Free The Best American Short Stories 2015 by T.C. Boyle

music.
    Then, limping toward the door, his voice slurred with whiskey, victorious in its cruelty, the last thing he ever said to me: We could see all the way to Bermuda.
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    Over twenty years later, walking early one morning into the private country club where I tended bar: the lock on the bar’s refrigerator busted, two empty bottles of Burgundy in the trash, the maître d’s tie slung over the bar’s mirror. As if all he had wanted was to finally catch himself in the act.
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    You dream of waking in the night, or half-waking, or less, but there is something there. You cannot see anything except your desk, your homework from the night before lit up a little by the streetlight outside. Your pencil. Your baseball cap. Then, more faintly, the television to the left, resting on a small bookshelf. A poster of Larry Bird above it, his green Converse almost black. Out the window the streetlight is hidden, but its light sifts through at an angle, and on the right side of your room, right in front of your bed, is a darkness. And it moves, like a muscle, like a heartbeat, before you wake up.
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    Another story: this one true. A married couple wanders the streets of the city for years. Everyone has grown used to their presence. They never ask for money. They sleep together, spooning, in a house made of cardboard and blankets. Their faces are ruddy and without expression, and when not asleep they are always in motion, always searching through garbage for survival.
    The first time you see them you do not know any of this. You are with your father, holding his hand, and you are walking just to walk, a stroll through downtown on a Sunday afternoon. He is humming a song, maybe about rain but it is sunny, and he hums so loudly you can feel it in the palm of your hand. He begins to swing your hand with his, slightly, as if in a wind. Then you see them, ahead. The man is digging through a mesh trashcan on a corner, his arm buried to the shoulder, and he is looking at you. The woman stands beside him, looking inside one of many shopping bags hung from her shoulders. The man does not take his eyes off you and you cannot look away. Your father stops. He looks at you. He kneels. Son, he says, it is rude to stare. Some people have very hard lives, and it is hard to understand for many of us why they live this way. But they are human beings, and Jehovah made them the same way he made you, me, your mother, your sister. I want you to say you are sorry. I am right here. Go say you are sorry to that man and woman, and I will be right here waiting for you.
    But you can’t. You begin to cry. Your father says it is OK. To just wait here.
    You watch him as he walks, in his long, slow strides, in a suit and tie, toward the man and woman. He is wearing a new hat, and you remember that was the reason you came downtown, so your father could buy a new hat. He stops just a couple steps from the man and woman and they look at him. The man’s arm remains in the trash but is now still. After a few seconds, the man looks at your father’s hand, which is held out to him. The man looks at the woman briefly, then he takes something from your father, looks at it, then puts it into his pocket. He goes back to rifling through the trash and the woman begins to yell at your father. She begins to scream, her face turning even redder, you cannot hear or understand what she is saying but you know she hates your father, hates you, hates many, many people. You want to help your father, the man who has only recently come back into your life, clean-shaven and speaking of God, you want to run toward him and defend him, protect him, but now he is holding out his hand to the man again, he has taken off his hat and is holding it out toward the man. The woman is now silent. The man takes the hat, a brand-new fedora with a feather, and puts it on his head. And looks at you, as if for the first time.

KEVIN CANTY
Happy Endings
    FROM
New Ohio