By Dianne King 

My father has one clear word left. It is no. We sit side by side on a Friday morning in the new Austin airport, all concrete and glass and sharp edges, while my mother goes to the bathroom for the third time in fifteen minutes. I nudge his arm after she leaves. "What do you think of this place?" I ask. 

My father holds out his left hand, moves it back and forth, makes the noise that has made up his conversation since his stroke almost four years ago, a loud jumble of vowels that mostly start with the letters “d” or “l” and do not mean anything in any language. I understand him to say that he has mixed feelings. The airport has its good points. He breathes hard and jabs at his right hand with his left index finger. These must be the bad points.

"It's too industrial?" I ask, because that's what I think.

"No-o-o," he says in three impatient syllables.

"Too bright, too cold?" 

My father considers, nods.

"That's what I think, too," I say. I lean my shoulder against his and watch people walk by until my mother returns and sits on my other side. My father reaches over and wags three stubby brown fingers in her face. "Hush," she says.

"What'd he say?" I ask.

"He's giving me a hard time about going to the bathroom."

I am happy in this airport, sitting between my two cheerful parents. But soon my mother's flight is called. She boards the plane to visit my sister in Houston in a flurry of words and travel anxiety, her small mouth drawn tight. “Don't forget to put on his leg brace tomorrow morning, Katie,” she tells me. “Don't forget his blood pressure medication tonight." My sister Beth and I cajoled her into taking some time away from Dad, but I can tell she is afraid he will not be safe in my care, that I will forget something that she would not, that I will leave him alone and he will fall.  

Toward her I have all the complicated love-guilt-oh mother feelings I always had. She, after all, is presumably not going to die soon. But toward my father, it occurs to me as I follow his slow lurching pace out into the weighted July heat of the parking lot, at the bottom of whatever else I might feel about him is a distilled Daddy love, as young as it is fierce.

We pick up my almost four-year-old son Jem from his friend's house on the way back home.  I am skittish. Dad and I have not been alone much since his stroke, and I am not sure how to get past the hearty tone I've adopted with him over the last four years. I am also worried about how he will react to prolonged exposure to Jem. He has always believed in well-mannered children, and Jem is not, always. 

Our 1942 wood-frame house has four tiny rooms in the original front -- two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and an equally small living room -- and a big dining room/living room Matt built onto the back with brick-colored tile and lots of windows. I settle my father and Jem at the long dining room table in the back room. My father's bald head is shiny brown under the overhead light, his face round.

I sing a song that my father used to sing to me while I prepare to cut Jem's hair with my sewing scissors. I've been wondering what he'd look like with really short hair, and I've persuaded him to let me try it. "I'm Pop-eye the sailor man. I live in a garbage can. I love to go swimmin’ with bowlegged women, I'm Pop-eye the--."

"Huh?" Across the table Dad looks up over the sports page. I know what he's complaining about. He used to sing it baldheaded women on Saturday mornings while he'd make us breakfast. "You have your version, I have mine," I say.

"'Don't sing," Jem tells me anyway, his head bent to color in a red mouse. "When you sing you make me mess up my picture."

"Watch your lip, kid," I say, amazed and a tiny bit irritated, as always, at Jem’s ability to claim his space in the world. Watch your lip kid is another of my father's phrases, but one I never use. Some I do. Cool it. But never his put up your dukes, creep, shadowboxing shuffle in the kitchen on Saturday mornings when he was making us breakfast. Not you're in a world of hurt, kid, when he was about to whip us at Yahtzee, or Sorry, or Crazy Eights.       

"You're getting hair all over my picture," Jem complains, brushing his coloring book with his hand.

"Almost done," I coax. Half of what I say these days to Jem is so automatic that I hear it as an echo, long after it was said. Clumps of his fine pale hair float down over the red lines left behind by his marker. I pick up another tuft of hair and clip it close to his head. My father dismisses us with a laugh and a shake of his head. He loves to laugh at human folly these days, especially mine. He watches me for signs of predictability -- the hand snitching the last bite of meat off the serving plate, the dropped spoon wiped carelessly on the hem of my dress -- and pounces with an "ahhhh, ahhh, ahhhh” from across the room when he catches me. I laugh with him, but sometimes I wish that he did not watch so closely.

