Free A Simple Distance by K. E. Silva Page A

throw me against the refrigerator for flipping him the bird, the one who would save her, or so she thought, from laying upstairs indefinitely. Near as I could tell, when my mom wasn’t at work, selling men’s clothes to our middle-class neighbors, on her feet for eight, nine, ten hours a day, she was at home in bed—hadn’t taken notice of me in years.
    Harold took my mother from Illinois to California; he took the money she made from the sale of our Victorian, peeling paint and exposed wood, its weathered façade so close to the Wright houses the new owners didn’t care they’d have to repaint, the fairness of their skin alone restoring property values more than any coat of red or white.
    They’d met in the men’s department at Marshall Field’s.
    She’d sold him a gray wool suit just before closing and he’d seen her in the parking lot, offered her a ride home in his ultra-compact Honda Civic.
    Six months later, she sold our house and Harold drove us across the country.
    Harold was white, like my father. But unlike my father, he was American, which made all the difference. Harold had served in the Pacific during World War II—he was that old—my mother’s brown skin reminding him, perhaps, of a time when it was acceptable to take open advantage of someone like her.
    I would like to think my mother loved me more than she did Harold. But the truth is, I don’t know. It took Harold to get her out of bed. Not me. I used to sit at the top of the stairs, just in front of her closed door, listening for signs of life until it was time to fix myself dinner or put myself to sleep.
    It took Harold to move us from Illinois to California. Redwood City. Mira Vista at Alta Mont.
    I used to hear them in the master bedroom, creaky bed springs, slapping skin, rhythmic cries of relief from my mother’s lips as if he was pumping the life back into her that my father, years ago, and I, daily, drained out.
    My mom put all the money from the sale of our house into Harold’s, helping him lower the monthly mortgage payments by nearly a thousand dollars.
    Of all the places Harold took my mom, and all the things he took from her, mostly he took her for granted. The only thing they ever did together was have sex and eat dinner: cubed steak, potatoes, and frozen vegetables in the middle of California.
    After dinner he’d sneak into the garage, through the door that led down from the kitchen, where he hoarded day-old baked goods in greasy brown paper bags on top of a loose two-by-four in the ceiling; each night he’d eat stale jelly doughnuts by himself.
    Those other things they did—creaky bed springs, breathy cries at night—I mostly heard from the other side of the wall. But through the keyhole I could see the little lump of them, single and pulsating: up and down, up and down.
    Maybe I’m more like Uncle Martin than I’d like to admit, because my body responded. Breathy and imminent. Wet and taut. Maybe if I’d had a little banana between my legs, it would have been standing, straight to, right then, like his did watching Susan and me. Maybe sex just shames us; makes us angry at everyone involved.
    The way Harold was made it easy for me to hate him: old, closed, and inflexible. It was easier than I could have imagined, sneaking into the garage, stealing his day-olds, feeding them to the squirrels underneath the persimmon tree in the backyard, leaving the greasy bags empty and balled up on the counter by the sliding-glass door so he’d be sure to see.
    It was much easier than blocking out my mom. I remember clearly, deciding that night not to see her over there, in the doorframe leading to the hallway that separated our two rooms, right and left, as Harold’s face, red with anger, moved into position between me and the ceiling, blocking out the light from the round florescent fixture that buzzed and buzzed and buzzed throughout our silent dinners, like a thousand dying mosquitoes, one by one flying into an electric zapper at