Free The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli Page A

duct-tape. I knew
it was too much; I knew my dorm room would strain to contain it all, and I had
no intention of bringing most of it wi th me . It’s just that once I started packing I couldn’t stop. Everything I
packed and stacked seemed like the counter-weight I needed to lever myself into
a new life . The final
weight was under the bed, a sheet of lined paper covered in ink that weighed
ten million pounds. Reading the words to my parents tomorrow would be another billion.
But I couldn’t really start fresh until they knew,
until I knew I was strong enough to tell them.
    “I was
thinking,” my father said, rubbing his finger along the dusty part of a
now- empty bookshelf, “that we
could do a little fishing this afternoon. Since tomorrow you’re heading off.
Just the two of us.”
    “I guess?” I
said. I reached to align a Tupperware crate a little straighter atop its bottom
neighbor. “I kind of have a lot to do still, though.”
    He frowned,
just slightly, and wiped his dusty hand on his pants. “It’s an invitation you can’t refuse, Oliver. Put
on some shoes. Then help me with the boat.”
    I watched him
leave the room, and when he was gone I knelt and pulled my speech out from
under the bed. The time for hiding it seemed past, the time for delivering it
not quite here, so I folded the pages into a square and put them in my pocket.

 
    My dad’s
back was shit, and when he said Help me
with the boat , what he really meant was Put
the boat in the pickup while I stand around holding the end . When I was
younger, smaller, it meant powerlifting the front end of the flat-bottomed rowboat up to the edge
of the pickup truck’s bed, jiggering it enough so my dad could push it forward and in. But after spending
all of senior year on the weight bench in our basement, I hopped up into the
bed, reached down and heaved the boat up with one hand, easy. At the other end
my dad tripped forward as I pulled the boat away from him faster than he was
expecting. Inside of it poles and tackle-box rattled against its green plastic floor. I spread an
oil-stained blanket across the end so it wouldn’t scratch up the cab. Then I
put a hand on the side of the truck, swung my legs over, and landed smooth in
the gravel of our driveway.
    “Well look at
you,” my dad said, putting in the oars. I cam e around and lifted his end
of the boat with one hand so he could close the tailgate underneath it. I could tell he wasn’t sure if I was showing off or was just enjoying
being strong.

 
    We rode to
the lake mostly without talking; the radio played at a volume that
excused our silence and the
fishing equipment clattered in the boat behind us. I was busy thinking about
the speech in my pocket and was eager to get home and re-write it again. That morning when I was
cleaning out my closet I had found the handwritten name-tag of a boy I’d been obsessed with in middle
school, plucked from the trash and s aved all these years as a secret keepsake. I ’d decided I needed to include him in my speech. It felt important
to me that my parents know how far back this went, that this was not recent,
that I had carried this.
    “Your mother’s
going to be a basketcase starting tomorrow, you know,” my dad said with a laugh
as we turned into the lake parking lot. The tires crunched across the sand. “We
should’ve had another kid to replace you.” He paused. “She’s going to want a
puppy.”
    “I’ll only be
like an hour away,” I said. UMass was not far from Lee.
    “Distance is
different for mothers, though,” he replied. “It’s like dog years. There are
mother miles.” He smirked; he liked this. “Mother miles,” he said again,
pleased, and he turned off the truck.

 
    Together w e
carried the boat down the concrete slip and set it on the still, honey-colored
water. When I was stepping aboard he snapped his fingers and said, “Oars! We c an’t go far without oars.”
    Holding the
boat in place with my foot, I turned and