Before the Ever After(13)

Some Days


Some days my dad doesn’t remember

stuff like the day I was born and how it rained for sixteen days straight before I came.

My daddy used to swear they had to take a boat.

Sailed to the hospital as captain, he used to say.

Came home with a first mate.

And I’d ask about Mama—what was she.

Everything. Your mama was and is

everyone and everything to me.

Tell me about the boat again, Daddy. But now he says he doesn’t remember.

Some days he sits in his big chair by the window and stares out at Sweet Pine.

Asks us over and over again What kind of tree is that?

It’s fall again. And the leaves are bright orange and Maple’s leaves are too

and even Crabby with her red berries and yellow leaves is beautiful.

You look out and it’s like the sky’s on fire, my daddy says.

You look up, he says, and it’s the most beautiful thing.

Some days his repetition sounds like the chorus of a song.

You look out and it’s like the sky’s on fire.

You look up and it’s the most beautiful thing.

I watch my mom watching him from the kitchen, her eyebrows wrinkling.

Come watch these leaves with me, little man.

Come watch the way they fall, my dad says.

Come watch the way they fall, little man.

Come watch these leaves with me.





Back Then


Every Sunday night,

I’d run to the TV the minute the game was on.

I didn’t care about the crowds cheering in the stands.

I didn’t care about the cheerleaders or the referees in their striped shirts or the coaches getting mad at the referees.

I just wanted to see

my daddy

#44

tight end

I wanted to see him running past the 40, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10 . . . yard line.

I wanted to see him make the touchdown.

And if anybody got in his way, I wanted to see him go into them hard.

Helmet to helmet, body to body.

Again and again and again until it was like he’d pushed right through a concrete wall that wasn’t concrete but was

defensive ends and linebackers . . .

Helmet to helmet . . .

My head hurts so bad . . .

Tonight, while me and Mama eat dinner and Dad naps on the couch,

she tells me more about the doctor in Philadelphia.

They are studying the connection, she says, between concussions and what’s happening to your dad.

She stirs her broccoli around on her plate. Most of her food’s still there. Most of mine too.

He’s had so many of them, she says. Too many.

But no one seems to be sure of anything.

Mama pushes her plate away and looks at me.

In the dim light of the dining room, her eyes are dark and sad.

There’s a penalty in football called holding.

You’re not supposed to tackle a player who doesn’t have the ball.

You’re not supposed to snatch him and slam him down.

Or hold on to him.

But sitting there with my mom and my dad snoring on the couch

and the doctors knowing but not knowing, I feel like someone’s holding us,

keeping us from getting back to where we were before and keeping us from the next place too.





The Broken Thing


There’s not a name for the way Daddy’s brain works now.

The way it forgets little things like what day it is and big things like the importance of wearing a coat outside on a cold day. There’s not a name for the way I catch him crying

looking around the living room like it’s his first time seeing it.

This morning, Daddy’s afraid to go outside.

I want to grab his hand and pull him hard

past the front door into the daylight.

I want to yell at him, tell him it’s only outside.

But I don’t. I just stand there not knowing what’s supposed to come after this.

I don’t know what’s out there, my daddy says.

Something big, he says. Something broken that I don’t know how to fix.





Haiku for Daddy


After school, in the empty house, I eat a snack and pull out my guitar.

Strum it soft then harder then soft again, let the music

echo through the rooms. Practice what my choir teacher told us, to bring the air up from my stomach when I sing to breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Daddy, you asked me to write you a song. I said I’d write a hundred.

I sing the haiku song I wrote for Daddy over and over, until the empty house is filled up with something.

Music.

Words.

Breath.





Before Tupac and Biggie


The music stays the same.

The way it makes Dad remember.

The way it makes him smile, tell the stories about the songs

that he’s always told me.

Before there was Tupac or Biggie or even Public Enemy, my daddy said,

there was the Sugarhill Gang. When they rapped, people understood all the words.

There was this one part in a Sugarhill song where this dude talked

about another kid’s mama’s cooking.

Back in the day you’d lose a tooth talking trash about someone’s mama, but