OCR Text |
Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 11 Listen, everything made sense to me after Dad told me that, and how he said it, so scared and bitter, and truly asking if he was a bad father, like I could answer for him, like I was the one who would decide if his life had been worth it, and I filled in the missing variables. I'm telling you the world aligned for me that day, through the opaque lens of my youth, the whole history of the universe made crystal sense: Dad never did a single thing he ever wanted. He didn't want to be a father. He did it because he had to, and he wanted to save Brandon from that. It was a shotgun wedding of the first order. The pink lines on Sheila's pregnancy test weren't a week old when the invitations went out, most of them by telephone. The date was now three weeks away. "A May wedding," Mom lilted. "How exciting for both of them." Dad said everything would be fine as long as Kyle could keep his piece in his pocket. I agreed. With graduation fast coming the only homework I bothered to do anymore was my art portfolio. I had two more canvases I wanted to add to it before school ended. They were gritty kitsch scenes of Brandon swinging a baseball bat. The angle of perspective in my favorite was so you couldn't tell if he was swinging at a ball or the catcher's head. My excitement increased every time I picked them up, and I found myself sketching Brandon with greater frequency. Both paintings had slight problems of proportion I wanted to perfect on a sketch pad before messing with the canvases. I never really cared for baseball, but I understood Brandon better when I saw him absorbed in the game, playing or watching, the effect was the same. He loved a little boy's game the way I loved painting. The smells of mulched grass and chalk dust were his turpentine and |