25. Back Already

Note: I ‘m working on a piece that is taking a long time to write. So as I work on that one, thought I’d post another story from my old site. If I’m keeping it 100% here, I feel like I’ m getting a little stuck talking about my dad’s death. So much stuff I want to talk about and write about, it feels weird to keep coming back… here. No matter, I stumbled upon this short story while going through my old blog and am giving it a quick dusting and posting it here on my new site. This was always meant to be a rough draft, so please excuse any weird past/present tense switcheroos. Writing is hard, y’all.

I think I wrote this as a writing assignment for class but I can’t fully remember if that’s the case or not. Anywho, enjoy.

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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. – James Baldwin


Back Already
written by Matthew Ryan McKibben on January 27-28, 2005
dedicated to James Joseph McKibben 5/14/47 – 1/28/03

The smell of cheap fast-food hamburgers and fries filled the car with a salty aroma, made worse by the lack of functioning air conditioning and a typically hot and sticky Houston summer afternoon. A cooked hamburger with onion and mustard smells so awful, it’s a wonder that it tastes as good as it does.

Tim felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. Without even checking, he knew it was work calling. They always called on his days off.

“Hey what’s up?”

“Hey, Timothy. This is Chris from work. Lydia wanted me to call you to verify that you are taking the rest of the day off today.”

“Yeah. I have some errands I have to run.”

“Okay man. Just checkin’ in with ya.”

“Thanks again for covering for me today. I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Don’t worry about it, man. These things equal themselves out in the end,” said Chris.

Timothy smiled in agreement but had his doubts that that was actually the case. “They always do,” he conceded. “Thanks again.” He closed his phone and placed it on the passenger seat next to the greasy brown fast food bag.

Timothy tapped the steering wheel with the ends of his fingers, and continued singing along to the Animals song on the radio. Or was it the Rolling Stones? He often had a hard time knowing the difference between bands from the sixties since they all sounded the same to his ears. “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever doooo.” His dad would have known which band it was. His dad knew everything, especially everything about the fifties and sixties. At least it always seemed that way. What he didn’t know, he made up well enough that no one ever thought twice about calling him on it.

Coming up on Torrey Pines Park, Timothy pulled into a parking spot marked by yellow faded lines and cracked concrete with sprouts of grass peaking through. Grabbing his food, drink and his dad’s wool fedora, he exited the car and made his way to a nearby park bench nestled in the shade of a tall pine tree.

Tim sat down and began eating his food in silence. Although he’s been a vegetarian for half a year, that first taste of his father’s favorite brand of hamburger brought a smile to his face. He knew he’d regret this burger later, but he enjoyed every bite more than the last.

Torrey Pines Park was designed around the same time as the suburbs that surrounded it. Before his neighborhood was overrun with progress, Timothy could remember when there were more fields than houses and when the fields surrounding this very park stretched further than you could ever hope to hit a baseball.

Marking the edge of the park, a slab of concrete that was once a basketball court sat benign; its foul lines and three-point arcs long since washed away, a rimless backboard serving as its only marker of what its purpose once was. They have a new neighborhood park now. Timothy saw it on the way into the subdivision. It has all the bells and whistles that new parks have; long tube slides, chain-link jungle gyms, and more bark mulch than one can imagine. Out with the old, in with the newer. Such is life.

Timothy looked around at the quiet park. Easy breezes blew the overgrown grass and empty swings with an identical push. He could hardly believe it’s already been 5 years to the day since his happy family accelerated down tragedy highway. These things happened to other people, not him. It was a heart attack that got his dad, which in hindsight was easily predictable. He should have eaten better, Timothy thought as he took his last bite of hamburger.

Timothy leaned back lengthwise onto the bench and pulled his father’s fedora over his face. Although he’s sure it’s just his imagination, Timothy swore that he could still smell his father’s aftershave in the wool fabric of the hat. Having his dad’s favorite hat with him always reminded Timothy of his father and all the great times they had together. Timothy sighed.

Memories and reminiscences are like shagging fly balls in the outfield. Sometimes they come right to you, sometimes you have to track them down, and sometimes they get lost in the glare of the sun. Today, he was Willie Mays and no memory was out of reach.

As he drifted off to sleep under the protection of the thirty-year-old hat, he fondly remembered all the times his father would take his mom and his brothers to the park for Saturday afternoon picnics, usually with a bucket of KFC chicken. And that memory naturally progressed to the countless Fourth of July nights spent on quilts only a grandparent could make, watching the warm Houston sky light up under the magnificence of a brilliantly planned fireworks show. Timothy was almost asleep when he remembered the time his father was setting off fireworks at the family lake house, and one firework string got loose, nearly blowing the family to bits. Timothy laughed quietly under the hat.

Under the weight of the sun at its highest point in the sky, and a fully unloaded hamburger digesting in his stomach, Timothy fell asleep quickly. It’d been months since he’d had a decent night’s sleep, but he’d gotten pretty good at afternoon naps.

Wake up, Timothy! Wake up, son!

Timothy woke to the sound of muffled footsteps running across the tall grass towards his bench. Looking to his peripheral, he spotted two pairs of tiny feet a meter or two from the bench. The children giggled. From somewhere in the distance, a man, speaking a language Timothy didn’t understand, motioned for his kids to leave the sleeping man alone. The sound of footsteps resumed and diminished until they were replaced by the sound of rusty swings moving back and forth.

