Slowbomb

Daddy’s Home

Daddy’s Home

I hear the sizzle of bacon frying. I get up and find Ma in the kitchen, cooking up some breakfast.

“Your dad is home,” she says with a smile.

“Oh.”

I look down to hide my disappointment. He’s normally in Virginia where he grew up. Ma had told me that the dirt in Virginia was red, and people walked down the streets barefoot. “They real country,” she said.

When I was seven, Ma and I rode down there with my dad’s older brother, while Jason stayed with his own father. I remember my grandmother being short and wrinkled, but she was anything but fragile. She zipped around like a worker ant. I tried not to laugh when I would hear her grown children calling her Maw and my cousins calling her Grumaw. They say their A’s different. They say a lot of things different.

It was weird how my grandmother talked to her grown children like they were kids, and how it seemed like they were scared of her. Maybe she was always strict. Ma said she was raised by her father, that’s why she’s so tough. I took few showers when I was there, because they have to pay for water. Grandma wouldn’t let us throw away any melon rinds or the cob after we ate all the corn off of it. It had to go in a bucket. Later it was fed to their pigs. They don’t call them pigs though. They call them hogs. We were put to work. I fell into a thorny bush while picking berries for my grandmother to make jam. I never did figure out the difference between jam and jelly.

One of my dad’s brothers, who also lives down there, tried to get us to come to his cookout. He kept saying he just bought a double wide and wanted us to check it out. When we got there, I realized he was talking about a trailer. It was great to run around in the open air though. The grownups all sat outside drinking beer and talking. Some were playing cards. Others were playing a game called Horseshoes, where they tossed horseshoes onto a metal stake sticking out of the ground.

My cousins were great. The stuff they do for fun down there is way different. We did stuff like catching lightning bugs in jars, and catching frogs in our hands that supposedly will give you warts if they pee on you. Ma wasn’t on me about staying safe. Her and my dad were off somewhere doing their own thing. Since I was with my family, I was allowed to roam free. I even walked down the dirt road, to the market, barefoot.

“Go wake your dad up,” Ma tells me now.

I go to Ma’s room and knock before I open the door. He’s lying there shirtless under the covers, and possibly even bottomless.

“Hey!” I yell. “Wake up.”

“What? What?” he says, in an angry-sleepy voice.

“Ma’s making breakfast.”

“Oh,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He shifts so that he’s facing the wall. “Go bring me something to drink. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I go in the kitchen and pour him a glass of orange juice. The fridge is full of food. When did she go grocery shopping? I look at my mother standing over the stove, moving eggs around in the pan with her spatula. She looks at me, and then quickly down at the eggs again, as if to say, “Don’t judge me.”

As the day wears on, it feels like the longest day of my life. I can’t go out, and I can’t stay in my room. I’ll do anything for Ma, but sitting around pretending to be a happy family with her and Sperm-donor sucks. They’re sitting on the couch cuddling and watching TV. She’s feeding him fruit. I’m trying not to barf. When she finally sends me to the store, I bolt.

“Yo, Bry—,” Kenny calls my name. His huge feet slam the pavement as he runs up to me with a basketball in his hand.

“’Sup, Kenny? Yo, what happened after the game yesterday?”

“Dude got murked up, that’s what happened. He caught the beat down of a lifetime. We made him walk back to School Street in his socks.”

“That’s not funny, Kenny.”

“That’s what he gets. It’s about respect.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“Yo, let’s go play some ball,” he says, tossing the basketball onto his chest.

“I can’t,” I say, showing him the cigarettes that Papí at the store sold me because he knows they’re for Ma.

“So go bring her the cigs and come back out. I got this crazy move I want to show you,” Kenny says, dribbling the ball through his legs.

“Nah. She won’t let me. Sperm-donor’s home.” Kenny knows who I’m talking about.

“Everything cool with you and him?” he asks.

I shrug. He’s probably remembering the last time my dad came around and what he did to me. It was two years ago. Jason was away and I never told him but I told Kenny. My dad was mean and angry for no good reason back then.

“You can stay over at my crib, if you want.”

“Nah. I’m good.”

“You really keep your cool. If someone would wild out on me like that, I’d spazz out right back.”

“I just play along for my mom.”

“Yeah, well, tell your momma when she’s ready for a real man, I’m right here,” he says, slapping his chest.

I charge at him with a tight fist, but he runs off, laughing. I laugh too. “Yo, you play too much.”

Upstairs in our apartment, Ma’s bedroom door is closed. Even with music playing, the walls are thin enough to hear what they’re doing, so I decide not to chill in my room. Instead, I sit at the kitchen table and work on my essay for school. A while later, the bedroom door opens.

“We’re going out,” Ma says, giggling.

My dad is walking behind her, holding her by the waist and kissing her ear.

“Don’t let anybody in this apartment,” she says.

“Okay.”

