impaled their letter on a vacant nameplate holder on the cabin door. The letter had been sealed so that my father could not hold me accountable for its contents. Laverne, making sure Simmons wasn’t watching, had given me all the cash she had on her—ten bucks—and I had rushed straight down to the vending machine. Never in the history of humankind had a Three Musketeers tasted so good, and I knew that one day, if I was lucky enough to have sex, it would have that candy bar to live up to. After a lot more junk food, I went home, slept fitfully by the sink, awoke early, and made it through Wednesday without another physical attack. When I returned home, Simmons’s note was gone from the door. Boot prints provided clues: my father had found the note, read it, and gone directly to the school. My blood ran cold. What if he had driven right past me as I slumped down Jackson on my way to Hewn Oak?
It was nearly ten. Footsteps paused at the door. All the windows were open; I heard a steady intake of breath. The knob rattled and a boot pushed open the door. Ken Harnett, in a sweaty work shirt and stained trousers, entered with his sacks slung over his shoulders and two large paper grocery bags balanced in his arms. He let the sacks slump to the floor. Things inside clacked and clanged. He turned his pale eyes to me.
By now I had transformed the floor space in front of the sink into something resembling the cushion forts I had made as a little kid. The dust that had velveted the area had been, for the most part, peeled away. Four tall stacks of newspapers had been arranged into a sort of privacy wall, while an overturned bucket served as a bedside table where I set my cups of coffee or glasses of water. My duffel bags had been molded into a bed. A rolled up sweater was my pillow. A water-damaged cardboard box had been repurposed as my homework table. A cracked plastic bowl I had found filled with mismatched nails, screws, and washers now held the scraps of food that I ferreted home from school.
He gave my handiwork only a moment’s attention, then walked over to the sink. The rancid odor spiked. He set down the paper bags stamped Sookie’s Foods and began slapping groceries to the counter with such force that his gray hair fluttered. I saw many things in cans: beans, soup, corn, beets, peanut butter, jelly, more beans. He gathered the few perishables and threw them into the refrigerator; I heard them bang around the cage even after the door smacked shut. Next I heard him enter his bedroom, pull open his closet, and make xylophone music with liquor bottles. Pride lifted my chin. I had done what had been needed to survive, and this odious drunkard would not make me feel bad about it.
Moments later he was back, upending a half-empty bottle of vodka. He winced and swallowed, his mad eyes sketching lines between seemingly random points of the cabin, cataloging each item that I had disturbed. He swung his muzzle toward me.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he barked. “They tell me to buy you all this food and what, you’re going to let it age?”
“You’re a little late,” I said. The strength of my voice emboldened me. I stood up and felt acutely the lousy drape of my ill-fitting tee and wrinkled shorts. “Three days late.”
“Three days,” he whispered to the wall. A large dirty hand wiped itself across his face. “Three days is nothing, kid.”
I had forgotten how thick the bowed straps of his shoulders were, how braided the lines of muscle in his neck, how tall he was—his twists of hair nearly brushed the ceiling. The cabin was already too small for him; we could never share it comfortably. I considered the tiny segment of floor space I had dared to claim as my own. In the plastic bowl were the orange crumbs of chicken nuggets salvaged from lunch.
“Three days is not nothing when you have no money,” I said. “I was starving.”
“So I heard,” he said, taking another pull on the vodka. I pictured him sitting in the principal’s office opposite Simmons and Diamond and realized how completely his grubby appearance must have satisfied the expectations of those preening careerists. It must have killed him to suffer their ultimatums. I felt an unexpected,