by Zack Smedley
“Huh?”
“THE BLANKET! GET THE BLANKET!”
I ran to do as he said, finding an old white throw quilt under a stack of cardboard. I used it to shield my head as I ran back.
“Hurry!” Dad said. He was hunched over the boot, and I was about to ask what the hell he was doing when the boot made a noise, and a head poked out of the opening.
“Oh,” I gasped. “Oh my God.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a kitten or a small cat. Either way, it wasn’t in good shape. Its fur was clinging to its face, soaked, and one of its eyes was halfway closed. It was looking right at Dad, who—I did a double take—had eyes as big as saucers and was pressing a hand to his mouth.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, look at you.” His voice was an octave higher than normal. He was in pieces. “Owen, here, give me that … there we go. No, hold on! Don’t touch her.”
“Are we leaving her in the boot?”
“Calm down. We’re going to cover her, use the blanket to keep her steady, and carry the bundle to the car.” When I stammered, “Al-alright,” he said, “Come on, bud!”
Five minutes later, I was sitting in the passenger’s seat with the bundle tucked securely on my lap. My father, dripping water everywhere, was back in the driver’s seat.
“You keep a firm hold on that, okay,” he said.
“Are we going home?”
“Emergency vet. Don’t dick around with the GPS; I know the way.” He was still panting like he’d just escaped a burning building. “Hold the bundle tight, just hold it. It’s very important that you do what I say right now.”
I reaffirmed my grip on the blanket. I kept waiting to get yelled at, but Dad spent the whole drive talking to the boot.
“Shh, sweetie, it’s okay,” he said, when we heard a small noise come from it. It was the softest I’d ever heard him speak in my life. When we got to a red light, he leaned down.
“You’re okay, sweetie,” he whispered, a lopsided smile on his face. “Shh. Oh my God, look at you. Such a pretty girl. Keep those gorgeous eyes open. Shh. You’re okay.”
“How do you know she’s female?” I asked.
“The genitals are saddled right up against the anus. On a male cat it’d be farther apart, okay.”
(I don’t have the first fucking idea how he knew that.)
Dad reached gingerly into the boot. I heard a small noise, and my father dissolved.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, sweetie. Shh, oh my gosh.” His eyes were still enormous. He said in a splintered voice, “Owen—uh, bud, you’re going to have to be the one to bring her inside. We’ll be there in a minute.”
We didn’t even park—just pulled right up to the curb, and I rushed the bundle into the e-vet to hand off to the people there. Dad took care of the paperwork once he’d pulled into a space. Then he collapsed into the chair beside me, his head in his hands, the boot and blanket in his lap.
“Christ, poor thing—they think she has a damaged spine,” he said.
The two of us were the only ones in the waiting room. We both pretended to watch the HGTV show on the screen in the corner.
“How did that happen to her?” I asked the TV.
“Fuck do you think? Someone threw her out into the road, bud.”
I didn’t answer.
“What a cutie, though,” he said, shaking his own head like he couldn’t help himself. “Captain Boots.”
“Huh?”
“Well, that’s her name, okay,” he said, like that was obvious. “They called her a brave little soldier when I asked how she was doing, so I was thinking her name would be Captain. But then I wanted something with more character, right? And I was just looking at my lap here, see, and at first I thought Captain Blanket, but what is this, a wuss? Nah, this is a tough cat. What did that teeny little head pop out of? A boot, okay, so … Captain Boots.”
Who the hell was this guy? The man who calmly asked for details when he learned that his own mother had died, brought to his emotional brink by a cat.
“Hey,” Dad said to the receptionist, after fifteen minutes. “What’s the status?”
“No info yet, I’m sorry. Are you the owner?”
“I—what, yeah, yeah,” he said.
She gave him a weird look, and he clarified, “We’re going to be, after this.” “It doesn’t quite w—”
“Whatever it costs, doesn’t matter. Money is no object here. Give her the best treatment; call in goddamn Sanjay Gupta if you need to. I want you to try to spend too much money here, understand.”