"Your father is going to kill me for giving you a crew cut," I tell Jem.

Jem pokes his head up. "With a gun?"

"God, no," I say. "That's just a bad expression. I only mean he'll be mad." He may or may not be mad. Matt has known me long enough to know that when I start cutting hair -- usually my own, but I'm trying to grow it out -- it signals some crisis that is likely to involve him.

My father points at the top of Jem's head. "Da, da, du da," he says.

I stand back and look. Jem is beginning to look like he has mange. "I know," I say. "I'll even it up later."

"We're not supposed to hurt people," Jem says.

My father looks up.

"No," I say.

"In fact," Jem says. "You're not supposed to hit people. Or even to bite people. Or even to push people down."

"Right," I say, wondering if it's Matt or me who says "in fact" so emphatically.

"You can push people UP," he says.

"Huh?" my father says.

"On a swing," Jem explains. "You can push people up on a swing."

"True enough," I say, and make a mental note to tell Matt about this conversation, another sign of Jem’s cleverness. I put the scissors down, take off Jem's shirt and brush the hair from his shoulders. His skin is already welting where he has scratched at the hairs. "There," I turn my son toward my father. "What do you think?"

My father draws him closer, and points where the hair is too short, too long, too patchy, too ragged. "Duh, duh duh DUH," he says. He shakes his head, returns to his paper.

"All right, all right, all right," I say. "I'll fix it later." I stand Jem in front of me. "You are beautiful," I tell him. It is true. With his hair gone, the blue-gray of his eyes is more vivid, his eyebrows make impressive arches across his forehead, and his skin has the juiciness of a young pear. He looks like a child of the 50s, the son of more conservative parents, parents whose first goal in child rearing is obedience. He looks, I realize, like my father's son would have, if he'd had a son.

It was my mother who brought my father through the rehabilitation after his stroke—

the depression, the physical therapy for his paralyzed right side, the doctors' appointments that crisscrossed their calendars—to this day at my house where I almost believe that it is the father I always knew who is reading the sports page, except one who is more genial and wordless, a jolly Santa Claus without a voice. It's as if all the hard biting edges of his disappointments and furies got zapped along with the left side of his brain.

Jem had been my gift to my father, my mute offering, delivered exactly one month after the stroke that may or may not have been spurred by bad genes, but almost certainly was affected by a lifetime of grilled steaks, cigarettes and massive quantities of hard liquor, no matter what he used to claim when he could still make claims. 

Look Daddy. Look, what I made for you.

I am embarrassed to ask him what I want to know now. It is too cliched, too trite-sounding, not enough of what I mean. Did you love me. Do you still. It sits in the back of my throat when I am with him, waiting its chance, crowding all the other, easier words out of my mouth.

While Jem takes his nap, I coax my father into playing Scrabble. My mother says it is good therapy. His ability to write got lost along with his ability to speak, but for some reason, he can sometimes put words together when they play Scrabble.

I do well, better than I do when I play with Matt, and my competitive streak kicks in. I love to win. Whenever Matt and I play games after Jem goes to bed, I end up getting mad. He beats me at Scrabble, at backgammon, at anything that requires concentration. My father spells the word "Ted," making use of one of my d's. I am quiet. I will not invoke the no proper names rule. I use my q's, my w's, my y's, all the letters that get extra points. My father makes three-letter words; got, cat, man. My score is double his. When it triples, I start feeling twitchy, like I'm doing something wrong.

At his next turn, he falters. He turns around his letters and shrugs. All his letters are consonants. "You could put an ‘s’ at the end of this word," I tell him. He does. On his next turn, he turns his letters over to me again. I find him another word.

"Dugh, dugh, dugh," he says. He holds up three fingers.

 "I don't understand what you mean," I say.

