The Two of Us, In Three Parts by Jess Payne

“Dad! Look!” 

Sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s black Chevy Silverado, I stare at my face in the visor mirror. The right side is swollen from having seven baby teeth removed in preparation for braces. I lightly press a finger to my puffy, brown-skinned cheek, then lift my  other hand to my left side to compare the two, grazing the two black braids that hang down to my  shoulders. My mouth is still packed with bloody gauze and I laugh as I flare my nostrils. The left one moves, but the right one doesn’t. At ten-years-old, this new ability makes an afternoon of pain totally worth it.  

“I can’t look right now, Boo,” my dad says, smiling.“I’m driving.” 

“Only one nostril moves,” I explain.“It’s so weird!”  

“You’re probably still numb,” Dad says. We reach a red light. He can finally look over and see my new “trick.” He laughs.“That’s why only one side moves.” Fear made my hands tremble as I sat in the dentist’s chair that afternoon and peered up into the sickly yellow overhead light as the dentist gave me laughing gas. Wearing sunglasses to shield my eyes from the harsh lighting, I flinched with each sharp prick of the numbing shots. Dad kept standing up to look inside my mouth, watching as the dentist yanked tooth after tooth with gloved hands. Somehow that made it seem okay. If Dad wasn’t freaked out, maybe I shouldn’t be either. The truck bounces around as we drive home, the engine rumbling like thunder. I flip the  visor up and sit back in my seat, my white and silver Nikes no longer touching the floor. Everything is gray: the sky, the concrete streets littered with potholes, the once green trees starting to die as fall transitions into winter, the truck’s interior, speckled with dust and minor tears in the seats. Tools I don’t know the names of clink around the truck bed with each turn. Rain falls in streaks between each passing of the windshield wipers, like tears. 

Dad turns the knob on the radio, a two-second snippet of each station playing as he searches for something good. A commercial about heating and air conditioning, an upbeat pop song, something classical, something in Spanish. His cocoa-brown fingers are stained a faded black, probably from working on someone’s car. He’s always working on a car or fixing something. He can fix anything. When the eject button on our VCR stopped working, he drilled a hole into the front; we could stick a pencil through it and press the button that way. So smart. He settles on the oldies station, some song about bread and butter and toast and jam that makes me giggle. Dad grins his wide, gap-toothed smile and lets go of the wheel, throwing his arms around, his attempt at dancing. I laugh as he scratches under his arm, mimicking a gorilla. He turns the volume up, brushing against the school pictures of my brother and I taped to his dashboard. I hate my picture, my hair in what felt like a thousand braids, the Pepto Bismol pink dress I was wearing, teeth too big for my face. But I like that the pictures are there. Like we’re always with him even when he’s not around. 

I like when it’s just the two of us. It doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes, on the weekends, I wake up before my mom and brother, and Dad is already awake, sitting on the couch, his legs crossed at the ankle and bouncing side to side, rhythmically, a gesture he says “pacifies him.” It’s still dark outside so the only light is coming from the TV. We watch cartoons over bowls of Frosted Flakes until sunlight peaks through the curtains. My parents aren’t screaming at each other. I don’t have to dial 911 because their arguments aren’t regular arguments. I’m not trying to figure how to get them to be nice to each other so Dad doesn’t have  to leave again. It’s just me and Dad, and the silence between us drapes itself around my shoulders like a hug.

### 

“So... what do you think of her?” 

We’re driving down the street in her muted gray sedan, dodging potholes as we head to a Chinese restaurant to pick up dinner. Dad looks at me, waiting on my opinion of his new girlfriend. She’s just a generic woman to me, a dark-skinned face with forgettable features, except for the dark red lipstick that seemed hurriedly applied. She whispered hello when he introduced her to me and my brother that day, then promptly retreated into the abyss that she  came from. My fourteen-year-old arrogance decides that she won’t be around very long.   

But I shrug my shoulders in response, not sure what to say. Outside, the cloudy Autumn  sky melts into the cracked cement roads becoming a swirl of foggy white and gray. The lines on the street are a faded white, worn by constant traffic. Street signs retreat into the background as we pass them. I read them to myself. Blondo Street. Parker Street. Decatur Street. “She’s kind of funny looking, isn’t she?” Dad says, chuckling a little. 

