Free Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz Page B

took a picture of me and my father. My father actually smiled. Then he took me out for breakfast. A woman named Blanca met us at the restaurant. She was pretty and she had a present for me. “I’m a friend of your father’s.”
    I shook her hand. “My name’s Maximiliano,” I said. “Most people call me Max.”
    “It’s a beautiful name,” she said.
    “You can open your present,” she said.
    It was a pen. An expensive one. “Your father says you write a lot.” I wondered if he read the things I wrote in my journal. I thought about making a rule that he couldn’t go in my room either. I smiled at her and thanked her. She was nice and she liked to talk and to laugh. We had a really nice breakfast and I wondered if maybe my father would marry her and quit his business and we could maybe live a normal life. Deep down inside I knew it would never happen.
    Blanca asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I could tell my father was interested in my answer. “Well, I’d either like to be a musician or an artist.”
    She smiled at me. “Do you play an instrument?”
    “No.”
    “Do you draw?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    My father was surprised. “What do you draw?” she asked.
    “The tree in the backyard. My room. My desk. My dad’s truck.” I didn’t tell her about drawing my mother over and over again.
    “You’ve been drawing my truck?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    He never asked to see that drawing. But a year later, when I was better at drawing, I gave him a charcoal sketch of his truck for Christmas. I framed it and everything.
    “It’s good,” he said. He had a strange look on his face. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, but my father wasn’t a crier—and the look went away. Just like Blanca had gone away.
    9.
    I was a quiet and serious boy. I was even more serious and quiet when I entered high school. I made friends, but they were school friends. I didn’t want anyone coming over to my house. My dad had too many customers coming in and out at all hours of the day and night. And I guess I had a theory as to why my father had bought a house in this neighborhood. The house next door had burned down and no one had bothered to raze it to the ground. The rest of the houses were rentals and the houses weren’t kept up and half the renters around us all seemed like they were potential customers for my father’s business. It was all perfect.
    Our front yard wasn’t kept up and my father wanted to keep it that way. “I like weeds,” he said. “Nothing wrong with weeds. You want a nice lawn in this neighborhood? What’s wrong with you? You want people to notice us?”
    I hated weeds. I guess you could say I always liked everything nice and neat—even though I knew that everything was chaos. I decided to make a deal with my father. I fixed the backyard. I planted some bushes and I grew a nice lawn. It wasn’t a big yard. It had a big fence around it and no one could look in. I think my dad liked the backyard. He bought some lawn chairs and sometimes we would both sit out in the evening. I would read a book and he would read the newspaper. My dad had a thing for reading newspapers.
    About the same time I entered Cathedral High School, my father began using some of the products he sold. He began to smoke marijuana in his room. I could smell it. A lot of the times he would come out of his room and I could tell he was stoned because he whistled. He always whistled when he was stoned.
    One Friday night, I was thinking about meeting some of my school friends at a football game. I was reading a book and eating a sandwich in the kitchen. My father walked in and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. Hesort of smiled at me and patted me on the back. I liked when he did that, but that only happened about twice a year and I would have liked it better if he hadn’t been stoned. “What are you reading?”
    “A story by Hemingway,” I said.
    “Famous guy,” he said. And then he just nodded. “You