that shack back there that I can let anyone know. So you don’t know. Like you don’t know what happened with Coach Randall.”
“What? What happened?”
“He took me back to the pound.”
“The coach?”
“Yeah. Cute puppy turned into a big, old smelly dog. Hey, here’s some shit women never have to deal with: what happens when a boy can look a man straight in the eye.”
“You mean …?”
“Yes, literally look him in the eye. It’s a caveman thing. No, even farther back than that. More like a wolf pack thing. Coach woke up one morning, I was looking him in the eye, and he could not deal.”
“Where was his wife this whole time?”
“Oh, Mrs. Coach? She was pretty much off scrapbooking every shit her daughters ever took. I remember this one time? They all went on a scrapbooking cruise. Yeah. What that all about? You’re, like, taking pictures of each other taking pictures so you can come home and put them in an album with a bunch of stickers and stamps around them and remember when you took the picture?
“No, even hiding everything I could about who I really was, I was way too much real life for Mrs. Coach. She had scrapbooking and I was her husband’s hobby. So when he came to me with a bunch of bullshit about his wife’s migraines and how her doctor ordered her to cut all the stress out of her life or she’d have a stroke, I knew exactly what was happening. I was out of there that night.”
“Is that when you came to Parkhaven?”
“Not hardly. Lots of stops before Parkhaven. They sent me to some old cow and her husband who was a long-distance trucker, so I never saw him. They kept kids for the money. Straight up. The more she took in and the less she spent on us, the more she got to keep for herself. She already had seven when I got there. Big woman. Really big. Took her half an hour to get her blubber up and off the broke-down couch she lived on. Like the queen in a hive of termites, she had all us drones bringing her food.”
“Ew.”
“It wasn’t that bad. She left me alone. They put me in this middle school with a fairly kick-ass football team. One practice and I owned the place. Seriously. Coach—Coach Whitaker this time—was wetting his pants, calling to make sure I had all my permission slips signed and a way to get to practice and the games. He ended up driving me himself. Buying me extra food so I’d ‘stay strong.’ ”
“How long were you there?”
“Few years.”
“Tyler, how old are you?”
“Honestly? I don’t know exactly.”
“Didn’t you need a birth certificate to start school?”
“See? I love the way you think. Way my grandparents tell it, my mom had me in a gas station. Dried me off with the hand dryer, then went out and got high. Not exactly a prime record-keeping situation.”
I think of how natural it was when Tyler called the kid who’d interviewed him “son.” Tyler seems older because he is older. And college? I also start to understand why he doesn’t want to talk about college. I think of him always saying, when we’re in a new restaurant like last night and the waitress hands him a menu, “I’ll have what she’s having.” I think about him never texting. About how when we do his homework together he always arranges it so that he never has to read. I know he can read, just probably not well enough for college.
“Have I completely freaked you out?”
“No, Tyler, I’m …” What? Every word I think of—honored? grateful? humbled?—they all sound like fake, college-application-essay words.
I am silent for too long and Tyler jumps in. “Don’t stress. That was weird. Too weird. Sorry. I shouldn’t have … Just shouldn’t have. Ridiculous, huh?” He pretends it is all a joke and says in this fake game-show-announcer voice, “A. J. Lightsey, come on down! You signed on for the golden-boy, football-hero boyfriend, and surprise! Guess what? You’ve won a redneck hick who doesn’t know who his father is and whose mom is either dead or a meth whore!”
“No, Tyler, that’s not it at all.…” I have too much to say to say anything.
Tyler apologizes again, and the silence stretches out until it is broken when I run over a few lane markers and some cans clatter around the bed of the truck.
“I should have cleaned those empties out.” The Tyler of just a few