Inheritance

I knew my dad had moved back to Oregon, but neither of us reached out right away. Winter came and went, I was busy with school, I felt bad about it. He called me in March, picking up as if it hadn’t been four years since we’d spoken. He needed help clearing out a defaulted storage unit he’d purchased at auction, after seeing people do it on TV.
	“Jay, it’s full of antiques, good stuff,” he said. “You know how to use eBay? You do the sales, we go fifty-fifty?”
	I let myself be roped into his scheme because my partner actually did sell vintage on eBay. I’d moved in with Benny well aware of the overstock issue in his daylight basement apartment. With even more inventory, he could open a booth at the flea market, and I could claim the second bedroom as my study, mission style desk under the egress window, bookshelves lining the walls. For the entirety of my master’s program, I’d done homework either at the bar where Benny worked, or on his threadbare midcentury couch, springs in my ass, because the Formica kitchen table was covered with brushes and scouring powder, wire cutters and light switches.
	Dad rented a fifth wheel in a wooded lot off the Nehalem Highway, mauve and burgundy racing stripes discolored with lichen, moss growing in crevices. It was docked to electricity and water and plumbing, luxuries he’d gone without for long stretches. He greeted us at the cold fire pit with three bottles of Alaskan Amber. Put the open one in Benny’s hand. The sun hadn’t yet reached between the trees. Benny must have been more hungover than he was letting on, I’d never seen him drink before noon. And my dad was a bad influence. He opened one for himself, gave me the third.
	“Jay, you look great,” Dad said.
	“You too.” He did seem more robust than the last time I’d seen him.
	“With that uh…” He put his hand to his chin. “…beard, you look so much like I did when I was your age, it’s eerie.”
	That was why he seemed healthier. His beard. I couldn’t remember what he looked like at my age. I would have been eight when he was thirty-one, and he wasn’t around much.
Dad said, “You’re back in school? What for?”
	I allowed his question to be what are you studying, not why are you still in school? It wouldn’t have done any good to remind him I’d had to wait until I was twenty-four to start, because I couldn’t pin him down to fill out financial aid forms.
	“I’m almost done. It’s a Master of Environmental Studies program. Like, policy.”
	“Huh. Policy. I’d rather be outside.”
	“And here you are.”
	He took in the surrounding forest, mid-morning light leaking through the conifer boughs, and grinned. “Here I am.” Inside, there were four dehydrators running, and dried mushrooms—food, not drugs—on every surface. He’d taken on some middleman role in a gourmet foraging operation. I was just glad he was housed.
	I draped an arm over the back of Benny’s chair, halfway through my beer and starting to feel good. “It’s nice out here,” I said. Benny nodded. “We should visit more often.” We’d spent the night an hour away in Astoria, in a motel room with mildew creeping up the walls.
	“Bring a tent and stay as long as you want,” Dad said. He took the bottle out of my hand to gauge whether I needed another and went inside.
	“Your dad seems all right,” Benny said.
	“Yeah.”
	There were stories I knew I’d told Benny and stories I knew I hadn’t. The six months in sixth grade Dad lived with Grandma and me, clean, chain smoking and reading Moby Dick on our front porch steps, the only person I know who ever finished it. My high school graduation party, when he got me so trashed I fell and hit my head on those same porch steps, requiring a trip to the ER for five staples and a lecture on underage drinking, scary enough to make me the volunteer designated driver for the rest of the summer. The choked message he left on our answering machine that August, telling us Jerry Garcia had died, a few days after it happened, as if Grandma and I didn’t have access to media coverage. As if we hadn’t been thinking of him.
	Dad came back to the fire pit with a map. He unfolded a section and snapped it smooth.
	“Benny, here’s how you’re going to want to get to that storage place.” He traced a route with his finger.
	Benny didn’t say anything.
	“Dad, Benny doesn’t drive. He doesn’t have a license. He never learned.”
	“You can navigate, then.” Dad held up the map again. He was treating Benny like they were the men. 
	“Benny can’t read a map. He doesn’t know east from west.”
	“That’s easy,” Dad said. “The mountains are east, the ocean is west.”
