The Boy in the Black Suit

by Jason Reynolds

  “I’m fine, Matt. I’m fine,” he repeated in that voice people talk in whenever they’re trying to convince someone that they’re not drunk. Cork always sounds like that, and it never fools anybody. “I just slipped, that’s all.” He was still struggling to stand. His feet kept sliding around like our kitchen floor was icy. Recognizing that standing just wasn’t going to happen, I grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and pulled it over to him.

  “Here. Sit,” I said, frustrated.

  “Shit, I cut my hand,” he groaned, plopping down on the chair. He squeezed his hands together to put pressure on the cut. Blood dripped from between his palms as if he were crushing cherries. As my dad rocked back and forth in pain, I grabbed a dish towel from under the sink.

  “Let me see,” I said, kneeling down, holding the rag out.

  Dad unclenched his hands. Red. I wrapped the cut hand in the towel, and told him to keep it tight. I could smell the liquor coming through his skin; with every grunt, his stale breath slapped me. He looked at me, his eyes glassy and lost like I was some stranger helping him out, instead of his son.

  “Better?” I asked.

  I knew it wasn’t better, but it’s one of those questions he had asked me a hundred times when I was growing up. It’s like a reflex. When I fell off my bike and scraped my arms all up, he slapped Band-Aids on them and said, “Better?” When I got in my first and only fight—got the crap beat out of me in middle school—he put some ointment on my lip and said, “Better?” And it was never better. I mean, it was eventually, but never when he asked. But for some reason, whenever he asked, “Better?” I always felt like I had to say yes.

  My father grunted in reply. It was like he suddenly had no words left, like his tongue was dead. Then, he grunted again, and out of nowhere a spreading wet spot appeared on his pants, and the cognac, now mixed with the smell of his piss, floated through the air.

  Seeing him that way automatically made me think about how he must’ve been all the time, back when he first started dating my mom. She used to always talk about how when she met him at the restaurant, he was a part-time dishwasher and a full-time drunk.

  “Baby, the bottom of the bottle was your daddy’s second home,” she’d say, shaking her head. Then she’d always add, “And if I didn’t stop him, he would’ve made that second home his grave.”

  Even though she loved him (whenever he wasn’t wasted), she told him that she wouldn’t marry him unless he gave it up. So he did. He gave it up for twenty whole years. But now . . . now, without Mom . . . he just . . . damn. It’s like he fell apart. At the same time, I kinda understood. And literally, by the time I stood back up, he was already ’sleep, slumped in the chair, snoring. And I looked at him like he was my kid—like we had switched places and this was his first night getting wasted and I was suppose to yell or punish him or tell him how irresponsible he was. Again . . . backward. And I couldn’t do none of that. Because he wasn’t my son. He was my father. All I could do was pray to God that he would get a handle on it.

  The next morning was weird for a few reasons. The first was, I decided to put on a suit. The same one I wore to my mom’s funeral. The only one I had. I figured since I was now working at a funeral home, a suit would be a better look than jeans and Nikes. Yeah, I knew that it would draw attention that I really didn’t want at school, but I figured a few hours of immature giggles were better than having to put on Mr. Ray’s jacket that smelled like old man. At least my suit fit. And it smelled like me, which smells like nothing. Not to mention, I didn’t look too bad in it, though I must admit it always took me a few tries to get the tie right. The first two times it always ended up a tiny, little, jacked-up knot. Then I remember to loop it twice, and it’s good.

  The second thing that was weird about the morning was my dad. I didn’t come downstairs and find him with his forehead slammed against the kitchen table, drool oozing from his mouth like slime, which is definitely what I was expecting. Instead, I came downstairs to a clean kitchen. No glass, no blood stains on the floor, not even a whiff of leftover funk. My father stood at the stove sipping from his usual mug, the smell of burned coffee and almost-burned toast in the air. (He can’t cook a lick. Can’t even make toast!) His right hand—the cut one—was neatly bandaged and he held the coffee cup in his left, which was funny because he’s right-handed and was clearly having a hard time getting the mug to his lips. But that seemed to be the only thing he was having a hard time with.

