Lebanon is a little older and my locks are a little weaker. He can easily find openings and enter without others knowing he walked my halls. It’s nice to have unexpected company. I’ve always been happy to see him and he is happy to have a place where Sara isn’t around. I am home when he can’t stay with his best friend or doesn’t want to be around all that happiness. Happiness is sometimes too much for him.
Lebanon tries to figure out the last of his math homework. He’ll start on English next.
His birthday is tomorrow.
I feel from him dread instead of the happy anticipation that comes along with one’s day of birth.
Looking inside him, I see Sara is always in a foul mood, but his birthday brings out something very bad. Lebanon can hear her in the bedroom. When the door is closed and she wails and drinks and then leaves to go meet more strangers.
There is a draft in the hall and he feels cool air and it’s nice to feel something other than her hot breath, smoky with the cheap whiskey bought in the store downstairs from their dirty apartment, where burnt embers of old cigarettes and the musty smell of another man leaving her bed perfume the narrow hallway and empty living room.
The Strangers. Their gold teeth mouthing familiar pleasantries to which they are not entitled. Slapping him on the back, as they buckle their pants and drunkenly bellow, “Hey, little nigga!”
These wretched festivities always begin at least a week before his birthday. Lebanon doesn’t know why.
I do.
I can’t speak and if I could, I wouldn’t tell him. Lebanon wanted Sara to love him and now all he wants is to be left alone. Sometimes he goes to the bathroom and stares at himself in the dirty looking glass. To ponder, to brood, to covet white-picket-fenced lives—dads that smiled and played baseball on fake green grass and moms that made apple pies and didn’t sleep with random men picked up in dark lounges at desperate hours, before daylight intruded on evil indulgences and thin mirages of humanity.