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“Where’s my fucking dinner.”
The voice of my father erupts from the backyard. A door slams and I hear my brother Matthew calling for him.
I’m standing outside my parents’ house, my arms wrapped around a green laundry basket filled with dirty clothes and books. My slip-on shoes sink into the wet grass and the blades tickle my ankles. Behind me, the sounds of cars stuck in traffic. Horns beep to the stop and go movements of angry drivers making their way home.
Seconds pass. A door slams again.
“Sherie,” his voice is louder now. “Goddammit.”
I take in a breath. Exhaust fumes from the freeway fill up my lungs. Mouth dry, the taste of smoke, thick on my tongue. I cough. And over the years it's clung to the windows and doors of our house, layers of black dust. My arms grow tired under the weight of my basket, but I can’t move. It’s cool outside. In a few hours it should be dark.
But I don’t want to go home.
I often went home on weekends during my first year in college, but after three years, visits rarely happened. It wasn’t like going home. It felt like being someplace where the smells and faces were familiar, but the feelings had changed or disappeared altogether.
The smell of cat urine is strong around our porch. I open the front door and the smell from inside isn’t much of an improvement. At my feet is Kelly, our dog, yapping loudly and turning in circles. In her excitement, she begins to scratch at my legs.
“Stop it Kelly, dammit, stop it.”
I push her away, gently, and she runs into the kitchen, passing through what used to be my bedroom. It had been stripped of everything, including the wall that separated it from the living room. The bed and desk are gone. The green walls of my room were now white, exposed. I move my basket into the empty space, dropping it in the middle of the floor. I leave it there for a few seconds before picking it up and moving it back into the living room. There’s no use trying to reclaim it as my own.
There's nothing left that belongs to me.
In the kitchen my mother is leaning against the counter with her hands buried in a large white bowl. She is much thinner than I remember her being. It’s been a few months since I saw her last.
“Mom, what happened to my room?”
She throws her head back, trying to move the hair from her face before turning to look at me. A few strands still cover her eyes and she tries blowing them away.
“Oh that, well we thought it would look better, you know, “ she says, wiping her forehead on her sleeve. "And now there’s more room for people to sit.”
She pulls her hands out of the bowl and they’re covered in a brown goop. It smells like pancake syrup. Through the kitchen window I see my father, sunk in an old plastic beach chair with a beer in his hand, crushed and empty cans are scattered around him. He tosses a baseball to Matthew.
“What’s his problem?”
“He’s mad at me because I forgot to buy barbecue sauce.”
“So you’re using syrup?”
“Something like that." She smiles, thin lips pressed against her crooked and decaying teeth.
I hear the back door squeak open and shut. Matthew runs passed me, shouting in a singsong way, and disappears into the living room. My father limps in behind him. The first thing I almost always notice about him, besides being drunk, is how swollen his leg looks. It’s always been that way, like it was molded together unevenly. Crevices formed where chunks of flesh are missing. But now it looks heavier, pulling him down on his left side. When I was younger he told me his leg was held together by a metal rod with pins and screws. I remember running my tiny fingers over the lumps and feeling the smoothness of the thick pink scar that ran from the bottom of his knee to his ankle. “Does it hurt?” I always asked.
He enters the kitchen, but doesn’t notice me standing there. He looks at my mother with her hands in the bowl of syrupy chicken legs and thighs. She stares out the window. And for a moment, their bodies are motionless. Eyes red and faces dry as dust. They are like statues, cracks forming along the edges.
“I’m running Matthew a bath and then I’m going to bed,” he says, pounding a fist on the counter. “And I’m not cooking your fucking chicken.”
He walks away and my mother never moves. Her eyes, glossed over and lifeless, are fixated on something outside. Poking at the meat with a fork, I imagine her searching for something better than this. Remembering the “what if’s” of her life. I walk over to the refrigerator and inside I find a bundle of grapes in the bottom drawer. I bring them to the sink and wash them with cold water. Next to me, she bathes the chicken in the mystery sauce.
“You know he ran into his old girlfriend the other day in Sierra Madre?” she whispers.
