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MY STEP DAD, MORRIS Heyward, seemed okay at first.
“Blake, this is Morris. You’ll be seeing a lot of him from now on,” Mom told me one night in the winter.
I was sitting at the Formica-topped kitchen table. Handmade paper snowflakes were taped on the wall all around me. An open shoe box was in my hands. I was using a sharp knife to cut a square in one end.
“Morris owns the pool store in town,” Mom said. “You know, on Main Street.”
I paused in what I was doing, left the knife sticking out of the thin cardboard, and took a moment to study him.
He was wearing his work clothes—a blue button down shirt that had a name patch on the left pocket, a pair of pants that were a darker shade of blue, work boots, and a cap with the company logo.
Morris reached out his hand to shake mine. I pulled the blade from the box, put the knife down on the table, and placed my hand in his.
“What have you got there?” He asked me, studying the empty shoe box.
“It’s a school project,” I told him. “When you look through the window, if you see the groundhog’s shadow, there’ll be six more weeks of winter.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Spring is almost here,” I told him.
“Blake,” Mom said, “Morris is a pretty good artist. Maybe he can draw you a really nice groundhog that you can use.”
Morris sat down across from me. He reached out his hand and slid a blank sheet of paper across the table so that it was in front of him. Using a pencil, he drew the most perfect standing groundhog that I had ever seen.
I was busy coloring in the trees that I had already drawn on the inside walls of the box, and Morris carefully cut out the groundhog with a pair of scissors.
He left a rectangular tab at the groundhog’s feet that I folded over and dabbed with a big glob of glue. I stuck the little booger to the inside bottom of the box so that he was standing upright.
“What else needs to be done?” Morris asked me.
“I just need to cut a hole in the top of the box,” I told him. “Big enough for the sun to shine through.”
Morris pulled out his own pocket knife and cut a square.
When it was all done, I placed the lid on the box. Mom, Morris, and me all stood around the table. Morris pulled out his keys. There was a little flashlight on the key ring. From the hole on the top, he shined the light into the box.
At just the right angle, the groundhog’s shadow loomed across the background.
Change was coming.
From then on, Mom started bringing Morris around the house a lot. Even at seven years old I knew what they were doing when they sat in the swing after I had gone to bed.
From my bed that was pushed up against the window, I could hear them. I wouldn’t fully understand the desperate groans that he was making until ten years later when I found myself in a similar situation, in that same swing on the concrete pad with a girl named Katie Carmichael, who I worked with at Burger Heaven.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t know that Morris liked to drink. Of course I knew. I even smelled it on his breath that very first day that I met him. As he leaned down to shake my hand, I could smell it coming from him.
I knew that people drank—I was seven, not dumb. Drinking was something that grownups did after they knocked off from work.
Mom and Morris were married later that summer. It wasn’t a big wedding with flowers and tons of people. Instead, they did it at the courthouse. I was the only person there to witness.
Morris moved in with us, and I liked him being there.
After Mom died in the car crash, everything changed. One morning, Morris sat down with me at the table. “You’re all I’ve got now,” he said. “You are the only person I have in the entire world.”