it’s still charged.
Forty-three percent, it says. Enough.
I can still steal the neighbors’ network. It’s called The Sappienzas and I know them as a tight little family, happy and Italian, and I feel good about taking from them.
I open Google. It’s slow.
Growing up, when I searched for Kel Keller and only got myself, it was like an echo. It was like sending out a hello and only hearing an echo.
Francis Keller, I tell myself. Type it in.
Type it in.
Francis Keller.
There is a Dr. Francis Keller from Texas. There is a 20-year-old Francis Keller on MySpace. A musician.
They are not my father.
I type in Francis Keller Arizona.
Nothing. Back.
On the third page there is a link to a hardware store in Queens. No explanation. I click it, and it takes me to a page with a fat smiling man with one arm wrapped around a trophy and another wrapped around a kid. His son, probably. Connelly’s Hardware, it says. Family-owned and operated since 1983.
Farther down the page there are photographs of happy customers interacting with happy employees. Even farther down there are pictures of a softball game. Team Connelly’s is playing Team Mike’s Auto Parts. All of the pictures have captions identifying the players.
The very last photograph is a group of men in a bar. They are standing next to each other and each one is holding a beer. Under the picture it says Jim Laughlin, Chuck Caliendo, Francis Keller, and Pete Howell after the game.
I can’t see their faces well. It’s dark in the picture. But the man they call Francis Keller looks like he could be the same man in all of my photo albums. He’s wearing a cap. He’s skinny like my dad was in the pictures I have of him. He’s got an arm around the shoulders of the fat man next to him. He’s grinning, I can see that.
He’s wearing a Connelly’s Hardware T-shirt.
I’m still wearing the same clothes I was wearing yesterday. I haven’t showered in almost a week. I’m still wrapped in a blanket and shuddering with cold. I drag the tips of my fingers across my face and feel nothing.
I turn off the computer. I stand up and my knees feel wobbly and wrong. It feels like days since I’ve eaten a meal.
I make myself walk. Into the hallway. Down the stairs. I shed my blankets at the base of them.
I check for my wallet in my back pocket. I open it: no cash. I need gas for the car. It’s part of my plan.
I have been in charge of my mother’s money since she got sick. She gave me her ATM card so that I could walk to the machine and get whatever I needed, whatever we needed. Her disability checks went right into her bank account. The food stamps arrived in the mail. I got used to spending almost nothing on us. I got used to earning money in other ways. I’d deal a little weed when things got very bad. It was easy in Pells. I could get it easy in Yonkers, and then just charge a little more for my friends at PLHS. But doing this made me scared because of baseball. And all I spent money on was the electricity bill, the gas bill, gas for the car. She spent money on her rum and her junk food, the only stuff she ever left the house for. And to feed myself I lived off others, off of my friends and their parents. The credit card that Trevor or Kramer or Cossy would slap down at the end of a meal out—we went to one diner a lot, we went to Applebee’s for a joke sometimes—became something we didn’t acknowledge. My mother’s disability checks were enough.
But now that she’s—
What will happen.
My cell phone rang over and over again yesterday and I never answered and I won’t listen to the messages either. Two calls were from her social worker. I won’t listen.
I drive to the gas station on the corner, walk inside the little store.
Frank the owner raises his eyebrows at me.
Where you been? he asks, and I shrug and say nothing and pray that he won’t ask the next question he always asks—How’s your mother?
He doesn’t. He leaves me alone. Maybe he’s heard from the neighbors. I stick my ATM card—her ATM card—into the machine, not looking at the name in raised letters on the front of it, and take a deep breath.
I know exactly how much is in there since