He holds up the same three fingers. "Dugh, dugh dugh," he says more impatiently.

"You're thinking of a word with three letters?"

"No-o-o," he says.

"You want me to call Mom?" I know this charades routine from watching my parents. It ends most often with two furious people and no answer.

"No-o-o," he says again.

"Where's your communication book?" I ask him. Since his stroke, Mom has bought a computer and two different electronic communication devices. All proved too complicated for him to use. Now he has a simple book divided by sections like FOOD and MEDICAL CARE. He points to the words he means. At least he's supposed to. He won't use it.

Dad gives me the look that I've seen him give Mom: resignation mixed with reproach. He waves me away and starts plunking down letters on the board. He puts a string of consonants together, looks at it hard, and then shrugs at me.

I watch the board. I cannot watch him. My face tingles with the effort not to cry. "Do you want to keep playing?" I ask him. He shrugs. I hold my face stiff while I make my next word. "Do you want to play cards?" I ask, but he shakes his head. I make the rest of my father's words, and he is already back in the living room with his book by the time I have gathered up the game and put it back in the hall closet. 

My mother calls to say she has gotten in safely. "How's your father?" she asks, sniffing. She is allergic to Beth’s cats.

When I hesitate, she panics. "Did he fall? Is he okay--"

"He's fine," I assure her, thinking that I have never given my mother enough credit for what she's been through. I am always defending Dad, telling her not to jump to conclusions about what he's trying to say, getting herself angrier and angrier over what she imagines. Maybe she needs her anger, maybe she has a lot left over after 38 years of marriage to a husband who got drunk every night. "He's fine. Does he read all the time at home?"

"He reads a lot," she says.

“He's not the same, is he?" I ask. It is a stupid question, especially four years after the fact. I think I told myself that he was just the same, he was just sober now and couldn't talk. He was in there, intact, whole, complete, complex, good, bad, profane, funny, cruel; only silent.

My mother sighs. "I keep telling you girls that," she says. “He doesn’t understand as much as you think he does.”

"I know," I say, suddenly anxious to have her off the phone. "Have a good night," I tell her. "We'll see you tomorrow."  

Despite the fact that Matt has vetoed any harsh movies or cartoons, Jem is obsessed with violence. In his Walt Disney world, mothers and fathers die at the hands of wicked brothers and uncaring hunters. At the preschool he attends three days a week while I work at the Austin Community College library, children pretend to chop each other's heads off in the playground.  When he was six months younger and got mad at us, he would say he was going to tear down the house, pull up trees by the roots. 

"Hurry," I say after his nap, steering him toward the car to go grocery shopping. Jem does not want to go. Neither did my father. He waved us away when I asked him to come, and went back to reading one of my mother's romance novels. The romance novels are a new tic. My sister and I buy him the kind of western novels that he used to favor before the stroke. I bring him mysteries, horror novels, anything without a lurid bodice on the cover, but half the time he comes to visit he sits down and brings a different romance out of his back pocket.

Jem, balking, hangs his head down and refuses to get into the backseat. Jem is a prickly pear child, easily angered, easily wounded, and stubborn. I love him and he drives me batty in equal measures. “He’s a boy,” my sister reassures me. “They’re harder than girls at this age.” She has one of each, so I believe her.

"You're hurting my feelings," Jem says to me now. "I want to take Daddy's car."

"Daddy's car is at work with him."

He holds his ground. "You're hurting my feelings."

Today, although I am the one who has taught him to pay excessive attention to his feelings, I do not feel gentle. I know my mother would not approve of my leaving my father alone. "Jem, I am in a hurry. We need to get back to Grandpa. You and your feelings can get in the carseat."

Jem lifts his head and roars. "My feelings are going to knock your head off."

He gets in his car seat. I am silent a moment before I lean over the wheel and laugh. I do not know why it's so funny. Maybe because it's outrageous. Jem is my litmus test for human impulses in their raw form. "It's not funny," he says from the back.

"It's kind of funny," I say.

