it any easier.
2.
Aside from it being the only shift my mom would allow me to work, the four-to-nine slot is what I would have picked anyway. Because the sun doesn’t go down until seven-thirty or so. And daylight hours are the best, by far. Or, to say it differently, my dad’s customer base mostly slinks out under cover of night.
While the sun’s up, the drivers-through are just as embarrassed as you are.
Early on, my dad accused me of wearing my swimming goggles as a disguise, along with the hairnet, so nobody would recognize me. He was half-right. Because the job was supposed to be just temporary back then, I hadn’t invested in any of the sleek Olympic models yet, like I have now, but was still wearing my old mask with the snorkel attachment molded to it. Like I was exploring some alien, underwater landscape. My dad calls it the “adult” world.
This from the guy who staged a fit when I declined his job offer, then moped around for four days and finally stepped into his bigger man boots, said he would just take that shift, then: be the proprietor, manager, and stand in the drive-through window.
This was fine with me, but then, sneaking in one night well after midnight—it was a Saturday—he was waiting for me in the darkness of the living room. I imagined him sitting in a wingback chair we’d never had. An evil chair.
I was under the influence of a couple of parking lot beers, sure, but that didn’t change anything.
The voice he came at me with was the voice of the devil.
And it’s not scary at all, that’s the thing. It’s simpering, kind of mewling. Like someone with hard shoes is standing on the knuckles of his fingers while he’s talking, and he doesn’t even want to be talking that much in the first place.
“Guess your mom laid down the law this afternoon,” he said.
“I’m only two hours late,” I cut back on instinct, my hand already on the banister, to pull me upstairs.
“What? No, I mean…an ultimatum. I guess that’s what you’d call it.”
I kept my hand on the banister.
“About the Hut?” I said, not because his tone was giving it away but because everything for the past year had been about the Hut.
In the thick air of the living room, my beer-tuned senses felt him nod yes, it was about the Hut.
“What?” I said, my eyes half-closed now, in a kind of innocent anticipation I shouldn’t have even had in me anymore. In the later stages of my parents’ ridiculous, days-long arguments, I mean, I usually ended up some kind of hinge point between them, able to tip things one way or the other. And I knew full well that the only way to avoid all that was to say nothing.
But this is why he was evil: he guilted me into that what.
“You know what an ultimatum is, right?” he led off.
“One of those organic tomatoes,” I said. “Sure.”
The flash of liquid white across the room was my father’s smile. But then he covered it with his hand.
“She said if I—if I don’t follow through on my promise, then, you know.”
“No.”
“It’d just be a trial thing. Nothing that serious.”
“Dad.”
“I shouldn’t even be telling you this. You should just worry about your own things. How was school today?”
“It’s Saturday.”
By now my eyes had adjusted enough to see his velvety grey shape in the chair. He was holding one of his alcohol-free beers, the fourth one of the night, I’d guess, going by how weepy he was.
“You mean she wants you to follow through on your promise about how this one’s going to work?” I said.
My dad hissed a laugh out through his teeth.
“It’s going to work,” he said. “That’s not the issue. The issue is who’s going to work.”
“Dad—”
“Nobody’s calling about the ad.”
“Nobody?”
“Not the right person.”
“I’m sure—”
“Listen, you just go on to bed now, cool? I’ve got some thinking to do. Whether I want this business to fail, too, whether I want to, you know, support my family, or whether I want to take that shift myself, then support my family from, like, I guess one of those Indian Village apartments, probably…”
The silence after this wasn’t thick or cloying or any of that. It was stupid.
I understood now why he had the lights off: so he wouldn’t have to see my eyes, accusing him, hating him.
“Somebody’ll call about the ad,” I said, finally.
“I’m sure they will,” my dad said. “Until then, though—”
“I’ll take it, okay? Just until you get a replacement.”
The silence here was even stupider, because it was filled with my dad’s pride. He was beaming.
He held his nothing-beer up, tilted it so the glass caught the moonlight, and asked if I wanted one.
It was supposed to be a father-son thing.
I went upstairs, dug through all my old boxes until I found my snorkeling kit, and didn’t even notice for three weeks that the help wanted ad wasn’t running anymore.
3.
I’m more religious now than I used to be. What comes around’s been around before, all that.
When I was twelve and it was summer, all the kids on the block would have these running water gun and water balloon fights. Me and Greg Baines were the oldest two kids, so we got to soak all the third-graders to our heart’s content, pretty much. And they liked it just because it meant we were playing with them.
I don’t know.
Standing over them with Greg Baines once, this little kid’s face and hair and shirt dripping wet, I felt a twinge of guilt that would eventually melt into shame, and make me stop hanging around with Greg Baines.
The thing was, all the water in our pump-up guns, it had been drawn from the toilet.
Now I’m that little third-grader.
My first customer dings the drive-through bell at twelve minutes after four, and the PA system outside cycles on automatically, instructing him to pull forward to the second bump, please, then turn his vehicle off, let us do the rest.
The
