What You Don't Know(55)
A part of him wants to stay, to get back into the thick of things right away, but he’s spent so much of the last few years running from Seever that he can’t. Even if he tried, he doesn’t think he’ll be any more use tonight; it’d be best to go home, to nurse his sore head and bruised face, come back to the investigation in the morning, when he’s thinking straight, when he can do the job right.
*
When he gets home, Joe’s asleep on the couch, a melting bowl of ice cream balanced on his lap. “He’s been hiding tuna cans again,” the caretaker woman says before she leaves. “He’s been digging in the trash and hiding them in his room. He won’t even let me wash them out first.”
Hoskins gets a trash bag and goes to his father’s room, and the smell of fish hits him, overpowering the musky aroma of old man. The empty cans are stacked in the closet, starting in the farthest corner, where the suit his father used to wear to church hangs, wrapped in clear plastic and knotted at the bottom, to keep the ends from dragging. There are dozens of them—when did Joe have a chance to eat this much tuna? Hoskins gets on his knees, starts putting the cans in the bag, trying to be quiet about it, so by the time Joe realizes what has happened these flat tins will be far away, buried under a mound of other garbage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Joe’s voice scares the hell out of him, the same way it did when he was fifteen and had brought a girl home with him, and they’d been in his bedroom, fooling around, because Joe shouldn’t have been there, he usually worked late into the night, but he came home early that day, Hoskins never found out why, and he caught the two of them in the middle of their funny business. He’d stormed into the bedroom, shouting, and he’d put the girl out of the house, but gently.
“I’m throwing all this junk away.”
“Get out.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“I’m a grown man. I’ll live any way I damn well please.”
“These have to go, Dad.”
“No.”
Joe’s eyes are shining, he’s breathing hard. He’s never been a violent man, never used his fists or was mean, is hardly ever rude or angry, but Hoskins thinks he might be ready to fight now, that there’s a good chance the two of them will end up on the floor, rolling around, swearing and punching, all over a bag of cans, their insides smeared with drying tuna.
“I need those, son,” Joe says, instead. There’s no fight in him, none at all, and Hoskins realizes that the shine in his eyes isn’t anger, it’s tears, because he’s ready to break down. “Please.”
“Why? It’s nothing but trash.”
Joe sits on the foot of his bed—not sits, really, but more of a sink, slow-motion and graceful, and he’s crying, thin old-man tears that run down his face and over his huffing lips.
“But I need them.”
Seever cried when they arrested him, real tears, and Hoskins thinks it might be the only time he ever saw the man being sincerely himself, with all the bullshit wiped away. He didn’t want to leave his home, didn’t want to be pushed into the back of the patrol car parked in his driveway. They’re mine, Seever had said, weeping. His forehead was mushed into the window, and he’d left behind a big smeary mark on the glass. They’re mine.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Joe asks, covering his eyes. His hands are veined, spotted. Trembling. “Please don’t do this.”
Hoskins doesn’t know what to say, how to make this better. He’s still holding the trash bag, and when he moves for the door the cans shift, clinking against one another with hollow metallic chimes.
SLOPPY SECONDS
HOSKINS
December 3, 2015
He tries to be quiet in the mornings so he doesn’t wake up Joe, creeping around his own house like a thief. He’s careful not to slam the bathroom door or to drop anything in the shower, and he usually shuffles around in socks and puts on his shoes last thing, but it doesn’t matter, it’s a shot in the dark, because there are times Joe is already awake, waiting at the kitchen table, his hands folded together patiently. Hoskins isn’t sure what he’s waiting for, and Joe doesn’t seem to know either—he was never the type of man who’d wait to be served, he’d never had a woman around to make coffee or iron his clothes—no, Carol Hoskins was a real flake, she’d been seventeen when Hoskins was born and she’d only put her life on hold long enough to marry Joe and shit out a baby, and then she was gone. As far as Hoskins knows, his parents are still married, and he sometimes wonders if Joe’s been waiting all this time for Carol to come back, to be ready to settle down. It doesn’t look like it’ll happen, though—she’s had forty years to come back and she never has—and Joe has gotten used to doing everything himself, but he still waits.
Joe isn’t at the table this morning, though, and that’s good, because things are easier when the old man’s asleep. Like the thermostat. When Joe’s still asleep, that’s his first stop. It’s on the wall of the tiny dining room, which seems the stupidest possible spot to put a thermostat, but maybe that was the standard when the house was built. He doesn’t know. He changes the temperature every morning, at least for a little bit, because Joe always looks at the thermostat, at least once a day, usually in the mornings.