chapter 14
september 21, this year.

Dad is in bed. His room smells like mold and mothballs and bo and piss and worse. I need to do his laundry. His sheets are my job, not Gary’s. Gary has all my old jobs. He showers Dad and changes him. He does the pot. He does everything. Dad’s sheets are crusty. I try not to think about it.

I think he’s waiting for me to notice.

I half limp, half slide into the house. I want to tell him about this, whatever it is, that I have smoked and how it’s messed me up, but my tongue is both too big and too small to form words. My knee looks like a zombie’s brain.

I stand in the doorway of Dad’s room and watch him pretending to sleep. I can always tell when other people are faking. Underneath the other stinks, his room smells like a hospital room. I don’t know why. There isn’t any reason. I never clean it, so you can’t blame Pine-Sol. Glob is lying next to Dad. She will lie next to him forever.

Sometimes when Dad thinks I’m not home, I hear him talking to Glob in the way that I wish he ’d talk to me. He talks about things that are interesting. Shit he heard on the news. A book he read. Just things. The weather. The way his mom used to fry chicken.

Dad never talks to me about just things.

He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Son,” he says, “go to bed.”

“My knee’s worse,” I say, which isn’t true, but it isn’t a lie either. I don’t know what I want from him.

Dad sighs, like he’s asleep, which I know he isn’t.

“We ’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he says. He holds so still that I almost think he’s holding his breath. I flick off his light switch and leave him to it. Limp up the stairs. The pain in my knee is unbelievable, like by just saying that it’s worse, it got a lot worse.

Every step, it feels like something is tearing.

I flop down on my bed and call Tanis.

She answers, out of breath. She’s on her bike, riding home from work.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Hang on. I’ll just stop, so we can talk.”

“Come over,” I say.

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m doing a project.”

Tanis does projects. The one she is working on is the town, done entirely to scale. She is making a map of her life. All over town, there she is, in miniature, at different ages. The farms are carefully demarcated. The whole thing takes up their entire rec-room floor. Her dad is cool about it. In the parking lot of Safeway, she’s put my dad’s car. Dad would like this shit. He would understand the need to make things tiny. It’s only me that’s left out of the joke.

Is it a joke?

I don’t know.

She says she got the idea from him. It fits her perfectly though because it involves her math and his art. I feel like they are ganging up on me, and it makes no sense because they barely talk.

“Please come over, Tanis,” I say. “I need you.”

She hesitates. I can picture her biting her lip, and I get a hard-on just imagining her face. I know she’ll come.

“Okay,” she says. “Just for a while.”

“Long enough,” I say. I grin. I throw the phone into the laundry basket with a bunch of fetid laundry. I am always throwing my phone and it is always somehow coming back to me. I lie back and wait for Tanis to come and take care of me.

Don’t I deserve at least that?

My knee hurts so fucking much.

I’ve never had anything hurt this bad. Not ever.