  “Morning, Matt,” he said, like nothing had happened a few hours before. Then he looked me up and down. “What’s with the suit?”

  “Doing some work for Mr. Ray after school,” I explained, but for some reason I felt like it went in one ear and out the other. It was like he wanted to know why I had on the suit I wore to Mom’s funeral, but he didn’t really want to know. He also was standing at the sink, and didn’t notice that the picture of us at the beach was gone. I had taken it to my room the night before.

  He shrugged and went back to his toast and coffee.

  “Want breakfast?” he said, plain.

  I stood there for a second and examined him. He was in his raggedy gray sweatpants, his belly poking out as usual. This had become his uniform since he had decided to take some time off from fixing up houses—stripping floors, dry wall, the whole nine. Now his day job was pretending nothing was wrong. But he couldn’t fool me. He wasn’t okay.

  “Naw, I don’t want to be late,” I said, still feeling uncomfortable about last night and wanting to get out of Bizzaro World as fast as possible. Even school would be less strange than the kitchen I spent the last seventeen years in.

  My father smirked. “Hey, it’s your funeral.” He’s said that line tons of times, but on this day it stung, and even pissed me off a little since I was literally just babysitting him a few hours before. I wanted to say back, and it was almost yours last night.

  “Yeah,” I said, throwing my backpack over my shoulder, suddenly wondering if I should go back on my promise to myself about not saying anything.

  I turned toward the front door, but then he began scratching scratching scratching his butter knife against his toast, the sound making me cringe inside. It was like the screeching sound the train makes when it pulls into the station. It pushed me over the edge. I had to say something. Maybe not everything, but something.

  “Dad?” I turned around to face him.

  “Yep?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Last night . . . ,” I started. He instantly stopped scratching at the toast, but he didn’t look at me. He just looked down at the half-black, half-brown bread. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t zing him like I wanted to—and trust me, I really wanted to—only because, well, we were both messed up, hurting, and it would’ve just been a wack thing to do. Just . . . mean. So I flipped the script and continued with, “You weren’t here when I got here, and I wasn’t sure if you ate or not, so I bought a sandwich for you. It’s in the fridge. You don’t have to eat burnt toast.”

  He took a deep breath, obviously happy I didn’t say what he thought I was going to say.

  “Oh.” He exhaled, looking at me, finally showing some signs of embarrassment. “Thanks.”

  Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

  It was another one of Brooklyn’s crappy fall days, where the clouds make nine in the morning look like six in the evening, but the rain just won’t come down. Instead there’s a constant mist like someone or something is continuously spitting on you. Gross. And to top it all off, I had on the most uncomfortable shoes in the world—stiff, clunky dress shoes, cutting into my ankles, forcing me to walk like my butt hurt.

  “Man, you should’ve just left without me,” I told Chris, as I waddled up to the bus stop. He stood there with a gigantic umbrella, way too big for such puny raindrops.

  “You said to treat you like normal,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “This is n
ormal.”

  I laughed and nodded to him.

  “But this big-ass umbrella ain’t,” I joked.

  “Neither is that monkey suit you got on,” he gave it back.

  I laughed again. “It’s for my job. Remember? At the funeral home. Where I touch dead people,” I said, pretending like I was going to touch him. “And anyway, I don’t even know why you talking. You probably don’t even have a suit. Probably can’t even tie a tie.”

  “You right. I don’t have a suit. But what I do have is an umbrella.” He pulled the large umbrella farther down over him.

  The funniest thing was when the bus came and Chris tried to close the umbrella up. He couldn’t get it to snap and lock in place, and it kept flying open every time he tried to step into the bus. He kept cussing and trying and cussing and trying until finally I just turned around and did it for him. People on the bus sniggered. Even the driver. I could tell Chris was embarrassed, but even he knew it was funny.

