“Hello, father.” Those two words were, perhaps, the most difficult he’d ever spoken. Worse, he didn’t know what to follow them up with. Did he ask the man how he was doing? Did he apologize? It was long past the time he could do anything like that. “I need your help.”
There was no pause. No shock. “Yes, I thought you might.”
He wanted to bury himself. He knew it was best to let his family pretend he’d never existed. It was what he’d vowed to do from the beginning. And now, to call after all this time asking for handouts…
He could feel the words clogging his throat. So many and all so impossible. He forced himselfto swallow. He felt small again, a child. As stupid and pathetic as he’d been the day his father had broken into the bathroom.Eli, he reminded himself.This is for Eli.
“There’s a man here,” he found himself saying. “A doctor.” And slowly, word by stumbling word, he gave his father a rundown of Eli’s situation. He kept the words moving, afraid that if he stopped, he might not be able to start back up again, and that fear only made him sound jumbled and wandering, but his father said nothing, only listened, until he finally came to the point. “He needs better food, and I can’t give it to him. I thought maybe if the whole prison had the same choices…”
“I’ll take care of it.”
He thought maybe the man was misunderstanding. He hadn’t yet explained his idea. Hadn’t even asked anything, really. But his father seemed to consider the matter over and done with.
“Is there anything else you need?”
Sometimes when he put too much peanut butter in his mouth at once, his throat would feel like it was coated with glue. The feeling he had now was like that, but worse. “No, I...no.”
There was a pause, and he could have filled that pause with any number of things. But all of it, every word in the overwhelmingly large English language, felt entirely useless to him.
“Is this man the reason Jennifer has moved out of the house?”
That didn’t really make much sense. Jenny had largely been living in the apartment near her office since the day she turned eighteen. But he knew what his father meant. “Yes.”
There was another pause, and he wondered if he could read his father’s displeasure in it.
“I should be able to implement the changes in a few days.”
It was goodbye. He knew it and felt the relief it brought him. Still, he clung to the phone and tried to think of what to say. So much had happened since they’d seen each other in the courtroom. Too much. They were strangers now. “Goodnight, father.”
He didn’t know what his voice revealed. He didn’t even know what he himself was feeling. Maybe it didn’t matter. The line went dead.
He pulled the phone away from his face and stared at it. The phones were all so old. Whenever he used them, he couldn’t help but wonder about how many people had held the receiver in their hands. What had they felt? What had they talked about? And where were they now?
A hand touched his back, but he didn’t flinch. He knew that hand.
“You okay, puppy?”
He turned to him. He’d stared at Eli’s face so much he could draw every expression mood and line from memory alone.
“I’m hungry.”
Eli laughed, and the sound helped erode a little of the pressure inside of him. “Again? You must be going through a growth spurt.”
He wasn’t hungry. Not really. But he wanted an excuse to be taken care of that wouldn’t raise the alarm too much. But maybe Eli sensed something regardless, because he put an arm around his shoulders, and kept him close, even though it made walking more difficult.
Chapter Thirteen
Social-Security Dick
The prison made the announcement two days later. They were in the shower together when Rat burst in with, “We’re getting new food!”
He schooled his face into an expression of mild curiosity, but Eli wasn’t fooled. As the bathroom erupted into all kinds of discussion, he turned to him and asked, “What did you do?”
“Me? I just mind my own business.”
“No, you don’t. How’d you manage this? Jenny?”
He pushed his face back under the water and pretended not to hear him. He should have known that wouldn’t work. Eli took hold of his arm and gave him a yank that had him crashing into a wall of slippery skin. “You can’t do this, puppy. She’ll go bankrupt trying to feed a whole prison.”