Free One in Every Crowd by Ivan E. Coyote

welding rods, one-inch square tubing, and two-inch fine thread bolts, talking the whole time. It was just like when I was a kid, the only difference being that my dad now would allow the proud-biceped kid who worked in the warehouse load the really heavy stuff into the back of his pick-up. “Better his spine than mine,” he whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth by way of explanation. His hair was a streak of silver, so startling, I could never lose him in the aisles. He seemed shorter, somehow, than I remembered him.
    He lit a smoke when we got back into the truck, letting it dangle from one corner of his bottom lip as he backed the truck up with one hand, his right arm draped over the back of the seat between us. He has always been able to do almost anything with a cigarette in his mouth like this. Somehow, the smoke never gets in his eyes. “You know what?” he asks, eyes on the road. “I used to drive downtown, just like this … before.”
    “Before” is the term my dad uses. He will not say “when I was drinking.” He does not use the word alcoholic. Everything is just before, or after. You have to just let him talk. He won’t answer direct questions. I don’t push him, I’m just so glad it’s after now.
    He continued, because I said nothing. “I used to drive around, and everything seemed like it was broken, or abandoned, or it needed a paint job. Nobody smiled. I really felt like it was hell right here on earth, some days.” He cleared his throat. “But now, I come down here, like today with you, and all I see is new construction, heavy equipment, girls in tight shirts … and a lot of chrome.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, to register my comprehension. “You know, all the things I like.”
    After I got back, I was afraid to phone him all summer, afraid to hear that his voice had slowed and dropped, afraid he would let the phone ring and ring and I would know. Scared that things had changed, or worse, that they had gone back to being how I thought they always would be.
    I called him last week; I had to finally, to see what he wanted for Christmas. He sounded fine, but the stone in my stomach didn’t dissolve until I heard him laugh. He didn’t laugh that much, before.
    “Don’t get me anything. I’m good. Don’t you worry about me. Or, how ’bout you get me something we both know I’ll like. How ’bout you get me a carton of smokes?”

Thicker than Water
    EVERYBODY ALWAYS SAYS I LOOK JUST LIKE HIM. Every once in a while, my grandmother hauls out the second oldest photo album from her closet and opens it on the kitchen table, next to the cut crystal bowl of sugar cubes and the matching cup that holds the little silver teaspoons. She slides the teapot aside to make room and squints over her bifocals. If I have brought a friend with me, this is the part where she makes them try to pick out which face in the faded black-and-white photos belongs to my father. My dad has three brothers. They are wearing matching plaid shirts, or bathing suits, or cub scout uniforms, or hand-me-down pajamas and holsters for their cap guns. In the background there is a Christmas tree, or a lopsided front porch, or a wall tent, or a brass statue of a war hero from the summer the old man took them to Winnipeg to see the army base and learn some respect for the soldiers who fought and died so the rest of us could sit around in our underwear and read comic books and not eat the peas or the broccoli he worked all day to pay good money for. It is always easy to find my dad’s face in the photographs. I look just like him, but without the ears. My grandmother named him Don, after his father, she tells my friend. This is the part where if it is raining or her knees are bad she will confess that she never really loved the old bastard, that he was never half the man his sons turned out to be.
    More and more, I find little bits of my father in me. Not just around the eyes or in the shape of my jaw,