  School went its usual way. I bumped around from locker to classroom, dodging varsity jackets, chicks with fresh doobie wraps peering into cheap, stick-on locker mirrors, making fish faces while applying lip gloss, gossip hanging above our heads like cigarette smoke. I was sure my name was somewhere in it, especially since I was shuffling around in an all-black suit, looking like some kind of secret agent with bad feet. My classmates probably just thought the suit was some sort of grieving thing. Like I was making some kind of point, which I’m sure they all thought was weird. But I didn’t really care because, like I said, high school seemed like nothing to me now.

  I sat in Mr. Grovener’s class and listened to him read Old English stories, where the way they talked was weirder than Shakespeare’s language, and I faded in and out of writing notes and scribbling squiggly lines in the margins. All I could really think about was the day before. Not just my dad, but also Mr. Jameson’s funeral. The old man and the big, squeaky-voiced dude telling those crazy stories. The laughing and joking. And of course, I also thought about when Ms. Jameson got up to speak. I sat in class and replayed in my mind, over and over again, that watery look in her eyes, the weird thought of her face fighting itself to smile, and the strange satisfaction I got watching it all go down. I felt bad about it, but I also felt good about it. Maybe misery really does love company. My mother used to always say that, but I had never really thought about it before.

  She also used to say a watched clock don’t tick, and I was definitely watching the clock. Every second seeming like a minute keeping me trapped in this lame prison of cool kids and square pizza. I didn’t care about Canterbury, or whatever Grovener was yapping about. All I cared about was breaking free and going to the funeral home to help Mr. Ray.

  And sitting in on another funeral.

  Chapter 4

  NINETEEN

  MR. RAY WAS STANDING OUTSIDE the funeral home sipping coffee from a bodega cup when I got there. For the most part, my suit was still in pretty good shape. No stains, all tucked in, and only wrinkled on the shoulders because of my backpack straps. And y’know, I felt different in a suit. I felt like I was really going to work to do something important. Little did I know, I was.

  “Look at you, slick. Sharper than a ice pick, ain’t ya?” he said, extending his hand to me.

  “Hey, Mr. Ray,” I said, a little embarrassed. I met his hand with mine.

  “What made you wanna put on your spiffs?” he joked, turning the blue paper cup up to take one last gulp of coffee.

  “Just felt like it, I guess,” I said. I couldn’t exactly tell him that it dawned on me that the suit would make it easier for me to sit in on more funerals because, well, anyone in a black suit could fit right in to any funeral, no problem.

  He looked at me for a second. “Well, you look good, son. Now if you can get all your little knotty-head buddies ’round here to put on some decent clothes and pick their pants up off their asses, we’ll really be in business. Pants so low, they gotta walk like cowboys. Like they rode here from the Bronx on a horse.”

  I snickered. I couldn’t help it, that was a good one, plus it reminded me of something my mother used to say. She used to call the boys from the neighborhood ghetto penguins because of the way they waddled.

  “They ain’t my buddies,” I told him. The whole pants-sagging thing was never really my style. Just seems weird to have your whole butt showing like that.

  Mr. Ray nodded. “I know, Matt,” he said, tossing his cup in the trash.

  He looked over my shoulder at a car pulling up behind me. I turned and there was a black Cadillac easing up almost to the bumper of Mr. Ray’s car. It had dark windows and a neon pink paper hanging from the rearview mirror. I recognized the driver. Robbie Ray. I could almost smell the hair grease; his oversize dark sunglasses made him look like some kind of bug. There was a man in the passenger seat, but I didn’t know him.

  “But seriously, son, all jokes aside, I’m glad you wore a suit today, because I need you.”

  “For what?” I said, edgylike because all I could think about was how I said I didn’t want to touch no dead bodies.

  “You know what a pallbearer is?”

  “Naw.” Never heard of it.

  Behind me, the pop and squeal of one of the car doors opening.

