Replacing Dad. Shelley Fraser Mickle

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СКАЧАТЬ for stuff that had gotten washed up. I went out to sit on the porch, listen to my Walkman. The tide was out, making the shoreline look like the world was being sucked dry. The edge of the water was a long way away now on the other side of the road, and the oyster bars were sticking up like the scaly backs of some kinds of monsters. Palm trees dot the edge of our front lawn, their bark wrinkled like elephant skins, and their big leaves were rustling.

      Beside me, our old car was parked in the drive, the crushed­in back now like the nose of a Pekingese. Mom had collected the money for it that the insurance company had given her, but she said she didn’t want to fix the old, silly, ugly car—which I knew meant fix the car Dad had left her. Instead, whatever money the company gave her she put into a little foreign job, a lime green Toyota station wagon. It was already nearly ten years old, but Mr. Duffy said he’d work on it for her and help keep it running. He was a good mechanic. It’d had a FOR SALE sign on it parked out on the highway for three months. It was sort of okay. Not radical or anything I’d want for myself; Mom called it the Granny Apple. But most of all, it was hers, the first and only she’d ever bought.

      That meant we were now a two-car family, except that the second one, which was really the first, was not exactly what I had in mind for myself. Didn’t even have a back end. And riding around in the reminder of your first wreck sort of sucks.

      I plugged in the earphones to my Walkman, mainly out of respect to the bird who lives in front of our house: an osprey, with a nest on a light pole. And the bird was up there, every once in a while getting up and stretching, pushing out her wings. She had been up there every time I’d looked to check on her over the last few days. Big as an eagle. Just not colored like one. Instead plain brown. And the nest looked like my room: big twigs and stuff woven all together, messy, but really real organized. That exact nest had made it through the last hurricane, while half the stuff on the street hadn’t. So out of respect for her, I had my earplugs in and was deep into KISS 105 and didn’t hear Mandy call me. She rode her bike up into the yard and stopped, then punched my knee. (The only part of Mandy that looks like me, as far as I can see, is her chin. It has a little dip in it, dimple, I guess, that makes it look like that’s where the two halves of our faces come together. Otherwise, she’s blond. Looks like Dad and George the Second.) I took the earplugs out of my ears. “Yeah, what?”

      “George put a rock up his nose. Says he can’t breathe.”

      “What in the hell did he do that for?”

      “I don’t know. George doesn’t know. But it’s not my fault.”

      I walked down the road, Mandy riding on ahead of me. I saw George sitting on this little sand beach a short way away, his trike mired in the sand. How bad could a rock be? Probably wasn’t anything.

      Mandy laid down her bike. “Show him, George.”

      George was wiggling his nose and snorting.

      “Did you put something up there?” I knelt in the sand and tipped George’s head back.

      “Yeah.”

      “Why?”

      “Don’t know.”

      “What?”

      “Rock.”

      “Why?”

      “Don’t know.”

      We sounded like two Indians in a Wild West movie. I mashed down on his nose for a while, trying to work the skin like you would a hose. Nothing came out. I wasn’t sure if I believed something really was up there. George has a wild imagination; makes up explanations for things all the time, sometimes even when he had the real answers, like when he believed barrettes held people up in water so they could swim. He’d insisted on wearing some of Mandy’s barrettes the summer before when we’d taken him for swimming lessons, ‘cause all the other kids in the class were girls and were swimming before him.

      “Snort, George. Give it a big heave-ho.”

      He did.

      Nothing came out.

      “You sure something’s up there?”

      Suddenly his eyes puddled up. He really was scared.

      “It’s okay, George. We’ll go call Mom. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.” I picked him up.

      I carried him back to the house. I didn’t want to jerk him or move him. I wasn’t sure exactly how far up the rock was, but I figured if I tilted him too far either way it might end up somewhere worse, like his brain.

      “Mom.” When I got her on the phone, I wasn’t sure how to break the news.

      “Yeah, Drew. What you need?”

      “Oh, nothing. We had lunch. Didn’t burn the grilled cheese. Didn’t burn the house down either.” I laughed. Then when she didn’t: “That’s a joke, Mom.”

      “Oh.”

      “No, I unplugged the electric frying pan, just like you told me. The beans were good. The apple was fresh, too, no bruises.”

      “Drew, why are you calling?”

      “We got just one little problem.”

      “What’s that?”

      “George put a rock up his nose.”

      “Oh God!” She sucked in her breath. “It could go to his lung! It could kill him!”

      “It could? I wasn’t sure if it was really serious.”

      “It is. It’s awful. I’ve got to come home. No, first take him to the clinic. To that new doctor. I’ll call first, tell them you’re on the way. I’ll meet you there.”

      She hung up, and we flew into high gear. “Don’t move your head, George,” I said. “Don’t sniff or do anything. Just hold yourself like a frozen person.” I took him by the hand. The clinic was half a mile away, just up the road and one turn. Mandy rode the bike beside us. I put George on my back, piggyback. I had decided not to ride my own bike, because I might jostle him. This way I could put a lot of spring into my feet and keep him steady. I could also keep his mind off himself by playing like I was a pack mule and we were headed up Pike’s Peak.

      When I walked into the clinic, which is this little white building next to the bank, the whole waiting room was full of people. The clinic seemed to be drawing from all over; people weren’t just from Palm Key. George was still on my back, and just like my mother said, the nurse, Mrs. MacHenry, was waiting for us. There just wasn’t much of anything she could do. She said Dr. Haley wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen him since I’d knocked the front in on his Mercedes. Now he was up the highway at a nursing home giving flu shots, she said. She’d sent for him, and we’d just have to wait a little while. She set George down on a chair in the waiting room and gave him a sucker. “Breathe through your mouth, George,” she said. “Every time you lick this sucker, breathe in, then out.”

      It was at least a comfort to turn George over to Mrs. MacHenry. She lived on the same street with us, in a stilt house with a boathouse on the canal that went behind all our houses. She had red hair about the color of a rusted yard chair and a mouth that wouldn’t quite close because of her teeth. And to me, that made her look СКАЧАТЬ