Calloustown

Unraveling

Long after I moved away, knowing nothing but bad things could occur to me — bad job followed by no job, bad marriage followed by no marriage, painful lesions followed by death — my father continued to struggle with mysterious demons and/or the Opposite of Newton’s Third Law. It need not be pointed out that my father, born Sinclair but known as “Sin” forever, owned a printing company until the remaining denizens of Calloustown discovered Kinko’s, that my mother left him for a man down in Sumter who retired from the Air Force and opened up an oyster bar, and that boils/ hives/shingles arrived simultaneously on Dad’s torso, just like I’d warned him. Sometime after I’d moved away, my father swore, he would pick up the phone to call someone only to find that person already on the other line, and then when he hung up the telephone would ring. He’d fill up premium unleaded into his tank, get a mile down the road, and run out of gas. My father put worms on his hooks and caught nothing, then, in desperation, threw in a naked bronze Eagle Claw and immediately pulled out a palm-sized bream. He’d spray his live trap with apple juice and place carrots in the tray in order to catch rabbits so he could breed the things and sell them to locals, only to have a cloud of Mexican free-tailed bats roost in the chimney. One time he had a sneezing attack, took over-the-counter medicine, went to a certified allergist, and after a thousand pinpricks the doctors concluded that my father was allergic to Benadryl. This went on and on. I had moved off to college then stayed for fifteen years. My dad closed down Sin’s Printing, my mother left, the lesions erupted, and I visited less frequently until I picked up the phone one day to call my father and he was already on the other end.

“I told you this kind of shit happens all the time to me. And listen — because I know you’re going to bring it up — if I moved away, then it would be like letting my nerves win,” he told me. “Where would I move? To Sumter, where I’d be stuck eating oysters and letting Soretta live the high life from her goddamn husband’s profit? Fuck that. I know she’s your mother and you probably love her still, but I can’t make myself hope that she does well. As a matter of fact — and I hope there’s nothing to bad karma, you know, wherein you wish bad things on a person and then bad things happen to you because of it — I kind of want her to die a miserable death. Well, no, I want her to think she’s going to die a miserable death, but really live to a hundred always on the edge of thinking it. Does that make any sense, son?”

I said, “Hello?”

“Listen. I wouldn’t be so pissed off if there was a goddamn reliable doctor in this town. Do you remember Dr. Stoudemire who used to be here? He was a great man. You know what he did when the town died? He decided to move and start up doctoring in New Ellenton, which is close to being a ghost town on the edge of the Savannah River Nuclear plant. Ellenton’s under water, in case you didn’t pay attention to South Carolina History in seventh grade.”

I hadn’t. I mean, I remembered something about slavery, and a nuclear bomb that accidentally fell through the bomb door hatch of a B-47 above Mars Bluff on March 11, 1958, and — although the uranium and plutonium core wasn’t attached — it created a mushroom cloud and hole deeper than most freshwater lakes in the area. I remembered that Senator Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat and opposed desegregation, though he fathered a biracial daughter. I remembered that a man named Senator Brooks beat up Senator Charles Sumner with a cane back before the Civil War. There was some kind of mention of a slew of astronomical events predating the end of the Pleistocene epoch hitting right around Calloustown, things called “Carolina Bays” because of the holes in the ground that, oddly, looked similar to that bomb hitting Mars Bluff. The teacher made a big point bi-daily to say something about how a man named Ruple went off to embalming college, got a job in one of the more prone-to-die-early cities, and left her in Calloustown alone.

I said, “Okay. I think we’ve gone over all of this before. Why did you almost call me but didn’t because I picked up the receiver to call you and you were already there?”

“There’s more,” my father said. “There’s so much more. A lot more.”

I looked over at my wife. She had taken up knitting and spent more time — from what I could tell — untangling knots than actually manufacturing a scarf or mitten or bootie for one of her friends who planned on having a baby in the next twenty-seven months. I said, “Do you want me to drive down there?” I should mention that as soon as my mother left, back when I was in college, my father insisted that I call him only “Sin.” I said, “Do you want me to drive down there, Sin?”

He said, “It’s gotten to the point where I go to sleep at six fifteen in the morning, and wake up at eight thirty at night. It’s all backwards. It’s not like I’m scared of dying, like that man in that famous story. It’s not like I want to stay awake all night afraid I’m going to get murdered.” He said, “I caught myself last week toweling off before I got in the shower. And then I got in the shower with my clothes on, goddamn it.”