  “Any sign of Cork, Willie?” Robbie Ray asked from the car.

  Mr. Ray looked at his brother and twisted his mouth up in a sarcastic way, making it clear that Robbie’s question was a dumb one.

  “Well, what about the kid? He gon’ do it?” Robbie Ray asked, his voice concerned and impatient.

  Since I was the only kid around, I figured he was talking about me. I also didn’t know what “it” was, but sort of put two and two together and guessed it had something to do with whatever a pallbearer was.

  Mr. Ray narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Gimme a second,” he said to Robbie in a serious tone.

  Robbie Ray nodded his head all nervous, and ducked back down into the black car.

  “Sorry ’bout that, Matthew,” Mr. Ray said, tapping a box of cigarettes against his palm. “But like I was saying, pallbearers are the guys who, pretty much, carry the casket.”

  I just gaped at him as my heart dropped to my knees.

  He continued. “I mean, sometimes family members do it, but a lot of the times the funeral home does it. Usually we have enough guys, but nobody can find Cork.”

  Yeah, because he’s probably out getting my father smashed, I thought.

  “So,” Mr. Ray said and sighed, “you’re pretty much all we got.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say no. I mean, I could have, but then I might not have been able to go to the funeral, which was the whole point of me wearing a suit. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to say yes either. I had never carried a casket. What if it was too heavy? What if it smelled weird . . . like dead people or something? Were there special ways to do it? Would I be able to learn how to do it on the car ride over? What if I dropped it? All these things were flashing through my head as Mr. Ray waited for an answer. I could feel wet nastiness start to develop under my arms as my nerves kicked into superdrive.

  “So, whatcha think?” he asked, doing a manly version of the whole puppy-dog thing.

  I just nodded my head. Damn!

  “You know where you going?” Mr. Ray said. He was talking to his brother on his phone, but using a headset like the ones they use when they take orders at Cluck Bucket. I thought about maybe suggesting earbuds, but Mr. Ray seemed too old school to switch up.

  “No, Robbie. You gotta start paying attention, man. Monroe and Stuyvesant. Not Madison. Monroe,” he said, frustrated. He shook his head and mumbled something to himself. I looked out the window at my neighborhood as the guy on the radio complained about the New York Giants.

  Staring at stoop after stoop, I thought about my mother. I can’t really say what I was thinkin
g about exactly. Just everything. Just her. It’s crazy to believe you can always put into words what you think of when you think of a person who’s gone, mainly because a lot of times it’s not about specific things. Sometimes you just think about how that person made you feel. That’s what I was daydreaming about. The way she made me feel. Like I was the luckiest kid in the world. Like I couldn’t lose. Like I was somebody important.

  Mr. Ray didn’t say much on the way, but I could tell he kept glancing over at me. I knew he knew where my head was, because right when I could feel the tears creeping up, he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey man, you a’ight?” he asked, his eyes off the road.

  I cleared my throat. “Yep. I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound normal.

  “You—” and before he could say “sure,” he shouted, “Shit!” and slammed on the brakes. Red light. He almost ran into the back of Robbie’s car.

  A loud thump came from behind us. I figured we must’ve been rear-ended, but we weren’t. Mr. Ray reached his hand up to the window directly behind our seat and slid it open. It’s funny, I didn’t even realize there was a window, completely blacked out, right behind my head. It was sort of like how cabs have that window separating the front seat and the backseat, except in Mr. Ray’s car, it was tinted.

  Mr. Ray peered into the back of the car. I turned my head to see what was back there that caused that thump and practically choked when I saw it. The casket. I thought the casket was in Robbie’s car since he was leading the way. Even though I tried not to look totally bugged out, I couldn’t help it. It’s just what happens when I’m nervous. Robot face. But can you blame me? A freakin’ casket was right behind my head!

  “Hey, it’s okay, man,” Mr. Ray said, stretching his neck to see the traffic light ahead of us. “This passenger can’t feel a thing,” he joked. I forced a smile.