He removed the hat from his face and sat upright. Two children were swinging in arcs that were matched only by the smiles on their parents’ faces. The older of the two children, a boy, was using his feet to push off the ground in order to get as much height as his ten year old legs could muster. The younger of the two children, a girl, was sitting next to him but wasn’t swinging as much as she was sitting and kicking her legs in and out in a pumping fashion. She turned her head towards Timothy and stared at him for a second or two. She smiled. A fleshy tongue poked its head out of the space where her top two teeth would have been. She continued to pump her legs.

Timothy stood up and stretched his arms into the air. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but the sun was considerably lower in the sky than it was when he started his lunch. Flies swarmed in irregular patterns in and out of the cardboard french-fry container. One fly is resting its busy little body on top of a small pool of ketchup. Timothy put his hat back on his head, and threw the trash into a nearby trashcan.

The parents of the two children, sitting on a bench near the swing, saw Timothy and waved to him. He waved back, walking towards them as he did.

“Good afternoon,” Timothy said, extending his hand.

The mother took his hand first and shook it gently.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

He smiled at her and turned his attention to the father sitting on a bench behind the mother. The father stood up and shook Timothy’s hand, a warm smile never leaving his face.

“You folks from around here” Timothy asked?

“No, no. We’re from Japan. Well, my husband is anyways. We live there, now. In Kyoto. I was born here, though,” the mother answered. “We’re in America to visit my relatives.”

Timothy smiled and looked to the girl swinging. She looked back at Timothy, a large smile never leaving her small face.

“We were just driving to my aunt’s house when the kids saw this park and begged us to pull over.”

The boy jumped off his swing at its greatest height and landed on the soft sand, kicking up a cloud of dust as he did. The dad walked over to the boy, grabbed him by the arm and proceeded to brush off the sand from the boy’s backside.

The mother laughed quietly. “My parents don’t care, really, but he’s so nervous that we’re going to show up with dirty kids.” Timothy smiled in return.

Not wanting to leave, but feeling like he should, Timothy felt a slight tug on his trouser leg. He looked down to see the little girl now standing by his right leg, looking up at Timothy with her nearly toothless grin. She pointed to Timothy’s head and then stepped to her mom.

The girl said something to her mom in Japanese, and the mother looked horrified in response. She shook her head and verbally admonished the child who began crying in response. She continued to speak to the child while shaking her head “no.”

“Is everything okay?” Timothy asked.

“Yes, yes,” the mother answered. “Ummm… I’m almost embarrassed to tell you what she said, but my child really likes your hat and asked to have it.”

Timothy ceased smiling and nodded in acknowledgement.

“I’m very sorry. She’s very audacious,” the mother went on. The child continued to weep into her mother’s shoulder.

“No, no. It’s fine.”

Timothy took his dad’s hat off and held it in his hands. The label inside the hat has worn down to the point that it’s no longer necessary to exist anymore. Despite its vast gaping hole for his head, the hat seems to breathe and to give off heat. And for a second, he remembered the time that he struck out in the bottom of the ninth of his last high school baseball game, and his father was waiting for him behind the dugout. He had a smile on his face and his hat pushed towards the back of his head. As they embraced, Timothy wept into his father’s chest. The tears didn’t stop until he had taken off Timothy’s ball cap, and put his fedora on his head in its place.

The smell of his father’s aftershave was gone, and the smell of old wool entered his nose. The hat felt heavy.

Timothy stepped to the girl; her cheeks looking red, and wet with tears. She wiped one of the tears away with the back of her hand. He bent down placed the hat on the top of the girl’s head. It fits perfectly for a second, but soon fell around the girl’s ears. She smiled again, and Timothy could almost see her tears beginning to dry on her cheeks.

“Oh no no no we couldn’t,” the mom said.

“Please, I insist,” Timothy interrupted. “It’s just an old hat.” It really was.

“Oh thank you! Thank you very much,” the mother said. She smiled at Timothy. The mom and the child exchanged more words and the girl smiled even more largely. What they said, Timothy didn’t mind not knowing.

The father and son stood to the side of the mother and daughter, and asked them what just happened.

“I hate to leave, but I really must be going,” Timothy said, interrupting the conversation.

“My daughter thanks you so much. She says this is the greatest birthday gift she has ever received.”

Timothy looked the daughter in the eye and smiled warmly at her. “Oh, is it your birthday? You’re welcome!”

“No, she just says that every time she gets a gift,” the mother said.

Timothy laughed. “Well, you’re still welcome.”

After exchanging farewells, Timothy walked slowly back towards his car. He gently knocked his knuckles on the metal playground slide as he walked by. The sound reverberated briefly and vanishes into the warm, Houston air.

Timothy made it to his car and slowly got into his seat. Before turning on the car, he heard his phone beep from the passenger seat. 4 missed calls, all from family. As he checked his voicemails, he looked out over the playground at the family he had just left behind. The little girl playfully ran from her mom, both of her tiny hands holding onto the side of her new hat.

Tim checked his voicemail. “Hey Tim. This is Nic. Just wanted to call to make sure that everything was alright. I know this day is hard on you. Call me when you’re on your way. I love you. Bye.”

Timothy turned on the car and slowly drove away. Everything was alright. Everything was just fine. He had gone to the park and was back already.