	“He does this for left and right!” I stuck my left thumb and forefinger out in an ‘L for Loser’ shape. 
	Dad frowned like I’d gone too far and said, “Benny, I’m sure you have other talents.” 
	“Thank you,” Benny said. He was a hard-hitting drummer, a no-nonsense bartender, and he really was good at refurbishing old furniture, he just couldn’t keep up with all the tattered pieces he brought home.
	“Are you coming with?” I asked Dad. “Are we helping, or are we doing it for you?”
	He whistled tunelessly. “Sure. Got a lady friend in town I’d like to see.”
	My relief had been tentative when Dad moved to Santa Fe, a decade earlier. I was only a little bit bummed he wouldn’t be in Olympia to take me barhopping on my twenty-first birthday. Could have been fun, although it was just as likely to have been a shitshow. He wouldn’t come to my apartment with pinpoint pupils and a confident grin, asking for eight dollars to renew his food handler’s permit, or invite me bowling and nod out between rolls, or call begging for a ride to the methadone clinic early on a snowy Saturday morning. I didn’t think he’d hack it in the southwest, but after the first year, I started to relax. He stayed nine more.
	Benny went inside to take a leak before we left, and Dad finally had the chance to ask me what was on his mind. “When you said partner, you meant—?” He made a pile of pine needles and little sticks with the toe of his shoe.
	“Boyfriend. Boyfriends.”
	“So.” Dad paused to process. “You’re…” He stalled out. “…gay? Then? You’re partners, so you’re…homosexual. Still.”
	“You could say that.” I started kicking pine needles into piles like he was.
	“I don’t care,” Dad said. “It doesn’t matter to me. My best friend growing up was gay. Justin. You remember Justin.” I did, and I remembered my dad using the same line the first time I came out. “But I thought…when you told me you were taking…” He dropped his voice as if to whisper a dirty word, and I almost laughed when he said, “Testosterone? I thought you were going to be…straight? You always had girlfriends when you were…a lesbian?”
	I looked at the little mounds of dirt we were shuffling around. “Benny and I—”
	“Are you happy?”
	“Yeah. We’re in a registered domestic partnership, it’s legal now in Washington.”
	“Hey, that’s great. Consider this a wedding gift.” He tossed me a key ring.
	“We didn’t have a ceremony.” I jangled the keys. “I would’ve invited you.”


A story about my dad I had definitely told Benny: The spring of ninth grade, he showed up at his mother’s, where I’d lived since I was five, to kick dope. I spent a few school nights at my best friend’s house, even though her parents didn’t like me and called me a bad influence. I slept on the couch and she snuck downstairs so we could make out. When I got home, Dad was gone, along with my bike, some of Grandma’s jewelry. 
	“That fucker,” Grandma said. We didn’t see Dad again for awhile. I liked picturing him getting around on my bike, and I never told her about the missing fifty bucks I’d squirreled away so my best friend and I could rent tuxes for prom.


Dad thought the van Benny and I borrowed from our buddy Jared—the one with his band’s name, Solar Plexus, graffitied on the side—looked big enough. We’d removed the back seat, so Dad brought along his lawn chair. He offered me a lit joint. I waved it away. The gravel and mud road to his place was lousy with potholes, I had to focus. Benny took a hit, put his feet up on the dashboard and pulled his stocking cap lower on his head. Dad popped the top on a can of Rainier. If I snagged a rut the lawn chair would collapse.
	“You’re too uptight,” Dad said, clutching my shoulder. “You need to hit this.”
	“I’m driving.”
	“Like you never drive and smoke,” Benny said. “Can we get breakfast? I’m starving.”
	At the Columbian Café, back in Astoria, Dad couldn’t read the menu. He said the type was too small. Maybe he was too wasted. He stopped Benny from reading every item out loud when he got to the smoked salmon hash. I’d always wanted to bring Benny here. They had a vegan special, and vegan breakfasts were past their late-nineties heyday, a rarity now with the bacon backlash.
	We had passed a truckload of caged chickens on the freeway, and Benny told me he made eye contact. He reminded me they were living beings, filled with cortisol. I told him that was why I didn’t eat meat, either. He said they were laying hens, and reminded me I ate eggs.
