"You know, son,
we should spend more time together."
"Yes, dad," I said, thinking about the years he had pretended that I wasn’t alive, that I never existed. "We really should." The years he spent
in jail for
drug charges,
weapon charges,
murder charges.
He was mumbling something about
chasing girls, and talking to
Adam in the back seat, and I looked at his eye, red and puffy from the operation. He said that his
retina was torn, and they had to attach a
buckle to it, or something along those lines.
He had gotten jumped in
Montreal while trying to arrange a ‘
business deal’ of some sort, and woke up in the back of a car, being held down by a very large man. He made it out by fighting the fellow off, and jumping out of the car at high speeds.
He had broken every limb doing so, some in multiple places. The casts came off yesterday.
"Let me take your
phone number,
Jairus," he said, and pulled out an
address book. I could only think about how very little I wanted to be in the car, how I wanted to be anywhere else. How I wanted
this stranger with my face to stop coming into my life at his convenience.
He jotted down my now-
inactive cell phone number, and I started to get out of the car.
"Wait... How do you spell your name again?"