I looked at Patricia. She said, “Are you all right?” She unknotted more yarn. It looked like a stalagmite of reddish noodles at her feet.

I shook my head. To my father I said, “Tell me what I can bring down there that you can’t get in Calloustown. I’ll stop by the store and get it, and then see you in a couple hours.”

Patricia said, “Here we go again,” set down her needles, and walked to the bedroom.

I called out to her, “Hey, don’t get mad.”

My father said, “Pussy.”

If you gave Sin laxatives, he’d become constipated. A diet of hoop cheese sends him sitting on the toilet non-stop. His eyesight has gotten better with age. His skin de-freckles when he sits out in the sun too long.

I drove down to Calloustown and got there at two o’clock in the afternoon, walked in the unlocked door, and found him sitting in his old half-stuffed chair with copies of the National Enquirer, Star, and Sun unfolded across his lap. He said, “How’d you get in?”

I said, “I thought you said you slept all day long. You aren’t asleep.” I looked at the end table to see if he had a bottle of bourbon set out, but he didn’t. He drank either water or vodka.

My father got up from the chair. He let the tabloids fall to his feet. “Thanks for coming down here, Duster. You still go by Duster, or have you shortened it rightly to ‘Dust’ by now? Like Sin. Sin and Dust, father and son. We could go into business together doing something. Like a fucking oyster house. Too bad my daddy — that would be your grand-daddy — didn’t name me Dirt.” He shook my hand, which seemed to me a little mannered and inappropriate. We’d not seen each other since National Boss Day — the only holiday he ever celebrated when I grew up, seeing as he was my boss, his own boss, the boss of everything other-mental. My father understood that he was the boss of his, say, triceps, but not of his psyche. So it had been two months. Patricia and I spent Thanksgiving with her parents, and they feigned amazement at the two trivets she’d haphazardly crocheted out of Nu-Grape bottle caps so that the sweet potato and squash casseroles wouldn’t scald the dining-room table.

I said, “The door was unlocked.”

Sin — at this point he wasn’t but sixty-three years old — looked at the door. He said, “It used to be that the door locked when I turned that little knob up and down. Now up and down means unlocked. I don’t like this one bit. I can’t keep up. Where’s Patricia? I miss seeing your wife.”

I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, just out of nosiness. Nothing seemed unusual, except that he had an inordinate amount of fast food — acquired condiments stacked neatly on the top three shelves, categorized. There was no McDonald’s, Burger King, Long John Silver’s, Arby’s, Sonic, Hardee’s, Krystal, Jack in the Box, or Taco Bell within fifty miles of my childhood home. He had some from a place called Swensons, which I knew from my travels only existed in and around the Akron, Ohio, area, some six hundred miles from Calloustown. I got a can of ginger ale out and said, “What’s with all the mayonnaise and mustard? What’s with the horsey sauce, taco sauce, three pepper sauce, and ketchup?”

I walked back in. Sin said, “You still married to Patricia?” He said, “Listen, you should read some of the articles in these newspapers I’ve been reading. There’s a shoe-hoarding man in South Dakota who owns a white slave, and it’s legal! The slave even says he likes it! His name’s Thompson, and he says he’s working to be in the Guinness Book of Records for most shoes shined in a lifetime. There’s a picture of them in here,” he said, picking up one of the papers, “and the South Dakota guy has Thompson wearing a choke collar, on a leash. America!”

I didn’t say, “Those stories are made up, Dad.” I didn’t say, “Don’t believe everything you read, Sin.” I said, “I bet the slave owner’s got something on Thompson,” because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Kind of like your mother had something on me. Is that what you’re saying?”

I shook my head. I grabbed the channel changer and turned on the TV, even though I knew intuitively that it wouldn’t work. Sure enough, the radio came on. I said, “I’m allergic to shellfish.”

“Back to the question,” Sin said. “I have figured out a way to garnish my sandwiches without having to pay for it. It saves me a fortune. See, I’ll drive to one of those places, go inside — that’s where everyone makes a mistake, going to the drive-through — and buy the cheapest thing on the menu to go. Then I walk over and absolutely overload my bag with packets of condiments. I’ve been meaning to get me a few empty jars and spend one of my nights squeezing what I have into them so it won’t take up so much space.”

I said, “The price of gas, Sin.” I said, “Why am I here again?”