	When the bill came, Dad was conveniently outside having a cigarette and Benny was conveniently in the restroom. I paid and found him hovering in the open doorway of the bar next door, pretending to read a flyer posted in the window. Pool balls clacked inside, AC/DC’s bagpipe solo roiling in the rancid bubble gum scent of sanitizer.
	Benny met me at the corner of the building, glanced around furtively, stretched and brought his arms down over my shoulders, giving me a squeeze, resting his chin on top of my head for a moment.
	We’d been happy, more or less, for the past four years. Benny was tending an empty bar when Jared and I came in, fourth of July. I knew who he was, I’d seen him around. He had been the original drummer for Solar Plexus and wanted to hear about the southwest tour we’d just completed. He was hot in a dirty punk way. I could smell him from the barstool. He made extravagant Bloody Marys with towering garnishes and charged us for well drinks. Afternoon sun poured in the skylights, filtered by oversized papier-mâché flowers hanging from the ceiling. Benny pulled pints of Oly, no charge. When Jared left to meet his boyfriend at the bus station, Benny said, “They’re blowing up a TV behind the library. You wanna go?”
	I did.
	Astoria was still, at its heart, a fishing village, and it crossed my mind that this might not be the most gay-friendly bar. I twisted out of Benny’s grasp. “Where’s Dad?”
	“He went to find his lady friend. He said he’d meet us here in about an hour.”
	“Why not the motel?”
	“I wasn’t sure where the motel was.”
	“His lady friend,” I said.
	“You think a guy like your dad can’t get a lady friend?”
	“Did he ask you for money?” Over the phone, Dad had told me he was clean, but he had always maintained a broad definition of clean.
	Benny’s face fell. “I gave him ten bucks.”


A story about my dad, from when I was a little kid, that I hadn’t really told Benny, not in detail: Dad yelled at me for trying to touch the blue flame on the propane camp stove, where he was boiling water for stale-smelling instant coffee. I started crying. I knew better, I was five, but it was so hard to believe that the blue part was fire.
	“Jay, you didn’t get hurt. I didn’t hurt you, I kept you from getting hurt.”
	He knelt and wiped my face roughly with the hem of the huge T-shirt I was wearing over my pajamas. It went down to my ankles, tie-dye and thorny rose graphic faded. I heard the tricky side door of the Chevy van clicking, and after jimmying it for a moment, Mom came out. Her long brown hair was tangled, and she wore a big sweatshirt with two long skirts. It was a chilly, damp morning on the Oregon Coast. Dad started to hand her a cup of coffee, then put up one finger in a wait gesture. He trickled some booze into both their cups and winked at her, without a hint of playfulness. Mom held her thumb over the drinking spout of my sippy cup and shook the powdered milk before handing it to me. She didn’t ask what was wrong.
	We’d been traveling all over the west, caravanning with Deadheads and meeting up at Rainbow Gatherings, no refrigeration, no real milk. Later, in fifth grade science class, I learned what the word on milk cartons meant: homogenized, and remembered the powdered milk, chalky and chunky. I drank real milk at Grandma’s house, but it was skim. Dad called it blue milk. I imagined milk from a glass bottle left by a milkman and stolen by a cartoon cat, smooth and white and nearly solid. Grandma said the Dairy Farmer’s Association commercials used paint.
	Yellow leaves were starting to fall on the campground paths. I stepped on pinecones carefully to get the right crunch. There weren’t any other kids screaming and tearing around on bikes anymore, only silver-haired couples who pulled their trailers with shiny trucks. They wore plaid flannel shirts and clean hiking boots and looked away when passing our campsite on their way to the water pump.
	Late afternoon, we arrived at Grandma’s house in Eugene. We weren’t supposed to go to the coast, we were supposed to go right back to Grandma’s after we saw the Grateful Dead at the 1982 Oregon Country Fair, and I was supposed to start kindergarten, but Mom needed to smell the ocean. She needed to smell it many days in a row. Grandma didn’t say “Welcome Home,” like the bearded men in ripped T-shirts when we arrived at a Gathering. She began yelling at Dad in the driveway, while Mom bit her thumbnail in the front passenger seat.
