Keith couldn't sleep. For once, not even Kendra's sexy body could distract him. She'd tried, giddy with the victory over her dad. She had boldly led the way to the guest bedroom, Keith following behind with the box of letters. He winced at her whoop as he closed the door.
"Did you see me, baby? I beat him. Him and Niall. It was like, everything I've been bottling up all these years came rushing out! And Mom, she was so bad-ass, standing up for us the way she did! I'm so proud of her!" Kendra yanked her dress over her head and stood there in her underwear and shoes.
"I want you to make love to me like you said. Every freaky thing you promised. Make me call you Daddy, make me scream." She wrapped her arms around his neck and gently pulled him down. Keith kissed her, but his heart wasn't in it. After a few minutes she couldn't ignore his muted passion.
"What's wrong, baby?"
He sighed. "It's just been a long day. Let's go to bed."
Under the light cotton sheet, they spooned. Still hopeful, she wiggled against him. The flesh was willing, but his spirit was weak. Even as his cock thickened against her softly muscled behind, his stomach dropped. He didn't deserve her sweet sweat, that soft snarl of her upper lip as she slid over the edge. He pulled her tight, nosing the coarse curls at the nape of her neck.
"I've got a lot to sort out, K, but I'll get it together. I promise."
He must really be tired, she mused. "Okay. Raincheck, though."
Keith held one long arm akimbo over his head and stared at the pale peach ceiling, Mr. Evans' words running through his mind like a broken loop. No matter how he tried to spin it, Robert was right. If he continued to be the man he was, he would destroy Kendra's future. Yet he wasn't sure how to change. If Kendra had wanted a suit and tie, she could've had her pick of Niall and guys like him. Still, she chose him. Why?
The moon grew full and fat while he tossed. Eventually, he conceded the battle and carefully folded the sheet back. Kendra's light snores didn't hitch as he rose. The keys to the Mrs. Evans's Benz were on the hook by the door. Keith slipped into the night.
He just drove aimlessly at first, following the moonlight past dark houses and down empty roads. Slowly the path became familiar, until he pulled into the dirt driveway of a small, falling down house with a sagging shed attached. He almost didn't recognize the place. He hadn't been back since the night it all went wrong.
The deck was no longer peeling. In the seven years he'd been gone the porch's flaking green paint had given up the ghost, until now it was just weather-beaten gray wood. The key, though, was still shockingly brassy, hidden between the loose front bricks. Keith used the flashlight he'd found in the Benz glovebox to clear away the cobwebs and stepped through the door.
He may as well have stepped back in time. Nothing had changed. Even the empties his dad drained and tossed were still scattered around the old arm chair, like abandoned pets waiting on their master's return. His father's effects were scant and mean: an Aaron's cap with the plastic tab, almost black with grease; a 20-pound ring of keys, their locks and cars long gone.
Hot as it was outside, the air in the house was unnaturally cold. Goosebumps raised on his arms, but Keith tried to shake it off. He stepped gingerly through the house, reliving childhood moments. The hole in the kitchen wall, a relic from the time he'd dodged a blow and his father broke his hand. The pencil marks on the doorframe his mom used to measure his growth; those stopped at his waist. His father never looked at him the same after she left. It was like the wound of her leaving festered inside their house until it infected everything.
Keith paused, thumbing over memories of his mother, nettled by his inability to recall her face. The image was like a faded Polaroid: a wisp of fair hair, the way the left corner of her lips quirked up when she smiled. It all wouldn't come together into a cohesive picture, and he knew that if he passed her now, they probably wouldn't even recognize each other. He touched the faded marks, that knowledge like a stone inside, cold and final. The short and faded graphite marks, five of them, climbed up the door frame. They were decisive and sure, like her, the next-to-last peaked like a small mountain. And he remembered.
It was the morning of his sixth birthday, and she called him over for their familiar ritual.
"You're getting so big, Old Man," she said. "One day I'mma look up and you'll be an old man for real."
"I'mma be older than you, Mama?"
"Not yet. You stay my sweet boy just a little while longer." When she went to mark his height, he bumped up on his tiptoes, making the mark go crooked but his mother was so tickled she let it stand. Keith didn't remember what he got that year, but he remembered her nickname for him, Old Man, on account of the eyes she said belonged to an old soul, and the way she laughed and laughed.
Keith tested the door to his old bedroom, and it creaked open unsteadily. Though everything was exactly as he remembered, it all felt strangely alien, like someone else's past. He forgot about the sharp angle of the corrugated roof, ducking his head just in time to avoid banging it on the ceiling, and tripped over the pallet of dry-rotted cushions on the floor. The crate of blue jeans still sat on the broken folding chair, one pair slung over the back. Keith picked them up and inhaled and could almost smell Kendra's scent on them still.
Under the chair, another crate was filled with CDs, books and personal keepsakes. He sat on the old cushions crosslegged, surprised at the feeling that welled up inside: nostalgia. He would never choose to go back to the bad old days, but those bad old days were his bad old days. Where the Red Fern Grows, his favorite childhood book, had made him long for a secret dog that would be his best friend. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. For a brief while, he had thought that he could be a transformative figure too, to kids like himself who grew up getting drilled down, beaten flat and filled with hate. They were America's trash, only useful when Big Brother needed cannon fodder for battles they had no stake in. They could be more than that. He could be more than that. So he'd thought. He swiped hard at his burning eyes and got up off the floor.
"What the fuck, man?" he scolded himself gruffly. "You fall in love and next thing you know, you're a weeping fucking willow."
He had one more room to visit in the house.
He touched the doorknob to his father's bedroom and a strong breeze swept through the house, violently ruffling the yellowed papers tacked to the wall.
"You old bastard, I did nothin' you didn't deserve!" Keith surprised himself by shouting.
He kicked the door open and reeled. He felt the weight of the aluminum bat in his hands, the blinding despair that nothing good would ever last, the rage that the sleeping man had taken everything, everything from him. He saw himself approach the bed. This time, he stopped short. It had been stripped, the sheet and pillows taken as evidence. But he could still feel his father's grip as the reclining man had tried to stay the blows and the ring of the bat when they told.
"I'm sorry, Pa. I'm so sorry," Keith sobbed. Hearing the words aloud made him realize he'd never said them.
He stayed past sunrise talking to a man he no longer hated, the whispered conversation dangerously close to a prayer. Finally he pushed himself up. He felt ... clear, and clean in a way he hadn't felt in years. A knock sounded on the door. He opened it and was swept up in a pair of loving arms.
