Where All Light Tends to Go Read Free Page A

responsibilities, and by the time I’d hit tenth grade, I was staying up half the night working for him. I went to school to keep child services off his back, but slept through every hour right up until the day I turned sixteen, walked out of Walter Middleton, and never looked back.
    From the porch, I could hear Conway Twitty’s “I’d Love to Lay You Down” and the drone of some mechanical buzzing that sounded like a bug zapper. I walked into the house, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the room around my waist. Daddy was bent over a folding chair with his back exposed and some long-haired Hispanic man was digging into Daddy’s skin with a tattoo gun. Neither of them looked up. The only one who did was a skinny blonde Daddy had been seeing, who glanced me over before focusing back on the tattoo.
    I didn’t speak but walked over to the coffee table and grabbed someone’s pack of Winstons. I flipped a cigarette into my lips and fell back onto the sofa beside the blonde. From where I sat, I could see that the Hispanic was halfway through spelling out that skinny blonde’s name in cursive between Daddy’s shoulder blades. He was covered in tattoos for the most part, and in the patchwork of my father, nearly all of them had started off as a woman’s name at one point or another, only to be covered by something more permanent down the road.
    “What in the fuck are you putting her name on your back for?” I leaned into the sofa and lit the cigarette with my eyes still stoned and half closed.
    “Shut the fuck up, Jacob!” Josephine hollered, but none of the others even looked up.
    The tattoo gun shut off, the Hispanic man patted my father on the shoulder, and Daddy straightened up and reached for his cigarettes. The Hispanic had snubbed her name short at Jose, and I started to laugh, the joint from earlier still heightening humor. “Who the hell is José?”
    “It says Josie, dipshit, that’s your daddy’s nickname for me, but what do you know? Ain’t like you can spell. You never even finished school.”
    Daddy cut eyes at her to shut her mouth, and she knew to shut it fast. It was a mouth he’d paid for after all, so I reckon it gave him that right. Her teeth were damn near rotted out the first time she came around, but Daddy said he saw something in her, put fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of work into those gums just to have her smiling with teeth like corn pearls.
    “From over here that looks like J-O-S-E, and far as I know, that spells José.” I glanced at the Hispanic and his stare widened. Part of him looked like he was about to laugh, but then there was this fear I could see way back in him like he just might piss himself.
    “J-O-S-E?” Daddy turned around to look the Hispanic man square. That fear I’d seen suddenly shot up to the front of the Hispanic man’s eyes.
    “Son of a bitch, that dumb fucking spic left out the
i
,” Josephine squealed. She was boiling now, her face getting flushed as she stood up with legs that ran from ankles to heaven in short shorts, and a tank top that she was all but pouring out of. For a split second, I thought I saw what Daddy had seen in her, but then she opened that mouth again. “Charlie, you better not let him do this to me! You better not let some spic ruin what we have.”
    The Hispanic man watched her with eyes spread, and I knew if I handed him a knife at that moment, he’d stab that old loudmouth bitch till there wasn’t any sound left to be made but gurgling.
    Daddy stayed calm like he always did, and there was something a bit more frightening about a man that could stay at ease while doing the sorts of things he was known to do. He never raised his voice and never raised his hand, just turned to the Hispanic man and asked him if he could fix it.
    “Hell no, he can’t fix it!” Josephine squealed. She started to open her mouth again, but Daddy duct-taped her lips closed with nothing more than a glance.
    “The two of y’all just get the