	“Jay was supposed to start kindergarten last Wednesday. You don’t even know what day of the week it is.”
	Mom started speaking quietly, without turning to look at me. “Do you want to keep camping with Dad and me, or do you want to stay with Grandma and go to school?”
	Grandma’s waxy pink lipstick and her copper smell after she smoked a cigarette and sucked on a mint, Froot Loops and cartoons, kids on TV going to school with lunchboxes. The cold, endless darkness beyond communal campfires, fire-roasted potatoes not cooked all the way through, sleeping in someone else’s tent, not sure where my parents had gone.
	In the van in Grandma’s driveway, I started peeing my pants and I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t even wet the bed for a few years, since I was very little. I didn’t want Mom or Grandma to know.
	Dad was arguing. “It’s not the law for kids to go to school until first grade. She’s learning more out in the bush than she ever could in a classroom,” he said.
	“Don’t give me that child of nature bullshit, Robbie.”
	Dad taught me how trees talk to each other, how nurse logs are dead trees that provide food for the little trees growing on them. Mom said put bright green new pine needles into your tea for vitamin C, to prevent scurvy. Justin—Dad’s old friend—taught me if you touch the inside of a tent when it’s raining, the water will come in, but if you don’t touch it, you stay dry. Nova—one of bearded men who welcomed us home at Gatherings—said if you got stung by stinging nettle, you could put a banana slug on it to relieve the burning, but slugs scared me.
	“Grandma,” I said. “And school.”
	“You’re not gonna like it,” Mom said. “You’ll just sit at a desk all day with people telling you what to do.”
	All I wanted to do was get out of the van and away from my pee.
	Grandma was saying Mom should go to school, too. I didn’t know, then, that she’d dropped out when she got pregnant with me, or that Grandma had done the same with my dad.
	“We’re free to live our lives as we see fit,” Dad said, less sure of himself.
	“Give me that little girl. Jay, get out of the van,” she said to me. Then to Dad, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
	“The door is tricky. Jay can’t open it by herself.” Everyone had always called me Jay.
	The door rattled and there was Dad. He plucked me from the seat, hands digging into my underarms. He realized I’d wet myself. It was his look of compassion that made me start to cry.
	Grandma scooped me up, too big to be held, and put me down right away. “When was the last time she had a bath? She probably has a bladder infection.”
	Dad was getting back into the Chevy. Mom wouldn’t look at me. Dad flashed us a peace sign as he drove away. He was twenty-seven then, the same age I was last time I saw him. Old enough to have his shit together and take care of his kid.


“You want another beer?” I asked Benny. It was almost two in the afternoon.
	“All right,” he said with a sigh, as if I’d been wheedling him.
	“A pitcher?”
	“Totally. Do it.”
	We found a dark corner next to a filmy Ms. Pacman arcade game. I stared past Benny into a Pilsner Urquell sign. “Did you catch the name of the storage place?”
	“No.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
	“There can’t be that many.”
	“Your dad said he’d meet us here.”
	“I’m not counting on it.” I went to the bar and brought back shots of whiskey.
	Benny said, “That’s what I was drinking last night.”
	“Were you nervous to meet my dad?”
	“What?”
	“You haven’t had whiskey since Christmas.”
	“That was scotch.”


When we picked up the van, Jared, freshly sober, threw in a partial bottle of bourbon he didn’t want around. Benny took a drink when we got on the freeway in Olympia, and by the time we arrived in Astoria, he was smashed. I could only assume it was accidental. Or he was celebrating his future as an antiques dealer.
	“Don’t fall out of the van,” I said in the motel parking lot.
	“I’m cool.” The way he spoke indicated he was not very cool. Benny rarely, if ever, got that drunk. I’d been looking forward to some sexy times. Instead, I watched infomercials.


“Let’s get fucked up,” he said with resignation.
	He’d been a straight edge kid until halfway through college, when someone handed him a glass of champagne at a cousin’s backyard wedding. His little brother passed him a joint and it was all over. “I never really listened to Fugazi,” I had said once. We were visiting his parents’ house, laughing at old photos, Benny as a string-bean, pizza-faced teenager with a shaved head. “Too macho. I was into Sonic Youth.”
