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The Stepfather

Michael Gigandet

    “You’re holding the world’s knowledge in your hands, ever smack dab of it,” the college boy in a cheap suit with the Mercury 7 astronaut haircut said.
    My stepfather looked at the encyclopedia and caressed the cover as if he were smoothing out a wrinkle, a sure sign to me that he was going to buy something else we couldn’t afford, but astronaut boy did not know that.
    “And I’m gonna give you my family discount too,” he said. “Not supposed to, but I’m gonna anyway.”
    Not only did my stepfather buy 26-volumes of “Knowledge of the World” Encyclopedias with the two-volume index, he ordered the 24-volumes of “People of the World”. He even bought the wooden bookshelf that came with them.
    You could sell the man anything. That’s how my mother sold him marriage to a woman with three children.
    “You kids won’t have an excuse not to do your homework,” my stepfather said, smiling, pleased with himself, justifying this extravagance and joking at the same time. He’d never completed high school, so I guess he had reason to be impressed with our very own treasure of the world’s knowledge even if we could not afford it.
    Air Force sergeants don’t make much, and as we moved among bases he worked extra jobs to pay for (and keep) the station wagons, school clothes, the used film projector which never worked and encyclopedias...and make partial payments to lawyers in the never-ending custody battle while my father avoided his child support.
    In Florida, he cleaned houses, and in Tennessee he worked in a liquor store and washed cars at a dealership. He napped between jobs, 30 minutes of rest before my mother would rouse him for work. Sometimes, he slept in the car while my mother drove him to work. I saw him once asleep in the car in our apartment complex parking lot. I pretended I didn’t.
    I was a rising junior in high school when we moved to Texas. We were living in a one-bedroom apartment near the Air Force base. It was temporary my mother said until a two-bedroom house in a rundown part of town came free in a month. My stepfather got a job cleaning the Dairy Queen.
    Sometimes I helped him that summer, but I was a teenager, lazy and resentful, so I avoided going whenever I could find a reason.
    We’d get up at midnight, drive a few blocks and park near the road. Afraid I might be seen by someone from my new school, I rushed to the doors to get inside, waiting there in the glare with my back to the road for my stepfather to catch up with the keys.
    The lights in the place would be blazing, so I stayed away from the windows in case anyone drove by.
    My stepfather scrubbed the grills and appliances and buffed the tile floors until they reflected light like glass. He washed the walls of windows with a rubber squeegee on an extended metal pole. Some nights he would run the ice cream out of the machine and give it to me in a large cup. I can still smell that ice cream these many decades later and won’t take my own children to a DQ.
    I scrubbed the booths, running my fingers through the creases of the upholstery for loose change. Once I found a dollar bill in the parking lot near our car while I was picking up trash. I also cleaned the bathrooms located behind a swinging metal door in the back of the dining area.
    One Saturday night I was filling my soap bucket in the back room when I heard a commotion up front. I turned the water off and heard the metallic clicking and sliding sounds of locks being turned, the heft of the glass door, the sound of air conditioned air whooshing into the night and then, girls’ voices, all of them chattering. One of them asked my stepfather if they could use the restroom which was just a few feet from where I was standing. The girls had to be old enough to drive—my age or a little older. What if they were in my class when I started school in September? They might tell everybody that my stepfather was the janitor at the Dairy Queen.
     I heard him murmur and the gaggle of giggling girls grow louder. They were coming. I ducked into the men’s room, listening, avoiding seeing myself in the mirror. Through the walls I heard the girls laughing, muffled voices and water flushing. Their door banged open, and their laughing receded like the sound of geese flying away into the distance. I listened to my stepfather relock the front doors, cylinders sliding into place. Through the window in the backroom door I watched headlights sweep the parking lot and veer onto the highway.
     “Did you see those cute girls?” my stepfather asked when I emerged.
    To him: “I was cleaning the men’s room.” To myself: “What could you know about cute girls?”
    When my mother died I went through her papers to see if there was anything important to keep. I stacked the photographs I found for my sisters. The old bills, divorce papers, tattered letters to her from when I was in the service and then law school got tossed into the burn box.
    I sorted quickly until I found the matchbook, no matches, just the cover, one of those with an advertisement for a correspondence course. For $99, this one promised an “Exciting and Rewarding” career as a “Certified Electronics Technician.” I recognized my stepfather’s printing, square and childish. He must have kept it in case he ever scraped together an extra $99 for a better life.
    I flipped it over between my fingers a couple of times. Knowledge. I was holding it in my hand. I slid it into my shirt pocket just like that dollar bill.

 

    This was previously published in the October 2020 Pure Slush anthology “Wrong Way Go Back” Vol. 19.

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