My father shook his head. He reached up and pulled at a patch of gray hair that grew mischievously to the left of his crown. He walked over to the window and looked out at my car. He said, “I thought you were going to bring me some pussy. Hey, you want to go throw some tin cans at a BB pistol out in the front yard?”

I sat down on the couch. I looked up at the photographs my father had put on the wall since my last visit — all of them pictures of various birds one might find browsing a Yankee feeder: goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds, Carolina wrens. I said, “You mean take the gun out and shoot at cans, like when I was a kid?” There were also photographs of crows, hawks, blue jays, and woodpeckers, a lone osprey — birds that didn’t visit traditional feeders.

“You’re not a kid anymore, Duster,” my father said.

“Why’re these birds on the wall? Are you into birding nowadays?” I got off the couch and corrected a frame. I said, “Who took these photos? They look professional.”

My father looked at the frames on the wall as if he’d never noticed them being there. He raised his eyebrows up three times, then squinted. He said, “I was hoping you’d bring someone with you. I always kind of liked Patricia’s mother. She’s classy, you know what I mean? I mean, Patricia’s mother’s classy.”

My wife’s parents had been married for forty-plus years and from what I could tell thrived unapologetically up in Wise, Virginia. They keep a sign in their front yard that goes VIRGINIA is FOR LOVERS, like it was some kind of non-argumentative statement on par with Rain Falls Downward. I said, “I think Patricia’s mom’s out of your league, for one. And she’s unobtainable for two. Three, Patricia’s dad has never liked you, and he would kill you. He was a sniper in the old days, you know. He was a sniper in the Army, or whatever. He shot actual people. He didn’t throw things at his own gun.”

My father walked out the door without saying anything. He got in the passenger side of my car and sat there. Of course most people I would tell this story later would think, “That man is going through the first stages of dementia!” They would say, “He’s the kind of man you read about for two days under the ‘Editor’s Picks’ section of the MSN homepage!” I was used to it, though. I went out to the car, opened the driver’s side, and said, “You want to go to Worm’s Bar?”

“After,” he said. “I didn’t call you to drive all the way down here to take me to the bar. Hell, I can walk down there if I want to. Or hitch a ride. I can drive my own truck if I feel like the fucking cop is taking a nap. I can get on the riding lawn mower.”

“After what?” I said. I went ahead and got in the car and cranked it. I didn’t feel sad or indifferent or happy or excited. I’d been going through this routine for a while with Sin. I said, “Where we going?”

My father said, “I need to go see a doctor. I mean, yeah, after Worm’s, I need to see a doctor. I’m afraid with the way things are going, I might live forever. I don’t want to not die, Dust. Who wants to live forever?”

_______

The hot-water tap turned cold, and vice versa. When he tried to quit smoking and put on a nicotine patch, it made him crave cigarettes more. One time he told me that his vices began at age seventeen with heroin, which led him to cocaine, which led him to marijuana, which led him to bourbon, which led him to the occasional domestic beer. My father swore he bought my mother a parrot that never learned to talk, and rescued one of those non-barking Basenji dogs that ended up howling all the time, then running off. His mousetraps worked better without peanut butter on the little tray.

I don’t like to think of myself as a bad son, but I drove my father straight to one of those emergency care clinics out off Highway 78 instead of the bar. I had called up Patricia from the driveway, for my father said he needed to go back inside and apply layers of black bloodroot salve on his torso and limbs before hitting daylight for too long, what with the lesions and hives and shingles that arrived like bad cousins, one after the other. To my wife I said, “I don’t know why I’m here.”

She said, “Yes. That’s one of the great existential questions. Sometimes when I’m unraveling, it’s the only thought that goes through my mind.”

I told her how my father seemed listless and depressed, that he looked like he could no longer take the world, that he’d given up on fighting. “He wants to go to a bar, so I told him we could go there for a while. But in reality, I want to take him to see a dermatologist. Can you get on the Internet and Google something like ‘Dermatologist/Calloustown, South Carolina/unexplained neurological disorders/ex-wife married an oyster shucker,’ and find out if there’s any kind of medical center within a fifty-mile range?”

Patricia didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “I think it’s you who wants to go to Worm’s Place, but that’s another story.” I heard her clicking away on the keyboard, and imagined her there in our den, a cell phone cradled to her delicate neck, enough merino wool yarn surrounding her to fashion a car cover.

My wife clucked her tongue, which sounded exactly like knitting needles clacking together when she was on a roll of knit-pearl-knit-pearl maneuvers for more than a couple minutes. I said, “No, I only want to drink all day long when I’m in my hometown, Patricia,” hoping that she’d think, “Because of me, is that what you’re saying, because of me?”

