Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

“Bloody Johos,” Tutti says. She looks at me. “Do you agree?”

~

Tutti says, “What are those things on your knees?”

I look at my knees. “What things?” I say.

“Those little scabs,” Tutti says. “Why do you have those little scabs on your knees?”

“I always get those,” I say. “Every year. Usually they go away.”

Tutti looks at my knees. “What is it?” she says.

“Psoriasis?”

“I guess so,” I say.

“Are you going to get psoriasis like your dad?” she says. “You’re getting more and more like your dad every day.”

~

I have all my clothes on except for my socks. I pick some black socks out from my sock drawer. I unball the socks and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pull one sock on. I sit on the edge of the bed, going up and down a little because of Sammy jumping on the bed behind me. After a couple of minutes, Sammy lies down on the bed and starts to cry.

Tutti comes into the bedroom and tells Sammy to quit crying.

“Cut it out,” she says. She stands in front of the mirror, brushing her hair.

When we get outside, it’s raining, and the rain is freezing onto the trees. Sammy’s got an apple. I put him in his car seat and he sits in the backseat eating his apple.

“I like the skin, Daddy,” he says. He has only recently begun to like the skin. This is something new. He is always chomping away on apples these days, telling me how much he likes the skin. “This is good skin, Daddy,” he says.

~

Tutti wants to know: where are all the jokers of the world? She wonders if we are wrong about something, if maybe God meant us to live our lives a different way, because it seems we are the only ones living them the way we do.

AFTER YOUgo out and do things, you get home from doing them and you go away from the people you did things with, back to the people you live with and the things you have done are done and they are nothing but memories of things that were done and where you are is at home with the people who have never done anything and you can try to remember the things you have done and tell the things you have done to the people who have never done anything — but what’s the point?

~

The guy was down in my garage.

When the garage door went up, the light hurt his eyes. He held his arm there. He had whiskers on his face. His face was white. He’d been staying in my garage for a week. I didn’t want him to go home.

“Can you get me a woman?” he said.

I went back in the house.

“He wants me to get him a woman,” I told Tutti.

“Where are you going to get him a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t just go down to the drugstore and get him a woman.”

“I could maybe call some people.”

“I don’t like having him down there.”

“It’s only temporary.”

“I can feel him down there. We have no place to park our car.”

I kept giving him things.

“Are you comfortable down here?” I said. “Maybe I could just come in and look around.”

~

When I was in grade four, I got four red stars. No one got four red stars. After that, I was all set.

I GOTto thinking about the drawer in the teacher’s desk where she kept all your stuff. All everybody’s stuff whenever she took anything away from anybody and said, “It’s mine now.” And then we would say whatever it was we thought would get the thing back if we didn’t have it and something were to happen to us, like if we were going to die or something because we didn’t have it. What I got to thinking the other day was, say the teacher took away some kid’s heart pills or like their hearing aid or something like that, and the kid gets run over by a car on the way home because he can’t hear anything. That’s what I got to thinking about, and I wanted to tell somebody about this, so I’m telling you.

I WOKEup in bed with Sammy still asleep beside me and I thought, I should stay here in bed beside him until he wakes up . I thought, I may never see him wake up into innocence again . Then he turned his back toward me and pushed himself back into my arms, and I realized I had been right in the first place: I would never see him wake up into innocence again.

~

I was trying to spread peanut butter onto some bread. Finally, I couldn’t spread it anymore. I put the knife in the sink. I left the peanut butter jar sitting open on the counter. I went into the living room to lie down. I looked out the window. There were some trees out there. There were two trees. I could see some of the branches on two trees. This is all I could see.

~

Yesterday a dog was killed in a car crash. I read about it in the newspaper this morning. It was on the front page of the newspaper. No people were killed. Only this dog. The newspaper showed a picture of the car where the dog was killed. It looked like the kind of crash that would kill somebody. They had this picture of the smashed-up car on the front page of the newspaper. The caption under the picture read, Dog Killed in Car Crash!

~

I don’t care about Tutti, really. The fact that Tutti will not get up in the middle of the night and go see what Sammy wants. This doesn’t piss me off anymore. It used to piss me off.

~

When Dad drove into the driveway that time in that strange, blue-colored station wagon he drove, I thought he and Mom were going to go back to being married. I really thought this. Mom was standing beside Dad’s car, looking down at her feet. Dad had the window rolled down. I had not seen Mom and Dad talk together in five years. I felt something important must be happening.

Dad didn’t even stop to talk to me. He waved. He waved as he backed out of the driveway, and then he got the car out onto the street and drove away.

Mom stood in the driveway, the gravel underneath her feet and the trees behind her, looking at her hands.

~

Sometimes I will just be sitting there, like in the kitchen, or in the living room or something, and I will be sitting there talking to Tutti, and we might be talking, or maybe we are watching television, more likely we are watching television, because we don’t sit around and talk to each other too much anymore, or maybe Tutti is cutting out a pattern for one of her sewing projects and I am sitting there watching her, and once in a while one of us says something, but most of the time I am just sitting there and Tutti is just sitting there and Tutti is maybe cutting out one of her patterns, and I’ll look down at my knees and see those two little scabs I have there on my knees, and I’ll go into the bathroom and get some cream and start rubbing some cream on those scabs, and if it’s Tuesday morning all you can hear outside is the garbage trucks going up and down the streets in the neighborhood, you can hear them even if they are clean over on the other side of town, you can hear them drive ten feet and then stop, and then drive ten feet and then stop again, and you can hear when the guy pulls down on the lever that makes the big hydraulic thing go up and squish all the garbage into the truck.

~

I can’t even believe that guy was my dad back then. That was some other guy. That must have been some other guy.

~

There is a big returnable bottle in the trunk of the car that rolls around and bangs into things. It sounds like a small body and Tutti says if I don’t get it out of the trunk and return it soon, she’ll throw it out.

I guess if I had to pick a day to die, I would have picked this afternoon. There are things I never resolved in my life. But at least the weather was good. Kind of cool. But sunny. If you stayed on the north side of the street, you could keep warm.