"Why did Rabbit die?" Jem asks from the backseat, as if he hadn't just figuratively decapitated me. Rabbit was our cranky old cat, who died last week at the age of thirteen. We buried him in a plastic bag in the backyard, and piled rocks on top of his grave. When it came time to say something we liked about him, Jem couldn't think of anything, although he was the only one who had hugged him every day.

"I don't know," I say. "He was old. He got some kind of funny illness."

"I am not going to die," Jem says in the back seat. 

"Hmm?" I say, without really hearing. I am trying to figure out what to make for dinner.

"Am I?" Jem asks, all the things he doesn't understand in his voice. "AM I?" Then I hear what he has said. I do not know what to say in return. When I told him a month ago that his teeth were going to fall out when he turned 6, he got hysterical. "I need to eat," he kept crying, unconsoled by my belated assurance that they would not all fall out at the same time.

But this is life and death, not teeth. "Every creature on earth dies," I say, carefully. "Usually it happens when they are old and they are ready for it."

Jem begins to cry. He cries in the car all the way to the store, so I pick him up and hold him a while in the parking lot, at a loss and filled with tenderness toward my grieving son. He sniffles as I carry him in. He sits in the grocery cart and leans into my chest when I pick out the apples, his whole face leaking. "It won't happen for a long, long time," I say, stopping the cart and making an uneasy promise. I kiss his forehead and wipe his eyes on my T-shirt. "Longer than you can even think of. You will be old. It will be okay."

He snuffles into my neck in the cereal aisle. "You are not going to die now," I say. "Daddy and I are going to take care of you."

Jem helps me put the groceries on the conveyer belt at the checkout line. I cup my hand over his head and smooth his hair back, rest my lips on his forehead again. His skin is salty. I cannot think of one more thing to say to comfort him.

On the way home he makes his pronouncement, every word a single sentence. "I. Do. Not. Want. To. Die. When. I. Get. Old." I nod at his reflection in the rear view mirror. "Okay," I say.

"Does that mean I won't?"

"Maybe," I say. I am lost. Perhaps I have made a mistake by answering his question; perhaps he isn't supposed to know about death yet. "Maybe it does."

"Maybe," I say. I am lost perhaps I made a mistake by answering his question; perhaps he isn't supposed to know about death yet. "Maybe it does."

Jem sniffs.

When he was still an infant, we played a game when I changed his diapers. I gave him his foot-shaped teething toy, and when he was not crying too hard he would put it in my mouth. I clamped my teeth on it, hard, shook my head and growled like a dog. It shocked me, the first time, how good it felt to bite. It was a primitive thing. I was a raging carnivore. My teeth ached with pleasure. I bit and growled and roared. Jem's face underneath mine watched, complacent, and then he put out his hand, unafraid, and took the foot back. He did not know what my mouth was capable of.     

My father, a career military enlisted man, was taught these things, and these things he passed on to me: Never quit, even when it would be in your best interest. Strike back when wounded. Obey without question. Work hard. Never cheat or steal. Never take handouts, especially from the government. Laugh loudly, eat well, play hard. If you can still do your job the next morning, anything you drink after five p.m. doesn't count. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Do your duty at the expense of personal happiness. (This one he did not say so much as he lived it.)

When I was growing up, his refrain to me was the trouble with you is, the trouble with you is, and there was sometimes a different ending but most often it was you don't think. All my life those words have resounded. The trouble with me is. It came to me only recently that much of what he taught me was not intended to hurt, but to protect; not out of spite, but out of fear; and that it is not his voice that I still hear in my head as an adult, but a meaner-spirited version of it I made up on my very own.

I’m afraid the voice – my voice – that Jem will hear when he is an adult will trouble him as much as my father’s does me. Be nice, I tell him in a hundred ways every day, even though I know what a dubious lesson it is. Worry about what other people think more than what you think. Don’t take up too much room in the universe. It’s a lesson he doesn’t seem to be disposed to learning, which is probably a good thing. When we take long walks at night with Jem asleep in the stroller, Matt drives me crazy by walking with the stroller flat down the middle of the street, as if he is entitled to the whole road, while I keep trying to nudge them to the side, so they won’t get run over.