	“Right, look how macho I was.” He showed me a photo of his performance art uniform, pantyhose and Chucks. Squinting, you could see the Xs on the backs of his hands. He said, “Sonic Youth is just hardcore slowed way down, like Earth is Link Wray slowed way down.”
	He’d sometimes play Fugazi’s instrumental soundtrack, and I’d begrudgingly agree that it was pretty far out. Every time, he would tell me, “It’s called Instrument Soundtrack. That’s the title. It’s not an instrumental soundtrack.”
	By the time we finished a second pitcher, I was pretty sure Dad wasn’t coming back. Benny pushed the remnants of a paper coaster he’d shredded into a tidy pile. He said, “You still want to try to find the storage place?”
	“I can’t drive. Let’s get another shot.”
	“Nah, man, let’s get out of here. I want to smoke weed and watch TV.” We didn’t have cable at home.
	“One more shot. Then we’ll go.”
	“Jay,” he said. “Don’t be an asshole.”
	“This is your fault for giving him money.”
	“Sorry for feeling generous.” Benny got up. “I’m going to the room. Give me the keys.”
	“You don’t even know where the motel is.”
	“I can find it. I just can’t give directions.” I dug in my pocket and dropped the motel keys on the table. Benny snatched them. “See you back there.”
	We looked toward the door. In a dusty beam of late afternoon sunlight, my dad stood at the bar. The woman he was with ordered a drink. He gestured come here.
	“See,” Benny said, punching my arm a little too hard. “I told you.”
	“What are you kids drinking?” Dad asked.
	“Water,” Benny said. He filled a plastic cup from a cooler off to the side, took a drink and handed it to me.
	“You’re two hours late,” I said. “We had two pitchers.”
	“When I got to Melody’s place, she was getting a load of mulch dropped off.”
	“Perfect timing,” Melody said, wringing the lime wedge into her gin and tonic and licking her fingertips. Dad told us they went way back.
	“After we unloaded it, we had to shower.” Dad and Melody shared a look. I scanned his pupils. Dad was getting laid, not getting high. “Jay? A pitcher. Benny will change his mind.”
	“I’m good,” Benny said. “Can I have the car keys?” I handed them over, too.
	“Where’s he going? I thought he couldn’t drive.”
	“He’s—” I pantomimed smoking a bowl.
	Seated at a booth, Dad asked, “Have you heard from your mom lately?”
	“Not since she decided me being queer was her punishment from God.” Years ago.
	“Still on that trip.” Dad shook his head. “Have you heard from my mom?”
	“Talked to her Thursday.”
	“I keep meaning to visit,” Dad said.
	“You know she’s not in Eugene anymore, right?” I didn’t know how he could have missed that. But he had.
	“Where’d she go?”
	“She moved to Bellingham. That’s where Grant’s kids and grandkids are.” After raising my dad, then me, alone, Grandma remarried in her sixties. Her husband had been an older father, and his kids were my age. They were pleasant, straight, boring.
	Melody said, “It must be wonderful to have grandchildren. Do you think you’ll have little ones, Jay?”
	I almost choked. “I think that ship has sailed.”
	“You could adopt,” she said.
	My glass was already empty, and Dad refilled it. I was losing track. Benny returned, slowed down and spaced out, hooked his ankle behind mine under the table. I told Dad I was good, but he refilled my glass again. Melody assured us she could drive the van. I couldn’t find the keys. Benny had them. 
	He and I sat on the floor in the back, too impaired to mess with the lawn chair. Dad sparked a bowl for Melody over the steering wheel. He was saying he’d never been inside the storage unit, even though he’d promised certain contents. Melody let it slip that Dad’s license was suspended. 
	“That makes so much sense,” I said. “Everything makes sense now.” Dad told me to shut up.
	“You got the keys?” Benny asked. I fished the last ring out of my pocket—the storage unit keys. Outside, it was just after dark, only a streak of light blue on the horizon.
	Benny squatted to reach the lock on the ground, bare knees sticking out of his torn jeans. I yanked on the roll-up door and it clattered upwards so fast I fell into the dusty arms of Sasquatch.