I grab my sketchbook and start sketching away. Big door-knocker earrings, denim jacket, a bang that covers her forehead, and a huge smile. It’s my mother when she was a teenager. I’ve seen this picture of her a thousand times at my great-aunt Grace’s house. She lives down on Lamartine Ave. Someone snapped the photo at the exact perfect moment. I can tell Ma was enjoying a good laugh. Auntie Grace raised Ma since she was five, after my grandparents died. Seeing my mom’s face light up when she’s with my dad reminds me of this picture. I donno, maybe he’s changed since two years ago.

I hear the top and bottom locks turn and the heavy door slam. I can tell that it’s Jason, because I know the sound of his keychains, plus it’s too soon for Ma to be back.

“Where’s Ma?” he asks, throwing his duffle bag down.

I look at the clock and realize I’ve been drawing for over an hour. My fingers are blackened from my pencils. “My dad’s here,” I say. “They went out.”

“When did Ray get here?”

“Last night, I guess.”

“What the hell is wrong with her?”

“Don’t know, but she seems happy.”

“Whatever. I bet he’ll be gone by tomorrow.”

I go wash my hands in the kitchen. I can hear Jason moving things around in the living room. He gets territorial like that because he’s the “man of the house.”

“What’s in this black case?” Jason asks, when I come back into the living room.

I look to see what he’s talking about. It’s in the corner by the radiator, which is probably why I didn’t notice it before. Inside I find a black guitar shaped like a star. Like a guitar Jimi Hendrix would’ve had.

“Yo, this is cool,” I say, strumming some chords.

“Sounds like it needs to be tuned,” Jason says, unimpressed.

I twist the tuning pegs at the top, which makes the strings sound more high-pitched. I twist the pegs some more and one breaks.

“I think you should stick to drawing,” Jason says, laughing.

“Help me fix it, dummy,” I say.

“Who cares about that old thrift-store guitar?”

Jason starts to undress to take his shower. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a wad of twenties. He puts the money his dad sends for bills in the empty bread-crumb container on the fridge and then goes to the back.

I ask God to let my dad leave here without noticing the broken guitar peg. Jason’s right. My dad never stays long. He appears and disappears better than any magician. I find some Krazy Glue in the junk drawer and glue the peg back on and hope my prayers are answered.

“I’m going to see my girl,” Jason says, showered and changed. “See ya tomorrow.”

I don’t hear them come in. Their laughter and cigarette smoke wake me up. I lie there in bed awake, listening to my dad sing to Ma. I bet she loves it.

“You want me to play something for you, Babe?” my dad says. Oh, no. I start praying again. Then he starts yelling and cursing. Ma’s saying something, but I can’t make it out. I bury my head in my pillow, pretending I’m asleep.

“I keep telling him to stop touching stuff.”

Ma’s voice comes from right outside my door before my dad kicks it open.

“Boy!” he yells. I try to look dazed and confused, but he’s immediately in my face. He grabs me by the collar of my shirt and yanks me to my feet. The back of his hand smashes across my jaw, and I topple onto the floor. Ma stands in the doorway, watching.

“He should know better!” she yells. “How many times do I have to tell him not to touch what doesn’t belong to him? He doesn’t listen to me.”

My dad kneels over me and squeezes my jaw, not caring that he just whacked it. “You keep your hands off my stuff, boy,” he says through clenched teeth. “You hear me?” he yells, jerking my head like he wants to tear it off.

Tears slide down the side of my face and into my ear. I have a scar on my leg from when he hit me with a belt buckle when I was twelve. Every mark I have on my body is from him. He only comes here to bang Ma and beat me.

“Yeah,” I manage to say.

He shoves my head back and stands to leave. “You’re so weak,” he says, squinting down at me like he can’t stand the sight of me. He wipes his hand, covered with my tears and spit, on his shirt and slams my door.

My jaw throbs and blood oozes onto my pillow, but I don’t leave my room. It’s crazy how Ma thought it would be safer for me to stay in today. I guess the pretending is over. Things are being thumped around, he’s yelling, and Ma’s screaming.

I can’t hear all the words they’re saying to each other, but I get the gist of the argument. He wants Ma to pay for the guitar. The chaos continues for a while, then the apartment door slams, and then silence. I feel bad for Ma because she really tried. She always does. She really just wants us to be a complete family.

My eyes blink open the next morning; I didn’t even feel myself fall asleep. The bright morning sun outlines the metal window bars onto my bedroom floor. Ma’s in the kitchen again, making eggs. Her beautiful eyes are all puffy and red. She looks over her shoulder at me. “Go wash your hands so you can eat.”

I sit at the table. “I’m sorry, Ma,” I say when she slides eggs off her spatula onto my plate.

“Just eat your breakfast.”

“Sorry, I caused all that,” I say anyway.

She walks out of the kitchen. I chew my food slowly and carefully, and then suddenly Ma comes behind me and presses a wet cloth to my swollen face. I suck in my breath because it stings, and the smell is overpowering. She drops a Band-Aid onto the table. “Wake me up at twelve, I gotta be to work by two today,” she says, and then goes into her bedroom.

I walk around the apartment and try to piece together what all went on after they left my room last night. My dad and his things are gone, and so is the money that Jason’s dad sent, but the broken guitar is still in the living room.