Page 58 - WTP Vol. VII #6

This was how he left. When Joel was eight years old his father went to work one morning and never came home. It happened on New Year’s Eve, three days before his dad’s birthday, the year they were hit with a storm that left a quarter-inch of ice on the roads and took down tree limbs all across town. His father repaired power lines for Penn Electric, and he was called in to work that morning because half the county was without electricity. He’d left early, long before Joel was out of bed, and when Joel looked out his bedroom window and saw the hailstones bouncing off the hood of his mom’s car,
it stirred in him the fear that a storm like this could upend their lives for good.
His mother spent the day in the kitchen, listening to an AM station crackling from the boom box they kept on top of the refrigerator. Every year they celebrated his father’s birthday on New Year’s Eve with a big dinner. She’d put a roast in the oven early that after- noon and sat at the kitchen table whispering into her hands, caught up in her own mind as if she were hyp- notized. A few times Derek climbed onto her lap, but she barely seemed to notice he was there. It was as
She looked at him with that hypnotized look, like she saw him but didn’t, and said okay quietly. He knew she was nervous about the storm, afraid his dad might get into an accident or that the weather might make him careless. She had grown up in South Caro- lina as a kid and the thought of battling such harsh weather always filled her with panic. One morning she’d kept Joel home from school when a quick squall of snow flurries collected at the edge of their lawn, even though it had tapered off long before the bus ar- rived. Worrying was what she did, even in the quiet- est of times.
if she had known for a long time that something bad was coming down on them, and today was the day it was going to hit.
That evening his mother fed them well after dinner- time without setting a plate for herself or his father. She stared out the window as he and Derek ate, though there was nothing to see but a dark, reflective pane of glass. Afterwards Joel took Derek by the hand and brought him upstairs. He put on Nintendo and turned up the volume loud. Derek held the controller, but he wasn’t really playing. Every turn he positioned his ship directly in front of an oncoming missile and stared at the explosion of red and orange pixels on the screen. Later, Joel got Derek into his pajamas
All that week things had been quiet. Christmas was just the four of them. Joel and Derek spent the day playing Nintendo up in Joel’s room while his mother holed up in the kitchen and his dad watched televi- sion stretched out on the couch. A few days later his mother took Derek and Joel to the mall while the holiday sales were still going. They bought his father the leather jacket he’d been wanting, a dress-leather his father called it, something to wear on a night out. His mother seemed to have a hard time deciding. A bunch of times she pulled the same jacket from the rack and held it beneath Joel’s chin. It had soft brown leather and a satin gray lining, and before she could put it back again Joel tried it on and stood before the mirror, pulling at the sleeves until his hands made it through the cuffs.
and laid sleeping bags out on his bedroom floor and he and Derek climbed inside. He could see Derek wide-eyed in the angle of hallway light, the two of them aware that something in the house was off but unable to figure out what it was. They listened to the weather tick at the window. After a while their mother came and sat on the bed. She was quiet for a long time. And in a voice that didn’t seem to come from her, as if it were simply in the air, she finally said, “Your father isn’t coming home.”
“I like this one,” he said.
Derek climbed from his sleeping bag and buried his face in her lap.
She looked him over. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” she said, which he somehow took to mean any jacket. Then as quickly she said, “Okay, off,” and brought it to the register.
“What happened?” Joel said, and before she answered he realized that whatever it was had nothing to do with the weather.
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“Nothing happened,” his mother said. “He isn’t com- ing back. It’s just us now.”
Returns
A Novel Excerpt from Kings Row
With the storm raging, Joel went back into the living room to look out the front window. Hailstones jumped off the road like popcorn. Thick cuffs of clear, wet ice coated the power lines and the metal railings along his front stoop.
“Mom,” he said from the kitchen doorway. “Can I watch TV?”
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