	“What the hell is that?” Melody was laughing. “A bear?”
	“Maybe it used to be a bear,” Dad said, “but it looks more like Bigfoot now.”
	Benny came up behind me and said, “Oh, no,” before I could tell him to avert his eyes.
	“It’s all taxidermy,” Dad said. “Really bad taxidermy.” He held a long creature with patchy white fur and bugged out yellow glass eyes.
	When I was little, one of my mom’s friends gave me a rabbit pelt she had tanned. I would brush the silky fur against my cheek. The smell in the storage unit reminded me of that smell, gone wrong, rotten, hides stiff where they should’ve been soft.
	Benny got back into the van and slammed the door.
	Dad called after him. “They might still be worth something.”
	“He won’t fuck with that,” I said. “He’s vegan. He doesn’t even wear wool or eat honey.”
	“Honey?” Melody asked.
	“The bees cannot consent to human consumption of their product.”
	“Oh,” she said. “I don’t think they care.”
	Dad said, “You still have to get all this out of here. Tonight. That was the deal.”
	“Benny’s not gonna ride in the van with that shit.”
	Dad said, “I didn’t think he’d be this much of a pansy.” I almost laughed. Benny was nothing if not a pansy.
	Melody wrapped a fox-face stole with shriveled eye sockets around her neck. “How do I look?” she asked in a faux Marlene Dietrich voice, smoking with an imaginary cigarette holder.
	I was fading. “I’ll go to the dump tomorrow,” I said, afraid Dad would argue.
	“Can I keep this one?” Melody asked, stroking the fox.
	“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s fabulous.”


A story about my dad I never told Benny: Four years ago, right before we reconnected, I passed through New Mexico, in the same van, as the worst bass player Solar Plexus ever took on tour. From Albuquerque, I caught the train to Santa Fe to visit Dad.
	We had been something like friends when I was just out of high school. We both lived in Olympia, he sort of relied on me. Seeing him in person after several years—years that hadn’t been kind to him as an off-and-on drug user—was unsettling. The feeling seemed to be mutual. He said nothing about my transition. I thought that was what I wanted, for it to be a non-issue, but I felt itchy for his recognition. And he’d suggested pizza. Jared said you should only eat blue corn tortillas and green chile when in New Mexico.
	In lieu of telling Dad anything about myself, or suggesting a different restaurant, I said, “Grandma always wondered what you did with her jewelry. Some of those pieces had come from her aunt. She was going to give them to me.”
	He wasn’t having it. “What would you do with women’s jewelry, if you’re a man now?”
	I couldn’t say I had a lady friend to give an engagement ring to, so instead, “I wouldn’t sell it for dope.”
	The server brought our pizza and asked if we wanted another round.
	We did.
	“You don’t know what it’s like, you can’t even imagine what it’s like,” Dad said, wringing a paper napkin.
	I took a big bite of pizza. “What’s it like?”
	The server returned with our beers. We muttered thanks.
	“You think you can quit on your own, but as soon as you’re sick, you do a little bit, just enough to keep from getting sick. Your mom would get so mad, she’d be kicking for real and I’d have just a little, and she couldn’t figure out how I wasn’t sick.” He almost smiled.
	I had heard that story. I gave him a stern look to show I didn’t think it was funny.
	“You go to one of those religious places, show up at some house where they hold you down in bed praying over you and force feeding you vanilla pudding while you’re vomiting.”
	I said, “God, I’m trying to eat.”
	“You asked. They assign housework. Dusting the same stuff every day. There’s never any dust.”
	My lip curled in involuntary sympathy.
	“When I’m using, I can hold down a job, but when I’m clean, I can’t do anything else. That’s all I’m doing. Not doing dope.”
	I’d noticed that.
	“It’s like I never grew up,” he said. “It’s like I’m still fifteen years old, at my dad’s place on the lake.” His father had returned from Vietnam hooked on morphine and absconded to his summer cabin outside of Olympia. Dad was a troublemaker, and his mother—my grandmother—sent him up there from Eugene. “We spent the whole summer…” He opened his hands to receive the right word. “Blazed.”
	The original bad influence. At least Dad waited until I was eighteen to get me plastered.