My father and I were drunks. No nice way to put it. I was a drunk from the time I went off to college until I turned 30, and he was a drunk much longer: at least from the time he eloped with 19-year-old mother until his stroke, some 40 years later. He never drank before 5 p.m., and during the day he was playful and funny, the cheerful life of our family party. At night, he rapidly turned into a sloppy, sometimes violent and often cruel drunk. For years on weekends home I sat with him until late at night, smoking and sloppy drunk myself, and listened to his unhappy ramblings about my mother and sister until my mother came out and shushed us both to bed. My father’s attention had a price; I always felt guilty and a little slimy the next morning for listening to his complaints about the other people in our family, the other people I loved.

When I turned 30, I stopped drinking and smoking, and I stopped sitting with my father at the kitchen table. I could not watch him drink anymore without censure. Wasn't it his life I was running away from?        

My father cried at the end of John Wayne movies, always when he heard “The Star Spangled Banner,” and once when he watched a young man lurch across the K-mart parking lot in Houston, in much the same way half of his own body pulls the other half along now.

We learned things from my father I wish we hadn’t, my sister and I. We hang a curtain between ourselves and those we love, we carry a grief and anger that we cannot get to the bottom of. We put up our dukes. I battle myself, she battles the world, we live in our father’s world of hurt, kid.

When we come back, Jem runs out of the car as fast as he can. "I have to poop," he says. I unload groceries. My father has fallen asleep with his head back on the couch.

"Mooommmmyyyy," Jem screams in the voice that sends tingles up my spine. It is the voice of a developing drill sergeant. I go to the bathroom door.

"I don't like it when you yell like that for me," I tell him sharply. "Grandpa is sleeping."

"Well, you weren't coming."

"I was coming. Please do not yell."

"Well, I had to because you weren't coming."

I sigh. "I swear to God," I tell him, "you would argue with a doorknob."

"No, I wouldn't," he says. "I needed you to come."

I lean against the doorway. "Well, I'm here. What do you want?"

"I want you to read to me."

"Okay," I say. "Let me put the food in the fridge, and then I'll be back."

"Do you know what?" Jem asks when I come back and sit across from him on the edge of the bathtub.

There is a shuffle down the hall, and then my father appears. Grunting, he sits down on the long white bench we keep just inside the bathroom door, sets his cane down on the floor.

"Do you know what, Grandpa?" Jem repeats. "Jonathan eats my lunch."

"He does?" I say, surprised. Jonathan is Jem's classmate at his daycare.

He nods his head vigorously. "Yes, he does."

"Are you done?" I ask.

Before he can answer a spray of liquid comes toward me and splashes my dress from the chest down. I put my hands up without thinking. After it stops, I realize that Jem has peed on me. I bark out a shocked laugh at the same time I hear a spluttering from my father. He clutches his stomach and points, his face turning pink. At first I am afraid he is having another stroke, and then I realize he is laughing too.

Jem starts to cry and then to yell. "You forgot to tuck my penis in," he says. When he hears us laughing he yells harder. “You forgot!” he accuses.

"Damn it, Jem," I stop laughing and yell back. "You can pee on me, but you can't blame me for it."

Jem cries, his face all squenched up and pink. "You forgot."

“JEM!!!!” I say, as sharply as my mother used to speak on her worst you-children-have-pushed-me-over-the-edge days. “It's YOUR penis!" The huge rush of my anger surprises me and Jem, who cries harder and then kicks out at me with his foot.

I could count on one hand the number of spankings I’ve given Jem, but I grab him now by his arm and jerk him off the toilet, conscious of my father watching and judging. Jem yelps. 

“SHUT UP,” I yell. He screams louder.

