No. That’s weird.
She laughed at my serious expression. Her throat was scratchy from the cold she was trying to kick. Because she was busy taking care of us and my father, there was no one left to take care of her. She was so congested I’d seen her hack mucus into our kitchen sink while scrambling eggs for breakfast.
Using the stitch ripper, I dug into the knots that were pulling loose from the fabric. The jeans were too short, but I’d gotten them from Brynn last spring when she’d decided they were the wrong style for her. The fabric was pretty wrecked. Everything I ate wound up on my clothes: red Kool-Aid drips and butter from a toasted bagel. There were grease stains from the carport, bloodstains and rips in both knees from wiping out on the asphalt after Milo pulled me around on the skateboard behind his bike.
Why don’t we just get you new ones? My mother put her hand on the back of my neck and ruffled her fingers through the short hairs that wouldn’t stay in my braid. She caught a snarl and I yelped.
I like these.
You’re gonna like lots of things in your life. She finished the coffee. Lots and lots of things.
I know what I like.
Milo lay on the rug by our feet, digging into a big Tupperware bowl of popcorn. He’d eaten almost all of it and was biting down on the uncooked kernels at the very bottom, licking salt from his fingers. His hair was getting long, which was good, because he’d started to break out on his neck. On his treks to and from the shower, I saw the blotches covering his back, topped with pus, like boils. Brynn kept talking about how cute he was getting, and I wanted to show her that proof, to point out that, of the two of us, I was the one who didn’t look like a plague victim.
Before, we’d make fun of him together. We’d ditch him at the house and sneak out the back so we wouldn’t have to bring him along when we did things: bike rides, trips to the grocery for ice cream. But the past school year, she’d begun talking about him the way she did the other guys from our grade. When she came over, she hung on his arm and tugged at his T-shirt sleeves. She laid proprietary hands on his stomach and leaned her head against his bony shoulder, as if it might offer some kind of comfort. Brynn laughed at the stupid things he said instead of mocking him for how dumb they were. My brother was a lot of things, but he’d never been funny.
Thinking about it put me in an even worse mood. It was hard to focus on sewing when I wanted to pinch the back of Milo’s neck until he yelled.
Halfway through stitching the crotch, my thumb tore through the paperlike material at the seat of the jeans. It made a hole big enough to fit my hand inside.
Goddamn it. Enraged, I kicked the popcorn bowl. Milo jumped back and knocked a full glass of Coke onto the rug. Stupid piece of shit!
That’s enough. My mother got up and grabbed one of the dishrags that hung from the fridge handle. She got down on her hands and knees and pressed it to the carpet, sopping up most of the spill. Go get me the stain remover and a damp towel from my bathroom.
I purposely ground the buttery popcorn bits into the rug on my way out of the room. Milo scuttled backward on his hands to get away from me.
And don’t wake your father! He just got to sleep.
Our parents’ bedroom was at the end of the hall. The lights were off and the door was closed. I inched it open, eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. Their bed was heaped over with quilts, the lumps so high that I couldn’t tell which of them was my father’s body. I padded across the carpet, carefully avoiding an overflowing basket of laundry that my mother had yet to wash, and eased toward the bathroom.
The shell nightlight my mother had bought in St. Augustine glowed pink along the walls above the mirror. There was a weird noise, some kind of hyuk-hyuk sound that reminded me of dogs throwing up on the rug. I stepped inside and turned toward the tub.
My father stood in front of the toilet. The pale line of his back showed the entirety of his rib cage. He was shockingly skeletal, skin pale beneath a smattering of dark hair. He breathed heavily, grunting. At first, I thought he was trying not to get sick by holding it in, like how Milo did because he hated throwing up so much. Then I saw that his arm was moving, just the right one, stutteringly, the muscles in his biceps flexing and releasing spastically.
He was muttering something, words beneath the grunts that I couldn’t quite make out. I heard the word shit and then I heard it twice more. My father sometimes swore in front of us, in the shop especially when he had messed up something with one of the mounts, but this kind of swearing sounded different. It came from deep inside his chest.
It scared me to hear those strange animal sounds coming from my father. I leaned away and hit the door. The handle smacked against the tile with a loud, resonating bang. My father spun around. He had his hand around his privates, gripping himself. He made a noise halfway between a bark and a cough. When I looked up at his face, I saw that he was crying. Mouth working up and down, he brought his other hand down to try to cover the soft mess of his genitals.
I turned and ran.
I dodged through the side door and into the carport, passing through the living room where my mother still knelt on the carpet. It was raining, and the wind blew leaves and pine needles across the yard and over the driveway. I sped into it, sliding wildly for a minute on the slick walk before righting myself and taking off down the street.
Rain fell into my eyes and half blinded me. I headed for the cemetery, bypassing the gate and launching myself over the chain-link fence. The ground was soft and mucky, and my feet slid there too, but I kept going. I ran between the new graves with their fresh white headstones, through the dripping trees, and past the mausoleum. Rain dashed across the stone benches with their lichen tops, crumbling legs dropping chunks of themselves into the dirt.
I crawled beneath a hedge that surrounded an oak near the oldest headstones. Lightning cracked hard overhead in rapid succession, bleaching the sky. The image of my father’s bare back clung to my brain. Rubbing my eyes, I pressed into the sockets until colors swirled there, like fireworks, spangled red, blue, and gold in time with the lightning.
My father didn’t talk about sex. He didn’t kiss our mother in front of us; didn’t hold us on his lap or even hug us too often. I’d never seen him naked. At least, I hadn’t before that day, or couldn’t remember it. His body was a mystery to me. I couldn’t even remember him bathing us when we were little. Once I’d come out of my room wearing just underwear and a T-shirt and he’d yelled at me to cover myself.
I sat for a long time in the cold rain and worried what would happen next. If my father wouldn’t want me to come help at the shop anymore since I’d seen him like that, naked and vulnerable. Would he look me in the eyes ever again? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to face him at all.
I could hear Milo coming for me from a long way off, kicking through piles of leaves and jumping over downed limbs. He had a very specific way of walking, a kind of short-short-long pull to his step, a shuffling drag that always gave him away. He lost whenever we played manhunt.
Move over. He was soaked through. His Marlins T-shirt was a damp teal and looked like an entire Big Gulp could be wrung from it. More. Like another foot.
We sat together but didn’t touch. Just huddled there in the brush. He was wearing only socks on his feet. They were covered in mud, the soles so dark I knew he’d have to throw them away. He’d just put a couple of sticks of Juicy Fruit in his mouth and the smell comforted me. It reminded me of home, like the corn-chip scent of our rugs and the cinnamon-apple candle my mother burned at Christmas.