He began pacing throughout the lobby.
“Uh,” I said, then tried again. “Uh. We’re adopting her?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “What do you think they’d do with the poor girl otherwise?”
“What if Mom doesn’t like it?”
“Oh, hell,” Dad just said, waving off the idea. “How could anyone say no to that little face?”
The poisonous, pissed-off Dad gradually resurfaced over the next two hours. He started asking for updates every ten minutes, then every five, and finally a vet came out to give him some info: They were working on it, but it looked like Captain Boots had at least partial paralysis in her back legs.
“And it’s still touch and go. She’s not as strong as we’d like,” the vet added.
“Whatever you need to do. You hear me?”
“We’ll let you know.”
From there Dad kept pacing around the waiting room and talking. He talked about how he was going to build Captain Boots a wheelchair, and it would be lightweight and stylish and easy for her to use; “the best a kitty could ask for.”
He grinned at me and rubbed his hands and told me how he was going to keep the boot she was found in, and we could put it in the spare glass case on our living room shelf, and it would be a reminder of how she came into our lives.
He was going to research the best food and the two of them would watch TV together while she healed. “Like your grandma used to do with this old tabby we had growing up.”
He rubbed his face and talked about how good these folks were for taking care of her, and how good I was for swerving out of the way. As I sit here in the waiting room, writing this journal entry to kill the time, I keep looking to my father. And all I see is the joyous grin of a man I’ll never understand.
April 3rd—Senior Year
Journal:
Captain Boots died just after nine o’clock. When the vet gave us the news, I waited for Dad to scream or curse or throw a fit. But the only time he got upset was when they gave him shit for wanting the body back, since we weren’t the owners. I expected him to give some huge monologue, but he just paid the cremation fee and quietly drove us back.
In a wobbly voice on the way home, Dad talked about Captain Boots like she was the family member we never had. He told stories about how they would’ve snuggled together when he went to sleep, and she would’ve clawed up the carpet, but he still would’ve loved her and given her extra catnip anyway. He talked about how “so many people have something waiting to piss you off,” but there was nothing disappointing about Captain Boots. Not her, never her.
Wordlessly I followed him around back when we got home. The ground was wet, but the rain had stopped. Dad got a shovel from the shed and started digging a hole in the backyard, ignoring me when I reminded him there was no body to bury. When he started to have trouble with it, I took over even though I didn’t know why we were digging. Maybe we were digging to dig.
We worked until we were both covered in bug bites and had a hole in the ground the size of a pillow. Then Dad crouched down, and I realized he had the boot in his arms.
I watched as he examined it under his head lamp, turning it over in his hands like an artifact. And as he ran his eyes over the holes and chewed-up laces, my father said, “Fuck,” tucked the boot under his arm, and started to cry. Not ugly uncontrolled sobs, but soft and stone-faced and for himself.
Eventually he lowered the boot in
to the hole and mumbled in a hoarse whisper, “You were a good girl, okay.” Then he slid the mountain of dirt over the whole thing.
When we went to our rooms that night, Dad just said, “Thank you for your help today.”
And despite how incredibly taxing the evening was, I found myself smiling as I fell asleep. I thought about how my father saw Captain Boots—this wounded creature—and just helped her. He didn’t yell at her. He didn’t blame her. He helped.
And I thought about how we did this together, buried something together—“thank you for your help”—and there was no yelling, no steamrolling, no rudeness. My father changed tonight—I’m sure of it. And that change is here to stay. I’m sure of that too.
