Dismember

ELEVEN

“I guess you found it.”

Trevor heard his daddy’s voice from out by the sinks, where he’d blow-dried the shoes with the automatic hand dryer.

“Not only was it still there,” said Mommy. Trevor hadn’t heard her come in, only realized she had when she responded to Daddy. “There was a woman guarding it for me. Eating a slice of pepperoni and waiting for me to come back. She said she knew I wouldn’t get far.”

Trevor had returned to the toilet seat not because it was any cleaner than standing on the floor, but just because he was tired of standing.

“—left in the world,” his daddy finished. Trevor missed the first part.

“Yeah,” Mommy said, and then there was a crackling like someone digging through plastic bags. Trevor wondered if there were any other boys out there (besides his daddy, anyway), and what they thought of a girl in their bathroom. Sometimes his mom could be pretty silly.

Daddy brought him the clothes, along with his cleaned sneakers, and he accepted them through the cracked stall door while keeping one hand cupped over his thingy. He guessed Mommy had seen him naked just as much as Daddy, but Daddy had already seen all that Trevor planned to show today, and that was enough peeping.

Mom had gotten him a pair of brown shorts and some underwear that were plain and white and boring. He didn’t consider them a very good trade for the clothes he’d ruined, but he wouldn’t say anything. He knew they didn’t have a whole lot of extra money. Sometimes his mommy couldn’t pay the bills on time and she got charged latefees. Trevor didn’t know what latefees were exactly, but he knew they were bad and that they meant spending more money. In Trevor’s mind, latefees was almost a curse word, and he never said it out loud.

The Gohan action figure he’d gotten at the toy store had already been a good surprise, and now he’d gotten new clothes on top of it. He didn’t know for sure how much those sorts of things cost, but he did know it was something, and that something was more than nothing. He put on the new clothes with mixed feelings. While he was ashamed at what he’d done and felt more than just a little guilty about the spent money—even if he didn’t totally understand things like bug jets—he was also happy to be getting into a clean pair of shorts. Standing around half naked in a mall bathroom wasn’t exactly his idea of comfortable.

The new socks, like the undies, were simple white things without even a red stripe at the toe, but Trevor didn’t care too much. Socks were socks. They kept your shoes from getting extra stinky and the chiggers from biting your ankles in the summertime, but otherwise they were worthless.

His dad had done a pretty good job wiping the poop off the floor around the toilet, but the stall was still nowhere near clean. Trevor didn’t want to move around any more than he had to until he’d gotten his shoes on, didn’t want to get his new socks dirty whether they were worthless or not. He’d noticed a wad of yellowed toilet paper in the corner beside a spider’s web when he tried to clean himself earlier. It was still there, along with a sticky-looking puddle of goo that looked like part potty, part spit, part blood, and all gross.

He slipped into the sneakers, and although he was not yet an expert lacer, he managed to tie himself a nice pair of looping knots that he figured were far from failures. Daddy had held the shoes under the hand dryer for a long time and gotten them mostly dried out, but they still squished a little when Trevor moved. No big deal. At least he was cleaned up. Who cared if he walked around sounding like the Swamp Thing?

He turned the latch on the stall door and exited with his head hanging. When his mommy ran to him and cupped his chin, lifted his face to hers and gave him a slobbery kiss on the nose, he couldn’t help but smile. She hugged him so tight it hurt, but he didn’t push away or tell her to take it easy because it also felt good.

Only after she’d finally let go of him, looking happy but also a little wet eyed, did Trevor finger the sides of his new shorts and say, “What do you think?”

Daddy said, “Sharp.”

And Mommy said, “As a razor.”

Trevor didn’t get it, but the two of them shared a smile, which was good. There had been enough yelling between his mommy and daddy to last Trevor a lifetime. He was always glad for the smiles.

His t-shirt had a pocket on the front—a nerd pocket is what some of his friends at school would call it—but Trevor had always liked extra pockets. Batman had a whole belt full of pockets, and something neat inside each one, and nobody called him nerdy. Trevor reached into the pocket and pulled out the crumpled five-dollar bill his mom had given him earlier. The shirt pocket had been the first one Trevor found when he’d scrambled for someplace to stash the bill on his desperate dash to the bathrooms. He hadn’t forgotten about it. The five had been his money for the merry-go-round, which he’d been looking so forward to riding.

But he didn’t think his parents would still let him go on the ride, and he certainly wouldn’t ask. He smoothed the bill out the best he could and offered it to his mommy.

“What’s this?”

Trevor pushed the money closer to her, but she didn’t take it, didn’t reach for it at all.

“I shouldn’t have asked to ride the merry-go-round,” he said and waved the bill, desperate for her to take it from him. “You should use this for the new shorts you had to buy.”

Mommy’s mouth came open like she was going to say something, but at first she didn’t. Instead, she dropped to her knees and pulled him in for another long hug. “Oh, hon,” she said finally. “You don’t need to worry about that kind of stuff.” She ran a hand through his hair and gave the back of his neck a gentle squeeze. Daddy stood by and said nothing, looked down at him the same way he had when Trevor had brought home the report card with all S’s, which was the best you could get in kindergarten.

“I’m sorry I scared you.” He wrapped his arms around his mommy’s neck and kissed her hard on the cheek.

She smiled with half her mouth, the way he’d always liked, and then patted him softly on the chest. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before the bathroom police catch me.”

“Kay.”

“And then,” she said, standing, “we’re all three of us going to ride the carousel together. How’s that sound?”

Trevor nodded. He moved between his mommy and daddy and held out a hand for each of them.

“Sounds good, Mommy,” he said. And it was.