She said, “There’s a veterinarian who’s still in business. Dogs get mange, and that’s more or less what your father has. Why don’t you go see the vet?” I didn’t say, “Ha ha ha.” I didn’t answer until Patricia said, “There’s one of those doc-in-the-box places, and that looks like your only choice without driving all the way to Columbia or Charleston.”

I said, “I might have to spend the night here. I brought along my gym bag, just in case.” She got on Mapquest and gave me the directions. “If you’ve gotten to some kind of golf ball driving range, then you’ve gone two hundred feet too far.”

Anyway, my father said nothing when I pulled into the parking lot, but I could tell from the look on his face that he felt betrayed. He said, “I wasn’t making a plea for help, Dust. When people make pleas for help, they take a bottle of aspirin, or cut their wrists in the wrong direction.”

I pulled right up to the front door — you’d think that an ersatz emergency room of sorts would have a handicapped parking spot or two, but this place didn’t — and turned off the ignition. I said, “I could hear it in between the lines of your voice, Dad. Plus, once we get you diagnosed for real and get proper medicine, then we can go to the bar and drink without worrying so much about the future.”

“Right-o,” my father said. “I knew there was a reason why your mother and I paid for all that education.” He reached for and extracted his wallet. “I got my Medicare card with me. You going to sit out here in the car or are you coming in?”

I said, “What do you want? Of course I’m coming in.”

“Right-o,” he said.

I looked over at a man and kid hitting golf balls at the Calloustown Practice Range next door to the emergency clinic. The sign out front of the driving range had gigantic CPR letters out front, and I wondered if people in mid-heart attack ever got confused with which parking lot to enter. I said, “Why do you keep saying ‘Right-o’? Are you watching a bunch of British sitcoms or something? Let me guess, your TV only gets British stations.”

He got out of the car and said, “To be honest, what I’d rather do to save some time is have you let me go in here — I know you have to get back home — and while I’m talking to the so-called doctor or nurse practitioner or whatever they’re calling these people nowadays, I’d appreciate it if you’d run into town and see if Tree Morse has any aloe plants for sale at his nursery. I’ve been reading up. Even if they don’t work medicinally, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have something around that needed me, water-wise.”

“That sounds like a plan,” I said. I didn’t mean it, of course. I knew my father just wanted me off the premises, that when I came back he’d be standing in front of the clinic after never checking in, and so on.

He shook my hand again for some reason and entered the building. I started my car and backed out of the parking lot, then put it in drive and returned to my spot. Then I reached beneath my seat and pulled out a squeeze tube of hand sanitizer, just in case my father’s skin supported a contagion from which I could never recover.

A snake caught and ate his cat. Back in the old days he got drunk one night, got a tattoo that read “Sin + Soretta” and it faded invisible a week later. One time he bought a recapped tire and it ended up gaining tread. I talked him into driving all the way down to Myrtle Beach to take part in a speed-dating extravaganza one time after my mom left for the retired Air Force colonel, not knowing that there was a convention of stutterers in town who’d pretty much clogged the sign-up sheet. It went on and on. Back when he actually set up appointments with Dr. Stoudemire, he was told he needed to eat more hot dogs and processed meat, seeing as his sodium levels were dangerously low.

I sat in the parking lot a good hour. I mean, I waited twenty minutes, got out of my car, opened the door to the clinic, looked inside, and saw only a receptionist behind the desk, no one else in the waiting room. I thought, “Good.” I thought, “My father’s in one of the examination rooms with a man or woman who probably half paid attention in medical school, more than likely in one of the Caribbean-nation medical schools.”

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon who went to the Medical University of South Carolina to figure out what I couldn’t: that there was a back door of sorts and my father sashayed his way straight through there without seeing a valid epidermal expert. The fucker. I waited my hour, I went inside the clinic and sat down for five or ten minutes, no one showed up with an accidental shotgun blast to their torso, and I said to the receptionist, “Are you doing a crossword puzzle, or a sudoku?” I said, “This isn’t such a bad place, out here in the middle of nowhere. Let me guess: most of the people you get in here suffer from snake bites.”

She didn’t look up. She said, “I know you. Do you remember me? Say. Say.”

I looked hard and tried to run a Rolodex of faces through my mind. I said, “Oh, Jesus, I haven’t been back to Callous-town for so long.”

