Didi Wood's Pick
Well-chosen details and an engaging, authentic voice bring these characters to life.
I love to light Daddy's cigarettes. I slide the match along the box 'til it snaps and sniff the sulphur. Daddy bends his whiskered face to my cupped hands, a Camel cigarette between his lips. He touches the tip to my flame and sucks in deep. After he blows out three donut rings, he seems easier. He settles back in his chair and lets me tap the ash when it grows long. We don't have an ashtray. Mama took that too, so I usually knock it into the coffee can by his feet or roll the ash on my pant leg like I've seen him do. I make a long, gray racing stripe of it when it cools. He wears boots with toes of steel. They're heavy and hold him to the ground. I try a puff when he gives me a nod.
"Don't hot box it, girl," he warns, as if I don't know.
Tiny shreds of tobacco stick to the tip of my tongue. I think of black hands, small like mine, that picked it somewhere in a southern state, under a hot sun, and I spit. It makes me so thirsty. Daddy gives me a sip of his beer. "Just a little bit, little bit," he says, in his morning voice, all scratchy. He rolls the Camel's into his T-shirt sleeve and smiles when my nose wrinkles at the bubbles. I trace my finger along his heart tattoo with the fancy letters that spell Emma. That's Mama's name. I don't ask anymore when she's coming back, because I'm older now. I keep her picture where Daddy won't see it.
"How's your head, Daddy?" I ask and move round behind his chair to rub his shoulders. I'm only nine, but I'm strong.
"Not so bad today," he says, but I can see his hurting around his eyes. I get him aspirin out of the big bottle he keeps by the sink.
"You want more coffee?" I ask.
"Maybe you should get me Old Jimmy, baby," he says as I shake aspirin into the palm of his scarred hands. He worked the docks 'til the layoffs came. I drag the chair from the table over to the counter and climb up. The red Formica counter is cool on my feet. There's a loud screech of brakes outside. It's the school bus. I hold my breath and wait. It honks. Must be a new driver. I wonder what happened to Mr. Miracle and how long this driver will stop before he figures out, I'm not coming.
"You going to school?" Daddy asks, looking up at me.
"Why?" My heart does a flip-flop. "Are you going somewhere?"
He frowns. "Don't you wanna go?"
I just shrug. I don't want to go to school with those retards who think they're better than me with their store bought clothes and a mother who stays put. Since Annie moved there's nobody worth talking to anymore. Besides, Daddy needs me. I wait until I hear the bus drive off, then reach up for Old Jimmy, tuck it in my cut-offs and climb back down.
"Wanna glass Daddy?"
"No, no, honey," he says, his eyes on my hands, on the bottle, as I give it to him.
He smiles, it's his sad smile he wears most days now since Mama's gone. He takes the Old Jimmy and holds it in his hands, like he's weighing it. I climb up on the arm of his chair, my legs like matchsticks. I can see us in our TV. Daddy lost his job so we can't get it fixed. I don't tell him how I'd love to get a wide screen with color. Our TV sits like an eyeball watching. It's tricky. It makes his boots bigger than he is behind them so he looks little. And with my arm along the back of his chair, I look bigger.
"Look, Daddy." I point. "We're on TV." It's our joke. Daddy stares at us for a long time. Then something changes, like the clouds move because all of a sudden, the sun is coming in bright through the window, it makes my brown hair all white. "Look at that!" I say. Daddy makes a funny sound in his throat. "I look like a grandma." He lets his breath out like he's a tire going flat. His hair's getting long. He used to go regular to the barber, but now it hangs down to the top of his T-shirt. I twirl it in my fingers. "I could give you a cut, Daddy." He unscrews the Old Jimmy and closes his eyes. I watch his Adam's apple jump three times before he lowers the bottle.
"Tomorrow," he says, "you ought to get that bus to school." I'm counting on him to forget. If I leave him, he could take off like mama. He takes another sip of that bottle. Then he looks at the old granny me in the TV. He screws the cap back on tight and sets it down by his feet and says, "I mean it."
Teresa Burns Gunther's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Peregrine Journal, Berkeley Fiction Review, SOMA Literary Review, Lynx Eye Journal, Literary Mama, Mary Online Journal, and The Mag. She was a featured writer in August Highland's Muse Apprentice Guild and a finalist in Phoebe Journal's 2004 Winter Fiction Contest. She has an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California and is currently completing her first novel. She leads creative writing workshops through Lakeshore Writers, an AWA Affiliate in Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband and two teenaged sons.