I hold him by the shoulders and put my face an inch from his. “You have been complaining all day long,” I tell him, my voice white hot shaky and beyond my control. “I am tired of you blaming me for everything. Stop or I am going to bust your bottom.” I shake him tightly, but the terrible truth is I don’t want him to stop screaming. I want a good excuse to spank him with the flat of my hand as hard as I can. “Do you understand me?”

He closes his eyes and whimpers, but I am a long way from being nice, I am miles from pity, I am in the land of a mean and seductive power. “I SAID, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

He nods his head. I release him and push him toward the doorway. “Go get dressed and don’t come out until I say you can.”

Still crying, he runs into his room and slams the door.

 “Huh,” my father says, shaking his head and making a face of mild censure, although I am not sure if it is for me, for not being able to control my son or for being too hard, or for Jem, being disobedient.

“Shut up,” I say, and even though I mean it to come out teasing, it does not.     

Standing over him, I put my fists up and do a boxer's dance, my feet scuffling.  "Put up your dukes, kid," I tell my father, as he used to tell us. He waves me away with his good hand. 

Something in the gesture, the dismissiveness, makes the flash of heat run up from my belly to my head. "Stand up," I challenge. I want to fight my father in the bathroom. I will fight him one-handed, to even the score. I want to punch him in the stomach until he cries uncle.       

"Come on," I say, "Come on." I box-dance around him, while he looks up at me.

"Huh?" he says. His puzzled look makes me madder. My throat is swollen with all the fury that pushes up from my gut. My head feels like it will explode. There is a black core of rage in my gut that scares me, even as I dance around him, prod his leg with my toe. "Come on," I say in a rough voice I don't recognize. He shakes his head at me and shrugs his shoulders. "Come on," I say, madder still. My toe jabs at his bad leg.

I think of his mean drunk. How he would squeeze our hands, twist our wrists, tell us he could break our arm if he wanted to, squeeze our limbs until we cried uncle. I think of the arguments with my mother, the nightly screaming fights that I could never stop, no matter how tightly I held the pillow over my ears. The requirement for absolute obedience. The ever-present, all encompassing disapproval. The careening drunk rides in the car, the threat around every corner, the mean, thuglike bully of him when he drank.

I want to put my head down and ram it so hard into his belly that he flies through the wall, out of my house, out of my life. I want to clamp my teeth onto his shoulder and bite as hard as I can. I want to tell him what a Goddamned rotten person he was when he drank. I want to tell him he wouldn’t have to try so hard staying alive now if he had taken any kind of care of himself at all. I want to crush him with my fury. I am so full of a whirl of rage and confusion and grief that I am afraid I might explode – the real kind of explosion, my body bursting apart from the force of all it contains.

“ARGGHHHHHH,” I scream as loudly as I’ve ever screamed, loud as a sonic boom, loud enough to burst out the walls of this old house, loud enough for my father’s eyes to widen, finally, at my impact.

"Hey," my father yells back, his face red. It is the first clear word other than "no" that I have heard him say since his stroke. My rage freezes. I look up and see myself in the mirror, the upside down U of my mouth, a shark's mouth, the pink and white of my furious face. I slump inside, slip down and sit next to him.

"Dugh, dugh, dugh," he says vehemently, holding up three fingers. I stare ahead, rigid and stunned, stuck between my still strong desire to bite his shoulder and to cry on it. In a moment, I hear him sigh beside me and then he picks up my hand and squeezes it in a gesture clearly meant to console. He squeezes my hand again, leans in toward me. He is so close I can smell his Canoe after-shave, see the pores in his nose. He strings some sounds together, gestures emphatically with his hand, knits his brow, gestures some more, laughs ruefully and shakes his head. I do not have any idea of what he is trying to say. He looks at me not understanding and laughs again, pats my hand, tries once more, gibberish and gestures coming together in the nonsensical language of my father.