She looked anywhere between forty and sixty years old. I thought, “Was she an old teacher or something?” I thought, “Have the schools gotten so incapable of offering teachers a paycheck without a furlough — what with the idiot gover-nor — that people have quit in order to be paid-by-the-hour receptionists inside virus-filled cement-blocked buildings?” I thought, “Did I take this woman to the prom, and then she had no other choice but to age mercilessly like some old dug best known to Appalachian photographs?” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m consumed with my father’s well-being.”

She tilted her head hard to the back corner of the building. “Well, your daddy seems to be consumed with not caring about his bank account.”

I looked at her hard, for I didn’t know what she meant, then looked at the door that led to the examination rooms. A woman came out of there wearing a standard white frock. She said to the receptionist, “Sometimes I wonder why we even have to show up here, Hannah.”

I looked at the doctor and said, “Hey.”

“Of course,” I thought to myself, “Hannah Hannah Hannah?” I said to the doctor, “Is it leprosy? Is it just a case of hives or shingles gone bad? Does it have something to do with fire ants, or nerves?”

Hannah said, “She ain’t seen him.” She said, “Back to what we were talking about, you asked me out one time I was in tenff grade you was in tweff and you never showed up. It wasn’t anything like the prom or nothing but it was enough to make me know I should like girls the rest of my life.”

The doctor stood there staring at me. I didn’t remember any of this at all. I said, “What?” I said, “Hannah, I’m sorry.”

The doctor said, “What are you talking about?”

I said, “My father.”

“He paid me twenty dollars to show him the back door out,” Hannah said. “Sorry.”

I said, “I don’t think I called you up for a date. Are you sure it was me? I dated one girl the whole time I was at Cal-loustown High. Her name was Vivian. You remember Vivian? And then we broke up and I went to college, and then I met a woman I ended up marrying.”

Hannah stood up. She grunted. She shook her head sideways. “I knew you’d end up no good, even back then, cheating on Vivian like you done.”

The doctor said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and retreated back into the examination rooms. I could see in her eyes, though, that she didn’t believe my story, and that she felt sorry for her receptionist.

I said, “Someone played a joke on you. Or on me! On top of that, my father’s telephone doesn’t work right anymore. Maybe it didn’t back then, either. Did you pick up the receiver and I was there already?” I looked in her face and tried to recognize anything. “Where’s my father?”

Hannah said, “Search-a-Word. I’m doing Search-a-Words.”

My father swore that his doors changed overnight from opening in to opening out. All of them. He said he’d put his hand on a Bible and tell the story about how one morning, maybe six months after my mother left for the oyster entrepreneur in Sumter, he got up to go put black oil sunflower seeds in the Yankee feeders only to pull and pull on the door knob, thinking someone had come along post-midnight to shove silver slugs between jamb and lock prankster-style. He said he tried the front door, the back door, and a side door that went off to a sunroom of sorts. Understand that this was a good decade after I’d lived in the house, so I couldn’t remember if doors went in or out in the first place. I didn’t even remember a sunroom in my house of training.

I went back outside from the clinic thinking about this — I accidentally tried to pull the door toward me, then pushed it out — and wondered where my father might have gone. I tried to think backward. Would one leave a doctor’s office and light out for the funeral home, or the maternity ward of a hospital? Would he hitchhike back home because he figured I would never think of him doing so, or toward Sumter, or to the opposite of Calloustown — which happened, in my mind, to be Asheville, North Carolina. Would he go to a wedding chapel?

“I’m over here, Freckle-dick,” I heard my father yell out. I looked at the CPR driving range and saw, still, that man and child standing there with three-woods in their hands. The man took his club and pointed down to the opposite end of the wide fairway. My father stood three hundred yards away and appeared to have a ball teed up to hit in the woods beyond the Calloustown Practice Range’s perimeter.

And he had his shirt off so that, from where I stood, he looked like a man with a thousand ticks on his back. I started walking his way. I entered the driving range’s boundaries and kept looking behind me in case the man and kid wanted to tee off in my direction, which is exactly what I would’ve done. My cell phone rang, I pulled it out of my pocket, and I noticed that Patricia was on the other end.

“Hey,” I said, breaking into a trot. My father addressed the ball. Where did he get the club? I wondered. Did the CPR hand out drivers to people who showed up clubless and unprepared? I said, “I’d be willing to bet I’ll be staying here tonight.”

