Chapter One
My dad and I both stare at the rain fly stretched between
our hands, its strange angles refusing to be reduced to a simple square.
"Okay, Son, let's fold this thing," Dad says. He gives it a shake.
"I think Matt had the right idea, leaving a day early." We stand
there a moment, and he releases one corner of the rain fly to scratch beneath
his faded Hawaiian shirt. Then he is immobile, thinking. "We could
be home by now," he says.
"Right--" I say, my voice nearly steady. "We're
doing the whole drive today?"
Dad lets go of the rain fly and mumbles something.
I hum to keep from speaking. I fold alone, and then I
begin unhooking each pole from the tent, pushing the tubes through the
pockets along the seams.
"Too bad you can't help drive, Theo."
That tight thing starts up in my stomach, the thing that
doesn't go away until I can be by myself. I toss the bundle of tent poles
to the ground.
He watches me. "You aren't… Don't tell me you
had a birthday."
"Okay. I won't," I say.
"Did you, Theo?"
"Well. Yeah, Dad, I did."
He takes off his glasses, and I look at the scar below
his eye, the one that's curved just the same way his glasses are curved,
the scar he got from the car accident that almost killed him fifteen months
ago. He wipes his forehead on his shirtsleeve and then cleans his glasses
in little circular motions, squinting.
They all forgot my sixteenth birthday.
I start folding the tent by myself while my little sister
Samantha and her best friend Kate argue about their swimsuits, and Della,
my step-mom, stands at the propane stove perched on the end of the picnic
table, stirring the oatmeal, telling the girls to be nice. I'm ready to
leave and be the person behind the steering wheel. I need to practice.
Florida is almost over, and four states away, my best friend, Jonathan,
is waiting back home in Missouri.
"Speed it up, you two!" Della calls out to my
dad and me. "Breakfast is ready!"
My dad looks toward the picnic table, in a daze. He stretches with his
hands on his lower back and pulls up one knee, then the other, leaning
against a tree to keep his balance as each foot lifts five, six, seven
seconds. The pain migrates across his face, escapes his mouth with a low
groan. But he doesn't complain. He is alive, and that is enough. "You'd
better eat while you've got the chance," he tells me.
I can't be angry with him for not remembering my birthday,
for not making things right. I start folding the camo-green tarp, and he
finds his cane and shuffles away. "Where are you going?" Della
calls to my dad, and he waves her off with his free hand. She turns to
me. "Let's eat," she says.
I gather up our folded camping equipment and watch my
dad disappear on the other side of a rise, drifting among the palmetto
bushes and live oaks of the surrounding campsites. "Alright,"
I say.
Della isn't really my mom. My mom was the plump, huggable
type. Della is skinny, and she teaches junior high math. My mom was a botanical
illustrator, an artist. She died of breast cancer when I was six. She was
still nursing my little sister Samantha. I remember what it felt like.
I remember hating the baby girl in Mom's arms, thinking Samantha gave my
mom the cancer. The last real memory I have of Mom is her body, shrunken
up like a bird, swallowed whole on the queen-sized bed Sam sometimes still
got to sleep in. Everything hurt when I touched Mom, even when I just touched
the old quilt she kept folded at the foot of the bed. Every bone in her
body ached, she told me. So I didn't touch her, even to hold her hand and
say goodbye when Dad said it was time. Of course, that was stupid and selfish
of me, but I was only six years old.
I wedge against the van, alone for a minute, holding the tarp and tent
and rain fly to my chest. A breeze stirs the needles of the jack pines
nearby, ruffling the surface of the pool of water at the base of the trees'
roots. I inherited all of Mom's plant taxonomies when she died, so I know
the names of all the trees and bushes and flowers from here to the Ozarks
in Missouri. I can't help but notice the plants, their names popping into
my head without my asking them to.
I'm tired. I open up the car top carrier, put our stuff
inside, and then look in my backpack for Heart of Darkness, the book I
have to read for British Literature. I stare at the cover and think of
Matt, the new instructor in Dad's department at Missouri State, how he
stopped at our campsite on his way out yesterday. I was sitting in the
hammock reading my book when he shook hands through the car window with
my dad. Matt looked at me. He waved and said something like Take it easy.
I said Sure and watched him drive away.
I wish Della had never invited him on this trip. So what
if he's new and lonely.
"Would you stop already?" Della says. She is standing behind
me, holding a steaming bowl of oatmeal. She is standing too close, and
her presence feels like the confinement of a short, choking leash. The
closer she gets, the more I know that she will be the one to figure out
what I did to Matt. I take the oatmeal from her and eat it and try not
to puke it up.
* * *
Later, after we say goodbye to all of the families who
traveled here with us from Missouri and who are now ready to leave for
home before we are, after we stuff every last cooking utensil and dirty
sock into the van, I decide to remind Della that I need to log more hours
of practice driving.
She tells the girls they can go play one last time at
the beach, and then I drop it on her.
"Do you think I could drive home?" I say.
"Oh god," she says. "Your birthday."
The tears well up instantly and spill over.
"I'll make it up to you," she says. She touches
my shoulder--I let her--and she hands me the keys. She doesn't like making
mistakes.
* * *
If you would like to read more
of Three Cubic Feet by Lania Knight, order your copy today.
