Wolfsong (Green Creek 1)

MOM GOT home late that night, after working a double in the diner. She found me in the kitchen, standing in the same spot I’d been in when my daddy had walked out the door. Things were different now.

“Ox?” she asked. “What’s going on?” She looked very tired.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not.” And I wasn’t, because I was a man now.

She touched my face. Her hands smelled like salt and french fries and coffee. Her thumbs brushed against my wet cheeks. “What happened?”

I looked down at her, because she’d always been small and at some point in the last year

or so, I’d grown right past her. I wished I could remember the day it happened. It seemed monumental. “I’ll take care of you,” I promised her. “You don’t ever need to worry.”

Her eyes softened. I could see the lines around her eyes. The tired set of her jaw. “You always do. But that’s—” She stopped. Took a breath. “He left?” she asked, and she sounded so small.

“I think so.” I twirled her hair against my finger. Dark, like my own. Like my daddy’s. We were all so dark.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“I’m a man now,” I told her. That’s all she needed to hear.

She laughed until she cracked right down the middle.

HE DIDN’T take the money when he left. Not all of it. Not that there was much there to begin with.

He didn’t take any pictures either. Just some clothes. His razor. His truck. Some of his tools.

If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he never was at all.

I CALLED his phone four days later. It was the middle of the night.

It rang a couple of times before a message picked up saying the phone was no longer in service.

I had to apologize to Mom the next morning. I’d held the handset so hard that it had cracked. She said it was okay, and we didn’t talk about it ever again.

I WAS six when my daddy bought me my own set of tools. Not kid’s stuff. No bright colors and plastic. All cold and metal and real.

He said, “Keep them clean. And god help you if I find them laying outside. They’ll rust and I’ll tan your hide. That ain’t what this shit is for. You got that?”

I touched them reverently because they were a gift. “Okay,” I said, unable to find the words to say just how full my heart felt.

I STOOD in their (her) room one morning a couple of weeks after he left. Mom was at the diner again, picking up another shift. Her ankles would be hurting by the time she got home.

Sunlight fell through a window on the far wall. Little bits of dust caught the light.

It smelled like him in the room. Like her. Like both of them. A thing together. It would be a long time before it stopped. But it would. Eventually.

I slid open the closet door. One side was mostly empty. Things were left, though. Little pieces of a life no longer lived.

Like his work shirt. Four of them, hanging in the back. Gordo’s in cursive.

Curtis, they all said. Curtis, Curtis, Curtis.

I touched each one of them with the tips of my fingers.

I took the last one down from the hanger. Slid it over my shoulders. It was heavy and smelled like man and sweat and work. I said, “Okay, Ox. You can do this.”