Black Smoke

Evening The Odds

The next day, a sluggish feeling came over me. It was a cool Sunday morning, and the visit to Cresington Bay was still very fresh in mind.

You never wanted to fully commit to heartbreak in whatever scenario it might've been, and to me, I had to come to terms with the fact I was more on board with living under the same roof as my dad than with my mom.

He had been doing good these past few weeks. I expected to come home and find beer cans and bottle caps spread out all along the apartment floor. Instead, he passed out in the living room, a cup of coffee in hand and a newspaper open to the Classifieds section, which was good for me. I didn't think I had it in me to talk about the visit with mom, and I'm sure if he'd ask about it tomorrow, I wouldn't know how to describe it.

How could I have?

That woman was not the woman who gave birth to me.

She was different.

An hour until noon, I woke up to find him at the dining room table with a laptop on hand. He flat out mentioned he had just quit his old job, whatever the hell that was, and was looking for something to cement the fresh start he'd been working so hard on.

Shockingly, no questions about yesterday.

"Carpenter? Plumbing? Not even one advertisement for flooring and landscaping."

"You know how to do that?" I asked, a bit surprised.

"Well, no," He answered. "But anything is fine to me at this point. I need to make sure we'll have enough money to keep this place."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Won't you be getting your last check from wherever it was you worked at?"

"Not at," he corrected, his eyes still glued to the screen. "But for."

For? What did he mean?

"Isn't that the same thing?"

Irritated on his dead-end search, he let out a deep breath. "I worked at the Shack. I was sort of a inventory manager. In return, I got free drinks out of it."

"So, like a bartender?"

He chuckled. "No, Zay. A bartender is a bartender. I was..." His voice trailed off, and his face wandered. I could tell he suddenly thought of something he probably figured he didn't really want to share with me, and that spooked me on the inside. "I just made sure no one stole from the Shack. Kind of like security. No gun. No earpiece. Just these." He raised his fists up to his face. "Your old man was a slugger in his younger days. Did you know that?"

"You never told me that," I said quietly. "You fought?"

He nodded cooly.

"You're lying," I followed up. "Where at?"

"Wallstern."

I raised a brow. "Is that some kind of arena?"

He gave a cheesy grin. "If you call a courtyard an arena, then yeah. Our principal didn't think so though."

I felt stupid after.
"You mean Wallstern High?" I had forgotten the school my parents had officially met at. Wallstern was deep in thought for my parents to send me to as well, but that was before we moved to Ashton Creek.

He nodded. "I was the president of a brawling club my sophomore year. It was nothing too serious. Open challenges and settled beefs took place. I held down my fair share of bloody noses and black eyes. Even knocked a few teeth out as well."

This was a different man than what I was used to. No one ever just gets a change in attitude and personality overnight. He must really be suffering on the inside.