My eyebrows rise, surprised by the admission. Again, I shrug my shoulders. My parents haven’t been divorced very long, maybe a couple of months. When they told us about their decision to part ways, I laughed and said, “It’s about time,” and then, “What’s for dinner?” 

“She’s nice though,” Dad goes on. “She helps me a lot with Grandma, too.” He pauses. “You probably don’t want to think of your parents dating other people, huh?” “I don’t know if I have an opinion,” I mumble, the thought of them as actual people who would want companionship not occurring to me. They’re parents. Why do they need to date?  Silence creeps between us like the chilly afternoon air through my cracked window. We pass a dilapidated car wash that has looked exactly the same since I was a kid, peeling red and white paint on the sign, never any cars there. Is it still open? I push up my glasses as if to get a  better look, but I know this area of town well. Nothing has changed.  

Everything else is just different.  

“Do you like your mom’s boyfriend?” Dad flicks his turn signal, gives me a side glance, eyebrows elevated.  

Mom's boyfriend wears sandals and his head is too large for his body and he talks to me  like I’m five. She’s too good for him. And Dad’s too good for what’s-her-name with the old lady car. I’m not sure if I answer his question, but I do say, “I don’t really like her dating, but it  doesn’t bother me if you do,” and to this day, I’m not sure if I was lying or not. 


### 

The window in the living room at my older sister’s house is large enough to show their entire yard, which is covered in thick mounds of January snow. The icicles hanging from the gutters frame the window like a winter landscape painting. The glass begins to fog up, so I slide my finger down its length, a single clear line against the cloudy whiteness. My dad’s Silverado is parked out front, the silver stripe along the side almost peeled completely off. My eyes follow the trail of footprints in the snow leading up to the front door, guessing that the smaller, slanted ones are definitely mine, and the biggest ones are probably my dad’s. 

When I turn my head in the opposite direction, I can see straight through the living room to the kitchen where my dad and his generic-faced wife are talking to my older sister at the table. The three of them are laughing, but I don’t hear anything other than the sounds of my brother playing video games with my niece and nephew. I look down at my red socks, wishing I was home working on a paper that’s due soon.

Dad appears from the kitchen. He just turned fifty-one a few weeks ago, but other than a few flecks of gray in his thick, coarse beard, he still looks the same. He still smiles that gap toothed smile when he sees me sitting by myself. He sits next to me, asks me how school is going, what have I been up to. One-word answers escape my lips. I don’t see him very often since he remarried and moved out of state, and I find myself studying my fingernails under his  gaze. 

“You never talk to me anymore,” he says. Where did that come from?  

“What do you mean?” I ask. 

“You’re just not like your siblings,” he says, sipping something out of a coffee mug. “I always know how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking. I never know what you’re thinking.” I don’t say anything, just shrug. My right leg begins to bounce up and down. So does his. “I just worry about you, Boo,” he says. “Sometimes I think me and your mom ruined you with all of our fighting. I’m sorry about that.” 

“That’s...okay.” I’m twenty, but in that moment, I feel ten again, transported briefly back into chaos. I shake my head as if to release whatever is creeping up to my chest, holding onto my heart.  

“What if you wrote me a letter? I know you like to write. I’m bad at it, but if that would get you to open up to me, we could do that. Be pen pals or something.” 

He sits on the floor so that I have to look down at him. The expression on his face seems somber. The tiny lines in the corners of his eyes are more pronounced when he gives me a half smile. His dark brown eyes are so small, they appear to be closed, as if in deep thought about this proposal. I have his eyes, almond-shaped and so dark, they’re almost black. The gray in his beard is barely noticeable, but I count each strand, and the one random red hair, a bright spot in a sea of blackness. 

Part of me wants to rub his bald head the way I used to when I was little, transfixed by the way the stubble felt as it moved back and forth beneath my fingers. Part of me wants to play a song and laugh at his terrible dance moves. Part of me wants to see if we can find an “X-Men” cartoon to watch like we used to. But all of that seems childish. I am not a child, but in that moment, searching for something to say to him, I don’t feel like an adult either.  

“Maybe we can try the pen pal thing,” I say, in hopes that he’ll stop talking to me, leave me alone to daydream in my corner, to stare at the snow. I don’t know that this is the last memory I will ever have of his face, of the smile that spreads when I finally answer him. I will be too afraid to see him in his casket in September. 

I will always remember the way the bugs hit the windshield on the drive home from his funeral, tiny flicks of sound against the silence that gripped my neck like a noose.