He might be trying to say what I need to hear. I did the best that I could or I always loved you or please forgive me or you’re forgetting the good parts. He might be saying some version of the trouble with you, kid, or he might be saying nothing I could think of, nothing I will ever know. But as my father talks I watch his face – brown and round and now gentle, covered with a dry web of wrinkles – until some understanding, wordless and forgiving, flies from him to me and back again. He has lines on his forehead and his Santa Claus eyes are warm and sad on me and I know – don’t I know? – that he loves me without telling, as best as he's ever been able to, and maybe the question has never been whether he loves me or not but whether it’s ever enough, love and all its flaws. I stare at my hands, clenched on my knee, and feel myself falling down to a place I do not want to go, a place that has no bottom, the wild young grieving place that says I love you, I hate you, don’t leave me, I’ll die. Against my will, my mouth stretches back and becomes a clown's mouth, and my face squinches up. I burrow into my father's shoulder and weep as the realization creeps over me four years late that I’m never going to hear the things that I always wanted to hear from him.

I miss his voice. I miss his clowning, I miss his eccentricities. I miss riding in the car with him to the liquor store and laughing when he proudly showed me some convoluted route that was twice as far but avoided all stop signs. I miss how meticulously he stockpiled ice in three locations every night so there would always be enough for his drinks: the ice cube bucket on the kitchen counter, the freezer pail of ice, the pile of ice carefully set on aluminum foil in the bottom shelf, and how we were only allowed to take ice from that pile, until it was gone and we could move up to the next ice step. I even miss the way he would visit my post-college apartments on business trips, take one look in my empty cupboards and refrigerator, shake his head over my one ice cube tray, and take me on dizzy shopping sprees for terrible foods like frozen Pizza Eggrolls, Diet Cokes, ice and bourbon. I miss my father, and now he’s never going to say something that will make everything all right. 

His hand on my head is wry and resigned. It says ah shit kid, what's the use in crying? but I do anyway. I cry until my throat hurts, my lips are sore from stretching, my chest burns. I burrow into my father's shoulder and I am five again, and I know what Jem knows: we are not safe at all.

When I stop crying, I sit still, emptied, stunned and somehow better, more clear. I have left a puddle of snot and tears on the front of his shirt.

"Hey," he says when I point it out, a shrug in his voice.  

There is a shuffle and then Jem's feet appear in my line of vision. I look up from my father’s shoulder. He has found dry underwear and a clean red T-shirt and put them on, along with one yellow sock. He is sniffling, and I feel remorse as sharp as my earlier anger.

I hold out my arms and he hesitates a minute before he crawls into them. I kiss the top of his head, breathe in his sweaty smell, close my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I was wrong to yell at you like that.”

“You were mean,” he says.

“I was very mean. I’m sorry.”

“You hurt my feelings,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Although if you pee on me, you shouldn’t yell at me too. That hurts my feelings.”

My father points to the wet front of my dress where Jem is sitting, the damp that is spreading to his red T-shirt, his foot with one sock, the foot without. He begins to laugh the wheezing cartoon laugh that he’s laughed since his stroke, the one that ends with him coughing helplessly and wiping his eyes. I picture the three of us sitting against the bathroom wall, the pee-soaked, anger-ravaged woman, the stubborn feisty boy, the half-working man, all the things that lie between us. 

I feel a laugh, fed on punchiness, start deep in my belly. It comes out my mouth in damp hiccups. Mimicking my father’s exaggerated gestures, I pull on Jem’s arm and point to my dress, his mismatched feet, the growing wetness on his clean T-shirt. Jem looks at me with a line between his eyes and then decides to laugh too, maybe just because we are. We wheeze and cough and snort, the three of us, and every time we slow down my father elbows Jem or points at my dress and gets us started again. We laugh until our stomachs hurt and our noses are running and our eyes are tearing. We hold out our hands up to each other like crossing guards:  Stop, our hands say, stop, you’re killing me, but we cannot stop. We laugh until we have no more laugh in us, and my father and I are coughing, and Jem is hiccuping in my ear, his arm tight around my neck, and I reach across him to pull some toilet paper off the roll and pass it around. 

Small Speaking Parts was the first-place winner in the Fiction Open contest of Glimmer Train. It was also published in Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood, edited by Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda B. Swanson-Davies.