Dad grabs two folding chairs and considers this. We open the chairs and sit with our beers on either side of a masking tape outline on the floor, which is in the general shape of the future breakfast nook.
We both sit quiet a minute and imagine, I guess, that it’s morning, sun shining and some birds chirping maybe, as if Dad and I are reading the paper with coffee in a house we used to share. But it’s beer we’re drinking, and when I was living here, I was the kind of kid who mostly ate by myself, in front of the TV.
“I don’t know,” he says, smoking. “I don’t think I’m a nook kind of guy. What about a breakfast bench. We could call it that.”
“What about this idea,” I tell him. “How about we get the flatbed truck out of the impound yard? We could scrape up the money to make it legal and get it back on the road.”
“Forget about the flatbed,” he says, shaking his head. “The flatbed was an experiment. The flatbed’s over.”
I take a sip of beer and a memory comes to me from when I was eight, and my father came through this door, home from a naval tour to announce that he hated the smell of metal, of insulation, and paint. He hated galvanized grating, he said, and red light bulbs and he was never going to take another order again as long as he lived. Even as a kid, I knew his heart was never really in the navy — we lived in the middle of a desert, and it didn’t seem like serious sailors would commute to the ocean. But my father became serious about being an ex-sailor and serious about his hatred of authority.
I try a different angle. “Are we going to let them get away with taking our truck?” I ask him.
He puts his rojo in his teeth and hunches sideways so he can dig in his pocket, where he finds his keys. He twists a key off the chain and tosses it to me. “Here,” he says. “It’s your truck now. You take care of it. Treat it like a baby.”
When I leave, I set the key on the edge of the table saw. I don’t want anything to do with it.
* * *
When I’m finally home, there’s a car in the driveway I don’t recognize, one of those slanty-shaped Saabs. The house is dark inside, and I strip naked by the sliding door, before heading out to the backyard, where I masturbate on the lawn. The sprinklers have run, and my bare feet leave dark prints in the misted grass. I have a lot on my mind, so it takes a long time. Above, birds wrestle their wings in the tight nests of a palm tree. The grapefruit leaves are thick, waxy, as I stare up through them.
* * *
In the morning, I come downstairs to find a man in slacks and an unbuttoned dress shirt eating in our kitchen. A loose tie drapes his shoulder. There is a little TV on the counter, and he’s watching “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel while thumbing through some papers.
“Hey,” I say. His briefcase sits open, and he wears reading glasses, though he looks too young for them. He’s really going at the cereal.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m Greg. We met at your mom’s office party.”
“I remember,” I say and grab a bowl.
“No, wait.” He points at me with a spoon. “Maybe it was at that awards thing.”
“Sure,” I tell him. “That sounds right.”
When I pick up the box of Cap’n Crunch, it’s empty.
“Isn’t this stuff great?” Greg asks. “God, I haven’t had this stuff in years.”
“Yeah, that’s why my mom buys it for me.”
Greg kind of coughs, but it might be a laugh. “Sorry,” he says.
Mom comes downstairs. She’s wearing a black suit with a bright scarf, and she’s in a pretty good mood. She is fumbling with an earring and heading for the coffee when she grabs one of my hands. She turns it back and forth in the light. It’s still a faint pink. “You better graduate college,” she tells me, shaking her head. Then she hands me some pamphlets. “Here, I got these for you.”
The pamphlets are about depression. One’s entitled “Warning Signs,” which features a big, yellow Yield on the cover. The other features a lamb, bright-eyed, gazing out from where it is cradled, in the great paws of a lion. This one’s named “Last Call.” Crucial to my mother’s idea of my father is that there is something really wrong with him, because if there isn’t something wrong with him, then he left us for no reason.
“Where’d you get these?” I ask her.
“City Hall. I filed a petition there yesterday, and they had all these sitting out on a table.”
Mom kisses Greg, grabs her briefcase, and then kisses me before heading out into the garage, leaving the two of us.
The theme music from Jaws is on the TV.
“So, are you just going to hang out?” I ask.
“Well, I got to finish this report,” he says, “and my show’s not over. Shouldn’t you be in class or somewhere?”
I shrug and take a stool across the counter from Greg, who makes being a county judge look pretty easy. “Shouldn’t you be married or something?”
“I was,” Greg says, “but I got a little condo now.”
When I graduated, my friend Terry Patuni asked me to move in with him, to get our own place, and I said no, like an idiot. Mom was like, “stay at home and live for free,” but she works a lot, and I do all the stuff like mowing the lawn and don’t get shit for it.
I check out the pamphlets to the sounds of thrashing fish. The big warning sign in the depressed person’s behavior, it turns out, is a sudden mood shift to peace and happiness, even elation. This can often mean a final decision has been made, and the weight of all earthly troubles has been lifted.
Sharks have limited feelings, I also learn, and they never sleep.
* * *
In Civic Responsibility class, I sit behind Cheryl. She wears a long dress with thin straps and sunflowers all over it. A fine gold cross has worked its way around the back of her neck, so it faces me, and there are running waves of goosebumps across her shoulders and the backs of her arms. I’ve never really said anything to Cheryl before, but I begin to wonder what she’s thinking to cause them. I lean forward to smell her hair — apples. They use the same shampoo.
We watch a movie on land conservation, and I realize two things. One, by the light of a video, Cheryl’s hair takes on the exact blue my swimming pool casts into the bougainvillea on nights when I lie on the diving board and masturbate toward the stars. Two, my father was born to be a U. S. park ranger. He has a deceivingly breezy manner that would be good with tourists, the military marksmanship to cull herds from the open door of a helicopter, and the disposition to spend weeks on end in solitude.
After class, Cheryl and I file out the door together, and I fall in with her as she heads toward the Snack Shack.
I put my hands in my pockets and try to be smooth. “Pretty lame video, huh?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I kind of liked the part where they tagged the bears.”
“Bears can be troublemakers,” I say and watch as she digs through her woven shoulder bag. She balances it on the jut of a hip, and I check our the red marks on her shoulders from her bra straps, smile at the way her sunglasses start to slide off her nose, and she lets them fall in the bag as she digs around. But I don’t really see anything nymphomaniac about her.
She pulls out a pack of menthols. “Smoke?”
“I didn’t know you guys were allowed to smoke,” I tell her.
“What are you talking about? Allowed by who?”
“Aren’t you all Christian?” I ask. “I mean, the body’s like the temple, right?”
“I’m not even going to respond to that,” she says. “First of all, Jesus doesn’t even care about the body — he’s into your soul. And besides, nobody ever told Jesus what to do.”