Four Sided

Dave

A few summers ago I took on a year-long lease for my first place on my own. A tiny, one bedroom bungalow on Oakland Avenue. Living there was magical though it never quite felt like home due to the previous tenant's severe wall color choices and my limited homemaking skills, but I took dozens and dozens of baths in the luxurious claw foot tub and hosted countless dinners for my friends around the tiny dining room table. There was a mud room at the front of the house with a hook for my bike. I hung my FUJI there each evening after biking home from work.

One day I recognized the neighbor a few houses down: he had briefly been the manager of a bar I had worked at when I was 19. Seeing him scraping the snow off a shiny, muscled SUV, I remembered how odd the job interview with him had been, sitting in high-backed chairs in the daytime quiet of the bar. He had leaned forward in his seat, saying in a breathless tone that he would love for me to come out of my shell. "I could," he rasped "Just shake you." It chilled me but I shrugged it off and took the job. Within a few months Dave had moved on to manage a different bar, and when I saw him on my street I did not greet him, did not acknowledge our strange connection and rarely saw him again.

A few seasons later, on a grey Sunday morning, I heard about the shooting. Two children, little boys, dead in the snow. Riveted to my phone, I watched the morbid coverage unfold: the mother is being held hostage, the mother is dead, the father was identified as the shooter, the father is dead. I cried and felt sick and then saw a picture of the family. Dave's flushed red face smiled up at me from the screen, and I reeled in recognition. The news said that the boys shouted "Hi Papa!" as they ran through the snow towards him, before he opened fire. Red and white.