“I might’ve found a dermatologist in Calloustown, or someone who’s a specialist,” Patricia said. In the background I could hear her yarn whispering down to the wooden floor of our den. “What’s a dendrologist?”

I said, “No. That has to do with trees.”

“Well they have one of those people in your hometown.”

My father reared back and swung at the ball. He hit a beautiful tee shot over the scrub pines that edged Calloustown Practice Range’s property. Behind me, a ball landed from the kid teeing off like a normal person perfecting his swing. I didn’t want to say, “It might be time to look for a psychiatrist,” so I didn’t. I said, “We got it all under control here. I’ll see you tomorrow,” and punched End.

Sin teed up another ball. As I reached him he said, “Was that Patricia? Did you tell her I said hello? I don’t want any shit from you about this. Listen, if I got my skin cleared up, then I’d end up being perfect. Can you imagine what it would be like being perfect? And then everyone around here would hate me all the time. People around here would kill a perfect person just so they wouldn’t come up so short at home daily.”

“Why’re we out here at the end of the range?” I asked him. I looked back. We were too far away to be in possible danger from anyone, unless they pulled out a modified potato gun and shot Titleists our way.

“I can’t think up there. I can’t think teeing off from where everyone else tees off. Listen to this idea, Dust. Listen to what I came up with just before you showed up: it’s a commercial for either a golf club or a golf ball. The camera shows a man at a par three hole, you know, like 150 yards from the tee box. So he pulls out his gigantic driver, and his playing partner says, ‘What’re you doing?’ and the dude turns around with his back to the green. Then he rips one and — I think they can do this now, what with all the fancy cameras and computers — it goes around the world, like a meteor, and then plops down on the green and rolls in the hole. Can you see it? The ball goes 24,901 miles, and then he gets a hole in one.”

I had to admit it seemed like a viable and worthy television commercial for a dimpled ball or oversized clubhead. I said, “Put on your shirt and let’s go to Worm’s.” I said, “Do you have any other ideas for commercials? I have a buddy in Charlotte who works at an ad agency.”

My father hit one more ball into the woods, topping this one so that it never reached knee high, then ricocheted off a pine tree and nearly came back to us. “So what did you think of Hannah?” my father said.

I handed him his shirt and tried not to make eye contact with those lesions. “She was kind of abrupt with me. Who the hell is she? I don’t remember her whatsoever.”

My father left his driver on the ground. He didn’t pick up his tee, which hadn’t moved through any of his swings. We walked on a veer toward my car. He said, “One day gas will be solid, and the Earth will be gas.” At the unlocked car my father said, “That Hannah woman used to call me up every day, thanking me for the way I brought you up. She says she wouldn’t have become the woman she is if it weren’t for you. She used another word for ‘woman.’ I forget it. Hell, she called so much your mother got to thinking that we were having an affair. I kept telling her — your mother — that everything was backwards.”

I drove to the bar, but I didn’t pay attention to Sin’s constant monologue. I thought, how many times have I unwittingly caused someone to choose a path in life? I thought, I wonder if there’s a woman out there that I should’ve married — one who never had to unravel yarn, or who never attempted to manufacture mittens in the first place. And then I got stuck thinking, what if my mother met the retired Air Force colonel before he retired, and he became my father? What would I be doing now? Would I be working in the restaurant, shucking oysters for the hungry masses? Would I be delivering shells to people who wanted crushed driveways? Would I encounter some kind of shellfish allergy and break out in hives?

Sin said, “I kind of miss her.” I didn’t ask him if he meant my mother, my wife, or the woman at the clinic. I even thought that, perhaps, by “her” he meant “him.”

We got in the car and Sin picked up my cell phone from the console. I got on the two-lane to drive into Calloustown proper. He pressed the receiver icon as if to make a call, then said, “I knew it would be you.” Was Patricia on the other end? Did that Hannah woman somehow retrieve my number, maybe through my father having written it down under Emergency Contact during another visit to the clinic?

Sin listened — or feigned listening to a made-up caller — and I thought about all the things that hadn’t turned backward in his life: The trees in his yard didn’t lose leaves in May, for example. His plates didn’t come out of the dishwasher dirty. His clothes didn’t appear to become dirtier straight out of the washing machine.

I pulled into a parking space in front of the bar. My father said over the phone, “An oyster-shucking knife isn’t sharp, but it can still cause harm. I met a hand doctor one time who invested in oyster-shucking knives.”

I turned off the ignition and said, “That’s not Mom.”

Sin said, “Hello?”