		When he went back to high school, he said, it was like everyone else knew how to study and pass classes, how to make friends and have a social life. He couldn’t figure it out. The only place he ever felt right was alone in the woods, until he saw the Grateful Dead. “That was the life that made sense,” he said. “Sharing whatever you had, living for the music. Someone would always give you a ride to the next show.”
	He followed them up and down the west coast, across the country. That was the life I was born into, the one that made sense to my dad. The one where smelling the ocean took precedence over enrolling your kid in kindergarten. The one where the audience at a show could, with their cosmic direction, control which song the band would play next, and it was the right one, every time. The one where the miracle of the extra ticket was performed with such regularity you barely even had to pray. Someone would always give you a ride, get you high, get you off, pay for your meal at a truck stop diner, give you a patch of land to pitch your tent or park your bus, and you’d do the same for your brothers and sisters, when and if you could, resisting individualism, materialism, capitalism. Leaving behind the systems created by the pathetic needs of the American ego, book reports and math exams, getting to work on time, filing taxes, going steady and getting married, The Man leering over your shoulder all the while, forcing you into some shape and role you never asked for, couldn’t comfortably fill, and were in constant danger of overflowing, embarrassing everyone around you. Imagine stumbling upon it as a teenager, a whole world running parallel to the one you couldn’t figure out how navigate, where the excess, the ecstatic overflow, was encouraged.
	My choice to live with my grandmother at age five had allowed me to navigate that primary world. But a five-year-old couldn’t really make that choice, which world to live in.
	“What if Grandma hadn’t been there to take care of me? To take care of you?”
	Dad put a slice of pizza on his plate. “I am trying,” he said, almost whispering. “I am trying to be friends.”
	I laughed into my glass. “Okay, sure.”
	“I am trying to understand you, and accept you—”
	“Don’t give me that.” I was parroting Grandma. I was on a roll. “You’re only talking about yourself. You don’t even care how I’m doing.”
	“Jay, I know I wasn’t there for you when you were a kid. I’m trying to be here now.”
	“I don’t need you now.”
	My dad dropped his strangled napkin on his untouched pizza. It drew up orange grease.
	“Where are you going?”
	“To smoke.”
	I finished my beer. I felt shitty about how much I’d sounded like his mother. Inheritance. When I’d first told Dad about myself, he’d connected it to his own dad’s war injuries, a shattered pelvis leaving him unable to father more children. It didn’t make either of us lesser men, Dad had told me over the phone, certain of it.
	By the time I finished his beer, I was pretty sure Dad wasn’t coming back. The restaurant was busy. I slipped out without paying the bill. I was never going to have pizza in New Mexico again, anyway. I resolved to call Dad and apologize as soon as I got to the house where we were staying. But when I arrived, there was a party in full swing. I got shitfaced with Jared instead.


We locked the storage unit. I climbed into the back of the van with Benny, who said, “It’s barbaric.”
	“I know. I’m sorry.”
	Melody hummed a song to herself. Dad didn’t say anything.
	The next day, I was going to take the dead animals to the landfill while Benny ransacked Astoria’s antique shops. He was going to keep filling our apartment with his collection, scratched and broken, no one paying good money for anything. Once I graduated and got a job at the Department of Ecology, Benny’s parents would help us with a down payment on a house with a garage he could use as a workshop. Dad was going to stay clean, and move in with Melody, and we were going to visit more often.
	Either that, or I was going to take the dead animals to the landfill and tell Benny to grow up. We’d bicker the whole drive home. I’d sleep on the beat-up couch and throw out all his old stuff while he was at work, unforgivable. Dad was going to stay clean, and move in with Melody, and I’d drop out of school a quarter before commencement to help with the mushroom operation, stoned all day and drunk all night, until I got my shit together and begged Benny to take me back.
	I was pretty sure he would, when it came down to it.

Liina Koivula holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and a BA from The Evergreen State College. Their short fiction celebrating subcultures of the American West has been nominated for Best of the Net 2026 and published in Feign, Puerto del Sol, Right Hand Pointing, Room Magazine, The Spokesman-Review, and Spokane Campfire Stories. They run the Substack Lifeguard of Love.