Dad’s Home

When I was eleven, my mother told me my father was never coming home. It was September, shortly after school had started, a few weeks before my birthday.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Now go do your homework.”

I never questioned what I was told by an adult. Not the existence of God, not the claim that the ancient Clovis culture once roamed the very ground on which we lived, not the fact that our tiny house was built on a swamp which might decide to swallow us all while we slept.

My dad was never a huge presence, so I can’t honestly say I missed him. But for the first few nights he was gone, I could hear my mother crying through the common wall between their bedroom and mine. Usually it was drowned out by the radio on her nightstand where some deep-throated bigot would rant about welfare and crime and Affirmative Action. After about a week, though, the radio went silent and so did Mom.

Kenny Pontillo lived directly across the street from us in an identical house painted one shade grayer. He was twenty-years old, mentally retarded, and sat staring out his front window most of the time.

“Where’s your dad?” he’d ask practically every day.

“Not around,” I’d tell him, and Kenny’d be satisfied with that answer, at least for awhile.

One Saturday in early October I came home from playing Tetris at Kenny’s and found an envelope, addressed to me and postmarked from Largo, Florida, on my bed. Inside was a birthday card — one week late — with a five-dollar bill. It was signed, “Dad.” I threw the card into the trash and gave the money to my mother who was in the living room vacuuming.

Halloween day our school got dismissed early, the idea being to let the kids trick-or-treat before darkness set in. My mom was at her job as a teller at Richmond County Savings Bank, so I decided to make a dummy.

In my parent’s closet I found my father’s left-behind work clothes in a plastic laundry basket. I stuffed a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt with newspaper, and stapled them together. On our front lawn, I positioned the dummy in a seated position, its back leaning against a tree. I tucked the shirt cuffs into winter gloves, arranged rubber boots at the ends of the legs. I stuffed an old pillowcase and added a face with a black Magic Marker. I tied it with clothesline, hoping it looked like a hangman’s noose. It hardly seemed scary enough, so I drove a screwdriver through the chest and decorated the wound with catsup. I filled an empty Coke bottle with water, added a label reading POISON! and placed it on the ground by one of the hands.

“What’s that?!” I heard Kenny shout from his doorway.

“It’s my dad!” I yelled back. “He’s home!”

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Z.Z. Boone’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Web, and storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Annalemma, The MacGuffin, Third Wednesday, Swill, FRiGG, Wigleaf, decomP, Word Riot, Pank, LITnIMAGE, Monkeybicycle, and other terrific places.