AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He makes this sound—I’m not sure what it means. Kind of a laugh, except with pain in it. He’s not surprised, though. There’s resignation in that laugh.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Smokes his cigarette down to the filter, drops it onto the dirt floor, grinds it out.
“She don’t need it,” he says.
Author: Robin York
“What’s she doing with it, then?”
He shrugs.
“You don’t have any idea?”
“Presents I don’t need. Clothes and shit for her and Frankie. I think she gave money to one of your cousins to get rid of a baby, but she won’t talk about it. ”
I let that sink in.
“She’s going out to see your grandma once a week. ”
He doesn’t mean Mom’s mom, who used to live in California but is dead now. He means Dad’s mom.
He means a decade-old rift between my mom and my dad’s family has been quietly repaired, and she didn’t tell me. That my money’s paying for stuff Dad’s people need—or stuff they want—because that’s the way Mom is with money. If she’s got it, she’ll give it to anybody, for anything.
If I’ve got it, she figures that’s the same as if it’s hers.
“Has he been back here?”
I don’t have to tell Bo I mean my dad. We both know what this conversation is about, and it’s a relief to talk around the undercurrents beneath the words, dig up the buried wires without having to name them.
The longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes that, underneath, things are deeply fucked up.
Five miles away, living in a piece-of-shit trailer in the kind of trailer park nobody lives in if they have a better option, there’s a man with my eyes. My mouth. Fucking things up just by drawing breath.
“Once,” Bo says. “I drove him off with a shotgun. ”
“What’s he want?”
Bo gives me a pitying look, and I take another drag on the cigarette and stare at my feet.
Stupid question. He wants what he always wants. Whatever my mom’s got. Her heart. Her cunt. Her money. Her pride.
He wants Frankie’s loyalty.
He wants to win everybody over, bring them around to his side, get them feeling sorry for him, looking at the world through his eyes, thinking, Man, he’s had some tough breaks, but he’s a good guy. I’m glad it’s all working for him this time. I’m glad he’s pulled it together.
He wants to make my mom fall in love with him, and then when she’s so far gone she can’t even remember what happened before, he wants to punch her in the gut.
The last time I saw my father, he kicked me like a dog. Spat on me. Left me there, my lip split, curled around the pain.
I don’t know why my mom can’t understand. That’s what he wants.
“Has she seen him?”
Bo doesn’t answer for so long, I think he’s not going to. He moves down the bench, swipes at an untidy spill of potting soil, rubs the dried brown leaves of a plant between his thumb and forefinger. “While I was down in California selling the crop. ”
“She tell you?”
His expression darkens. “You think I’d fucking let her live here if she told me? I heard it off a guy I know. She says it’s bullshit. ”
