N travel the east coast as a salesman for the machinery he had built himself for over fifteen years. He started to tuck in his shirts, slick gel in his hair, now cut and shaped in his goal of a style.
A
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At our old house, my father crafted a tree house out of spare lumber scattered around the backyard. Inside it, I surveyed my crashing seas below as a pirate and tucked my pet caterpillar into its tin bucket home strung on a rope. My old playmate Amanda and I scurry beneath the tree house with our squirt guns, dodging the crystal bullets, when hers drops with a final cracking noise. We soon discover her weapon spurts with as much force as the lazy bubblers at school. “What’s wrong, bud?” my dad calls from the back porch. His baseball cap, his go-to before he sets out to explore the lawn, covers his eyes. The dirty green rim is nearly bent into a hook from his familiar routine: remove cap, wipe forehead, squeeze the visor, return. “It’s broken,” I say, ”and it’s the only other one we have.” We settle around the tree with our chins tucked, brush the curious ants off our kneecaps. “A broken squirt gun, huh?” he says. Later, he finds us and carries an
old shampoo bottle with small holes he punched in the top. “Here you go,” he says, and squirts water on my cheek.
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With his decision made, my father attended a conference on selling techniques and public speaking. After, the kitchen table disappeared beneath folders, business cards, and a new laptop. He settled into his new desk, called me from my bedroom. “But how do you send it?” he asks, leaning toward the screen. “Just hit send in the corner,” I say. “Then, it’ll show up in the sent box. Make sense?” He nods a few times, sighs. He opens a new message, blank and spacious. “Okay, let me think.” He clears his throat, stares at the keyboard as if it might lunge at him. Then, his words start to fall like a game of Tetris, one by one. “Typing is harder than it looks, huh?” he says. I notice his grammar errors, but this new posture feels strange, leaning over his shoulder with all the right words. I write on yellow post-its nearby: “They’re not going to like the spaghetti. There is the zoo. This is their blue house.” I stick