Eric Lindstrom - Not If I See You First

This truth I don’t want to tell, not to Petey anyway. It’s a tough enough situation as it is, my house filled with relatives—who I used to only cross paths with every couple years—now sleeping in my dead dad’s room and home office. I don’t want to tell him how I miss talking with Dad on the ride home from school, or how we wouldn’t be done when we got home so we’d sit at the kitchen table and talk some more, drinking iced tea, until he finally had to get back to work. I don’t want to tell Petey how I didn’t think about this until I climbed into Aunt Celia’s car today, when the silence—which I created and now can’t break—sucked all the air out of the car until I thought I’d pass out. How I want to sit at the kitchen table and talk to Dad now, but if I do everyone will think it’s weird, me sitting alone in the kitchen doing nothing. I don’t care if people think I’m weird, but they would bug me with questions.

Like Petey’s doing now, because sitting on the stairs doing nothing is weirder than sitting at the kitchen table. But I don’t want to tell him that instead of sitting in my room having a one-sided conversation with my dad where no one can see, I want to do it in a place where I feel him: in the kitchen, in his office (off-limits, since it’s my cousin Sheila’s room now), or at the base of the stairs, where I never sat with him in life but sometimes do in my dreams.

“I’m just resting. It’s been a long day.”

“Wanna play Go Fish?”

Not particularly. But I can’t do what I really want to do either. “Sure thing, Little P. How about Sheila?”

“Her door’s closed.”

We both know what this means. Do Not Disturb.

“All right, you get the cards, I’ll pour the drinks. Last one done has to deal.”

He pounds up the stairs. I sit a moment longer. Aunt Celia makes Petey pick up his room every night before bed but he just throws everything on shelves and never puts anything in the same place twice. He has a few decks of cards but only one braille set he got from me, so it’ll take him a few minutes to find it.

I don’t know if they’re going to let me just sit quietly to talk to you every day, Dad, but I’m sure as hell going to try. I might need to go into my room and close the door like Sheila, because you’re right, everyone has secrets, and that includes me.

*

Dinner is pork chops—too dry like always—mashed potatoes, applesauce, and canned peas. All of Aunt Celia’s meals are cartoons, like something you might get if you were a captive in an alien zoo and they fed you what they thought people ate from watching TV.

I didn’t offer to help because Aunt Celia always says no thank you. Which would be fine except she only says it to me. She tries to be nice about it with different reasons, sometimes hinting that she’s cutting me a break since I’m “having such a hard time.” It’s really because the best way to help is chopping and she can’t stand seeing a blind girl holding a knife. Whatever. Everything we’re eating tonight is stuff I can prepare in my sleep. I’m glad to have less work if that’s what makes her happy.

“Parker, did you and Sheila see each other much at school today?” Uncle Sam asks.

“Dad!” Petey says, mortified. “Not cool.”

“What?”

I know what my junior protector means. “It’s okay, Little P. The word see can mean a lot of things, like bumping into someone, or dating them, or understanding them. So no, I didn’t see Sheila today. Maybe she did see me, though, if you see what I mean.”

Petey laughs. No one else does.

“We don’t have any of the same classes,” Sheila says in her why-do-we-have-to-talk-about-this voice. “And our lockers are nowhere near each other.”

Uncle Sam doesn’t point out the small size of the school or the possibility of sitting together at lunch or ask how she knows where my locker is if she didn’t see me. I’m glad. He usually knows when to stop.

“How’s Molly working out?” he asks.

“It always takes a while to break in a new buddy, but she seems promising. She has a lot of Rules to learn.”

Sheila snorts. Well, a burst of expelled air, definitely the eye-rolling kind. I let it go.

“Little P has a good story to tell,” I say.

“Yeah—” he begins, but Aunt Celia interrupts.

“Please don’t call him that, Parker. I’ve asked you before.”

“He likes it, don’t you, Little P?”

“It was my idea! Right, Big P?”

“He won’t like it later, and by then it’ll be stuck.”

“The day he asks me to stop calling him Little P, I will, that’s a promise. I only call him that at home so if anyone else hears it, it won’t be from me.”

“It’s just … it just doesn’t sound … It’s not appropriate.”

“Your concerns have been heard,” I say lightly. “Go on, Little P, tell your story.”

I expect a pause for everyone to have an eyebrow conversation about my defiance but Petey can’t hold back and jumps right in describing how a fishbowl in his class got knocked over. The fact he’s excited doesn’t necessarily mean the fish survived—it could have gone the other way and he’d have told the story in pretty much the same tone.

While Petey describes the drama of saving the tetras in chaotic detail, I map out my pork chop with short stabs of my fork and dull knife and then saw the meat away from the bone. I’d caused a minor uproar when they first moved in because after I cut my food I don’t switch my fork to my right hand for each bite. This is a concept that (1) had never occurred to me, (2) is common etiquette supposedly, at least among people who still obsess about things like this, and (3) is something I find utterly bizarre. Even stranger was how Aunt Celia not only disapproved of this, and my dad for letting me do it, but also had some half-baked notion of stopping it. Uncle Sam saved us from the most ridiculous argument imaginable by saying the way I eat is how they eat “across the pond.” While this didn’t make it optimal to Aunt Celia, it somehow made it legitimate enough for her to let it go and save face. It was my first glimpse of what it would be like living with Aunt Celia under my roof.

*

I’m on my bed with my laptop, reading with the help of Stephen Hawking’s voice. I rarely read actual braille books and only occasionally use a braille terminal. A lot of the time I listen to audiobooks or browse the web with text-to-speech software, and what better way to learn stuff than hearing it from the smartest guy in the world?

I’m on my nightly Wikipedia crawl, enjoying the irony of reading about cuckoo birds. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and then those birds raise the cuckoo chicks as their own, like nothing odd is happening. In my house it’s the other way around.

My phone rings with Sarah’s ringtone: quack quack quack …

I disconnect my earbuds from the computer and plug them into my phone. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. “Any fires tonight?”

“Nope. Just a few sparks when Aunt Celia told me again to stop calling Petey Little P .”

“It’s a terrible nickname.”

“Not appropriate, she said.”

“You know that’s Celia-speak for she thinks it’s perverted, and it is. He’ll hate it later when he figures it out.”

“Jesus, Sarah, he’s eight. And if you think Little P means his dick, then Big P —wait, never mind. Should have thought that through.”

She chuckles and it warms me. Sarah hardly ever laughs.

“Sheila still not talking to you?”

“No change there. None expected.”

“My theory’s holding; I figured she’d steer clear.”

“I’m not the best one to show her around anyway. I can’t point out much and I doubt she’s interested in how many paces it is from the cafeteria to the nearest bathroom.”