“Who did, Dad?"
"Yup, it was Blanch, I’ve told you about her.”
The name sounds familiar. I think I remember her from a photo my father showed me once. Yes, I remember it now. There were four people in the photo, all of them wearing orange bowling shirts. My father's mouth was opened just enough to see his front teeth, his top lip upturned slightly. It was a painful smile and his eyes were opened wide as if he were surprised by something. Next to him stood Blanch, busty and dark-skinned, with a bowling ball between her hands. She wasn’t smiling. My father had talked about her, and always my mother would interrupt him: “She didn’t have eyelashes.”
I shut off the water and place the grapes in a bowl. “Yeah I remember, what about her?”
“Nothing really, she stopped by later that day with a friend, probably to see what I look like.” She pulls her hands up from the bowl and wipes them on a towel. “It’s been so long since he’s seen her, he keeps talking about her.”
"Did she have eyelashes this time?"
My mother laughs and shakes her head.
I want to say something else, but I can’t find the words. I pick a grape and stick it in my mouth. And then another. She leaves the kitchen for a few seconds. I keep shoving the grapes in my mouth, hardly chewing them before swallowing.
“I’m sorry about your room,” she says, walking over to the bowl of chicken and moving the pieces around.
I tell her it doesn’t matter. “You know I sent my $250 to hold my place for school next year.”
“So you’re really going to New York?”
“Well, yeah mom, I don’t want to be here anymore.”
She doesn’t say anything after that. But her eyes tell me she’s worried about holding herself up. Holding the house up. Every month my parents come to me with their hands out. And in those hands I place the checks. With wilted faces they tell me their sorry; they’ll pay me back. I’m the one keeping them from falling.
But the money doesn’t matter to me. I’ve screamed at her through the phone: “I’m tired of filling your shoes mom,” I tell her. “I’m fucking tired of holding this family together.”
Before leaving, she tosses the bowl of chicken into the sink. The syrup splatters along the edges. She calls for Matthew to get in the tub. And then I’m alone, filling my mouth with grapes.

I don’t know how long I was sitting in the kitchen before my father walked in to grab a beer from the fridge. Without a baseball cap on, his dusty gray and tangled hair sticks up in every direction. He sits next to me at the kitchen table and holds out his hands, palms facing upward as if to offer me something. There is nothing for him to give me.
“Look at me,” he says. “Look at your old man.”
I tilt my head up so that my eyes meet his, but I do not search his face for answers or apologies. Not yet. I notice the discolored walls behind him. Soiled and smeared. Patches of paint and wallpaper peel away as if escaping the crusted grip of aging doorways and windowsills.
I look down at my father’s hands and they are rested on the tabletop. Years of paint and plaster caked around his fingernails. The knuckles bulging under sandpapery skin, hard as rock. The hulking fingers always bent inward, looking like tiny mountains on the table. Deep lines cut through them like canyons. His hands are damaged but they are talented, beautiful even.
He paints. A house painter, but much more than that. At work, his hands are immersed in deep pigments. Ever floating over the walls, his motions are quick and strong. I’ve watched him hold the brush, each stroke calculated for perfection. His hands become gentle, almost soft. Never has he looked so relax, so at peace. To him, it is a blessing to be drunk. But to me, it is his work, his hands are his blessing.
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking down at his hands. “I love you guys, you know that.”
His breath is warm, but sour. I turn away from him. I want to be far away, far enough away. There is nothing more to say to him. He wants us to love him, but he wants us to suffer too. At home he is never the painter.
When he’s finished with his slurred apology I decide to leave him alone to finish his beer. He makes the same promises he can’t keep. I walk out into the living room and decide that for tonight I’ll probably sleep on the couch. I can hear faint laughter from the bathroom and then a can being tossed into the kitchen sink. I hear the pull-tab being ripped from another.
I want to go home, but where that is I can’t remember.
I hear my father stomp into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. The laughter in the bathroom stops and for a few seconds the house is completely silent. And then he starts to scream and pound against the walls.

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