EIGHTEEN
DAD SWINGS THE SLEDGE AGAIN AND MOM KEEPS YELLING TO COME INSIDE BUT I CAN’T LOOK AWAY. I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE BUT HE SAYS THE SOONER WE DO THIS THE SOONER I CAN GO INSIDE BECAUSE IT’S LOUD. IT’S TOO LOUD. THE SAWS ARE GOING AND THE DRILL IS GOING AND THE HAMMERS ARE SMASHING INTO EVERYTHING, WE WORK FOR HOURS AND WE DESTROY THE DRYWALL, WE DESTROY THE SHELVES, WE HAMMER AND IT’S TOO LOUD BUT HE SAYS HE DOESN’T CARE UNTIL I TELL HIM WHO IT WAS SO I JUST KEEP SWINGING UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT; ONLY THE BARE STUDS AND THE CONCRETE WALLS AND THE TORN-DOWN TABLE AND THE TORN-DOWN SIGN THAT READS OWEN’S STUDIO. AND I WANT TO GET UPSET BECAUSE THE STUDIO IS GONE, BUT I’M JUST RELIEVED WHEN IT’S OVER BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS TOO FUCKING LOUD.
NINETEEN
I WASN’T SURE IF SHE WOULD, BUT MOM REALLY DOES it. When Dad and I emerge from the garage hours later and try to get inside, we find the doors have already been fashioned with new locks. I wait for Dad to throw a fit, to pick up the power tools and saw his way into his home. Instead he picks up the suitcase lying on the front lawn, loads it in his car, and drives off.
Not a word.
I’m still staring at his empty spot in our driveway when Mom comes rushing out and hugs me. She whispers how sorry she is; says a bunch of Mom-things. When I ask her when he’ll be allowed back, she gives me a tearful talking-to about how this is for my own safety and it should’ve happened sooner.
At first, I’m sure that one of them is bluffing—that he’ll be back with apology donuts and we’ll bullshit our way back to normalcy. But when he’s still not here for my eighteenth birthday two weeks later, it sinks in that this may not be temporary.
My present turns out to be a used car—specifically, Mom’s used car, which she’s replaced with a newer model thanks to a promotion at work.
“Do you want to have your friends over?” she asks me that night as we eat the brand of ice cream cake I have for my birthday every year.
“We’re celebrating next week,” I say.
“How about Lily? How’s it been with her lately?”
I feed her the usual BS. In the weeks since the argument at the beach house, Lily and I have mostly stuck to seeing each other at group events—movie nights at someone else’s house or going swimming at the neighborhood pool. The group is set to disband the first week of July, aka six days from now: Beth is going on a family road trip, Austin is moving early to stay at his brother’s place, and Vic got into an honors program that starts a month before the semester.
So I have a new mode: Hold on. Hold on until the group disperses, until it’s just you and her left. Then break up with her, and it’ll just be you.
Mom and I watch home videos from my first ever birthday party while we eat our cake. Her request. We end up leaving it on for an hour, playing through the first three years of my life … tiny me, going from crawling to walking to talking. Mom is holding the camera in most of them, but in one, Dad is doing the recording.
I watch as he approaches toddler-Owen, who’s on the floor with a sketchpad and crayons.
“Owen!” says Dad—a younger man; more fun and less pissed off—in a singsong. Then he growls, in a mock-scary voice, “What’re you doin’ down there, huh?”
Toddler-Owen giggles and holds up his drawing, beaming proudly for the camera. The picture is of two stick figures, smiling and holding hands under a lopsided sun. One—whose shirt is made of green and brown—towers over the other. The poorly-scribbled caption:
Me + Dada.
Dad laughs—(laughs!)—and says, “Did you do that! Wowww. I’m going to put this up on the wall so I can look at it every day!” Then he laughs again and says, “I’m very proud of you … you’re so great, bud.”
(You’re so great, bud.)
When the video finishes and Dad’s voice leaves the air, the house is quiet again.
Mom tries to compensate by making more small talk. It reminds me of the days back when Dad was deployed, when she and I would do things like this to distract ourselves from his absence.
Neither of us addresses the ugly part, though: that he’s not overseas serving his country this time. Instead he’s alone up at his cabin, cut off from everything he used to come home to.
