Caring Is Creepy Read Free Page B

attic access between my closet and the living room. The front hallway, lined with elementary school photos of me from Kmart, led to a junction at the kitchen, forward took you past the sink to the kitchen door. If you took a right, you went into our biggest room, the living room, which stretched across the middle of the house from front to back like a saddle. From there, a worn trail in the carpet led straight past the couch, along the front windows, to the side hallway, a bathroom built for one, and on to our twonon-spacious bedrooms. Mom’s was on the left and had a good bit more moving-around space than mine. At the end of the hall, across from our rattletrap washer-dryer, was the door to my perfectly square, perfectly tiny sleeping box.
    Five minutes of mayhem later, Hayes went limping into the bathroom, mumbling “fuck” over and over again like a prayer. What sounded a lot like my Suave Wild Cherry Blossom conditioner fell and rattled around in the shower. When he came out again this time, he had orange stuff on his upper lip. I thought for a moment he’d been drinking the liquid soap. Then I noticed the prescription cough syrup bottle in his hand. Hayes tossed it with a clatter into the sink.
    “Bad cough,” he said.
    “Ah,” I said.
    I didn’t remember him coughing once since he’d come, but if he had a craving to gulp syrup, it wasn’t any skin off my behind.
    “When’s your wrinkled old ma get off?” he said
    I didn’t answer, since I’d heard her tell him this information twice already over the phone. I sat on the couch and looked at a man wrestle an alligator on the television. Hayes sat down beside me, stretching his back until it cracked. “Yu-up.” He turned this into two long syllables. “So you playing the silent game with me here or maybe you just need a couple Q-tips? Huh? What’s the good word, Little Flipper?” He made a dolphin sound. I edged away from him on the couch.
    Without looking away from the TV, I told him she’d be home tomorrow morning. This was a trick my mom had taught me after I’d complained about him bugging me. “Just stop paying him any mind,” Mom told me, “and he’ll quit after a while. He just wants a reaction, any reaction.”
    “Okay,” he said, almost to himself, and yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop. “That’s alright. That’ll work.” He sat there for afew more seconds, breathing loudly and tapping out a complicated beat with his fingers on the back of the couch. Eight loud, wet sneezes came out, one right after another. Then he jumped up all of a sudden, banging his knee against the coffee table.
    “Well, I’ll be shoving off then.” He limped over to the hall and looked about in a dazed way. I knew what he wanted.
    “On the floor in the kitchen.” I pointed to where his cane rested under a chair. “See you,” I said.
    “Yeah.” He furrowed his forehead at me. “Thanks.”
    The hole in his muffler must of grown a good bit bigger, because I could hear that crap Toyota truck of his until it got out to the state highway. Hayes had a tendency toward moodiness, worse than my mom sometimes, but even for him this was whack-a-doo behavior. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I knew better than to ask my mom for an explanation. I figured I’d be better off not saying anything at all unless she asked.

Types
    D ani put her Shins CD in my mom’s boom box. I’d been resistant to it at first because a senior girl at school had got her into them. An ex-cheerleader burnout named Barbara Ann that Dani idolized for some reason. Dani’s Shins thing started with a Zach Braff movie,
Garden State
, that Barbara thought was pretty intense. She got so worked up over it she must of watched it a dozen or so times. The Shins were one of the bands on the soundtrack, so Dani bought the album. I didn’t care all that much for the movie, or Braff’s show. Even my mom hated Braff’s goofy hospital show. In my experience, people at the hospital