Free A Paper Son by Jason Buchholz

to climb, up and to the west.
    My sister Lucy and I had not been raised like this, the children of mountaintop pot farmers. We grew up closer to the bay, just off 101, in a small house with empty walls and hardwood floors and a yard made of gravel and weeds. For the first ten years of my life I remember little but my father’s battles with cancer. It was an endless series of remissions and resurgences, treatments and medications, clinics and operations and specialists. He had been a software engineer, part of that first wave of scientists and visionaries who helped lay the foundation for home computing and the emergence of Silicon Valley. We had a spare room completely given over to a mainframe the size of a refrigerator. Our dad spent all his time there, sometimes staying up for two and three nights in a row, sweating, gazing through the monitor into the capabilities and future of his machines. My mom tried to get him to take walks, to get fresh air, to eat healthy foods. She made appointments for him with acupuncturists and herbalists. He ignored all her efforts.
    â€œThis is a fight,” she would say to him, carrying away a plate of uneaten broccoli. “You need to think like a fighter.”
    â€œIt’s not a fight, Pam,” he’d say, rising from the table to return to his work. “It’s a race.” It wasn’t until later that I understood what he meant.
    Our mom worked the community college circuit, teaching biology, botany, natural history, and any other subject in which she could pose as an expert for long enough to get past a hiring committee. She never complained, but I don’t think she liked it much. Her schedule changed every semester. We never knew when to expect her. At home her usual spot was the dining room table, with her books and papers spread around her.
    Lucy and I constructed our childhood at the feet of these two monoliths, drawing on the backs of the endless strips of serrated paper the computer’s printer spit out, or reading beneath the table as our mom worked, listening to the scratches of her pen above us. There was no television, no stereo in the house. “Other families stare at TVs,” she would say. “We converse.” And then she’d tell us not to talk to her because she had papers to correct. The walls were bare but for a few yellowing drawings that Lucy or I had done, tacked beside doorways. We rarely used the yard, and when we did, we didn’t know what to do. There were no balls, no shovels. We collected pebbles and threw them at the fence.
    Our dad died, at home and sleeping, when I was ten and Lucy was almost fourteen. It was a bright clear day, and though it was January it wasn’t cold. Mom came into our rooms that morning—first Lucy’s, then mine. “Your father died last night,” she said, giving me a short but tight hug, “so come and say goodbye to him.”
    I wondered if he’d won his race. At the funeral I asked my mom, but she said she didn’t know. A few days later two of the men he worked with came to us and said that they had made a deal with our father—upon his death, everything in his office was to be sold to them for five hundred thousand dollars, payable right then. One of the men opened his briefcase and wrote my mom a check. She thanked him. The man said that it was they who should be thanking her. The company owed its life to our dad, he said. He looked over to where Lucy and I were watching, half-hidden in a doorway. He had kids, too, he said, and our dad’s work fed and clothed them, too. He said he was sorry. They went into Dad’s office and boxed up all his things. A team of men came in a van and took the mainframe away on a metal dolly. The man who’d written the check went on to explain that in addition to the money, my mom now owned twenty percent of the company, and that we’d receive payments every quarter based on the company’s income. The