TWENTY
April 5th—Senior Year
Journal:
I’ve just scheduled my first hookup. I suppose I’m still processing that—I didn’t start out with that intention. I was sitting in the Studio, browsing through group pictures from senior prom the day before. I’d just smoked the last of the weed I bought from Austin, and I decided to do some window shopping.
The thing is, today’s person deviated from the script. For one, they initiated the conversation with a polite message:
Hello, how are you today? :)
So, a step up from the usual.
I typed a response back and made some small talk to warm him up. I checked out his profile, which had three things listed: his name (Dewey), his age (eighteen), and his bio (“bi, shy, and ready to cry”). It’s the type of thing that would’ve charmed me if I were new to the game, but I knew how this worked by now. First rule of the app: No one who seems nice up front is immune to being a dick. Full stop.
It wouldn’t have gone any further than that, but then he went off-book again: When I tried to start the usual dirty talk, he shut it down. His message read:
Hey, would you be comfortable meeting up in person instead of doing this over text
It’s completely fine if not. I just can’t stand this interface.
I closed out the app. Useless.
But then he sent a follow-up:
Will you be at the pride festival this weekend?
This time, I replied.
Isn’t pride in June?
His answer, a few minutes later:
Yeah, this is a festival being hosted by the county library system. I think they want to have it in the spring so more students can go. I’m helping run the library booth, so I’ll be there all day. We could meet up then and see where things go from there :P
For a while, I didn’t type back.
I had to resist the urge to call him out for his false politeness … that nice-guy act these assholes always pulled until you didn’t give them what they were after. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, just to watch that courteousness crumble and buckle to a bunch of profanities and playground insults.
But the thing was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tank this right away. Part of me wanted to meet one of these gray squares in the flesh just to see what it was like.
I’m still not entirely sure why. But I told him fine.
He couldn’t resist another peppy reply:
Great! Let me know when you arrive, and I can meet you at the front entrance. And we can play it by ear from there :)
I set down my phone without answering.
TWENTY-ONE
OUR GROUP’S FINAL HANGOUT ALSO SERVES AS MY belated birthday celebration—combined at my request. The best gift they could give me was the free rein to plan out our final day together. They all know that; so that’s what they do.
Technically it isn’t everyone’s last day… . Vic will be around for another week, and Beth and Austin will be back for a few days separately in August. But none of it will overlap, so I asked that this be t
he last time I see them before leaving. I want a clean break, a clear moment of farewell with all three of them at once. I want an event.
And I get one: The five of us spend the entire day together, and we do everything on my list. Breakfast at the local diner, just like on senior skip day. Swimming at the pool and having a water gun fight like we did two summers ago. Packing a picnic lunch and eating it in the bed of Austin’s pickup truck. I even allow for a surprise deviation where they drive me to the gas station across the street so they can watch me buy my first scratch-off ticket. It wins two dollars.
I take pictures throughout the day, and we eventually end up doing an entire group photoshoot down by the playground. We capture a dozen different pairings: Austin and I doing finger guns, the three girls leaned against each other, cute ones of the couples, jokey ones of all five of us in sunglasses.
“Shit, I blinked!” Austin yells for the last one.
The last leg of the day is spent in the spot where it all started: roasting veggie burgers and s’mores at the fire pit. I try to take in the feeling as everyone starts to reminisce … talking about the days when we’d watch Judge Judy at Beth’s house after school, or the time Austin donned a full snowsuit to kill a wasp in Vic’s basement. Eventually we run out of memories, so we devolve into the usual banter.
“I want to grow a tail someday,” Austin tells us matter-of-factly.
“No you don’t,” Beth says, shuddering. “Ew!”
“Oh hell yeah I do. We’ll be back for Thanksgiving and I’ll be swatting people all over the place with that thing.”
“Ooh, just picture how that would spice up sex,” says Lily.
“Ew! I don’t want to picture that! No, stop!” Beth screeches as Vic tickles the back of her neck with a leaf. And even though I laugh, there’s a sadness to it as I stare at the flames and think one thing over and over: I miss these people already.
