Free Martin and John by Dale Peck

I could’ve just let it drip down the drain, but without measuring things how can you say what you’ve lost?
    The faucet stopped dripping after my father fixed it. But it doesn’t get hot water now. I don’t think that has anything to do with the faucet, more with something deeper, inside our house. But my father doesn’t know this—he needs me to tell him. And me? I need him to fix it. I already know I can’t do it alone.

Transformations
    Something flickered in the darkness. The light, a tiny, handheld candle, wavered for a moment, then danced about like a firefly. Its illumination was too ephemeral to really be called light: it was a pallor, a skin-tone glow of marble whiteness. The sheets on the bed were white as well, crisp underneath with hospital corners and turned back on top at the perfect forty-five-degree angle. We drew in a breath, and then, with a sigh less an exhalation than a movement, slipped into the sheets, the down of our bodies ruffled by their cotton coolness. The faint smell of bleach raised the hair on the napes of our necks. With blind hands and animal instinct we made love, the candle glowing white somewhere behind us, the sheets yellowing with sweat like soft butter around our thighs, a blue night just visible at the edge of the curtain. We moved quickly, slowly, not at all; there might have been some blood, blotting rose petals on the sheet, but no pain. Then, sleeping, it was over; the sun rose behind our eyelids and washed outthe room, and everything in it became translucent. Looking in, anyone could have seen us and felt our bodies pressed together under the blanket and known what we had done; my face on his chest, our breathing synchronous, rose and fell like a wine cork on the waves.
    IT SHOULD HAVE been like that: lights, camera, action, everything. Heavy on the filters, a little fog drifting in from under the bed. But I lost my virginity to my stepfather on my mother’s double bed during the afternoon’s heat while she was at work. Salty water rolled off our bodies and the bed creaked under our weight like old bones; it was far too hot to climb between the sheets. He wouldn’t look at me while we did it, and he was quick about his business. Afterward, we sat in bed and he held me, staring blankly at the door and occasionally running his fingers through my hair as he’d done for the past two months, ever since he’d started sleeping with my mother. They weren’t married at the time we had sex, not even engaged, and I was pretty sure he was the first man since my father’s death a year and a half before. He’d had cancer. Liver, spleen, stomach, intestine. Just about all his guts rotted away.
    My mother had come home from the hospital the day he died—he’d been in six months—and I knew what had happened because she was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and drinking a rum-and-Coke when I came home from school.The knob on the front door nearly came off in my hand as I entered the trailer; it had broken more than a week before. My mother didn’t really greet me when I walked through the door, just called out, “Come on in here.” Her words weren’t slurred, but they came out in two uneven bursts. I walked in the kitchen and sat down at the table. A package of Kents lay on the table, a few of the cigarettes scattered about like the crooked spokes of a bicycle tire, and two open bottles—a plastic one, half filled with Coke, and a glass one, nearly emptied of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum—were on the table next to her. She’d pushed the placemat away, and the formica tabletop was scarred with scattered water rings near where she sat, as if she’d been not just drinking but moving the glass around for hours. She didn’t say anything so I unpacked my lunch box, pulling out the empty sandwich bag, apple core, and half a Twinkie, and set them all on the table. My thermos sloshed when I lifted it, and I remembered that I hadn’t drunk it all at lunch that day. I unscrewed