Hundreds

     I. 

     Dad knocks the car ceiling and mutters a number under his breath. Eighty-seven. A glow of red flesh plumes on his knuckles. Mom once asked him over barbecue ribs if he was counting until he reached some eccentric number. She said this in a joking way, though. In a way that could only be detected if you noticed the way she studied his face to see if he would laugh. He replied with a “no” or maybe a “why would you think I’m that kind of person.” I don’t remember. 

     In a way, I believe Mom’s conspiracy. Each day, he gets closer to one hundred. I smear my palm on the window because it’s feeling too much like the screen of a sitcom today. Like watching contentment and completeness, watching one-hundred when I’m so far from it. 

     We pass Eddie’s Chicken and Waffles and a couple laughs, the woman’s hair warped by the grease I left on the glass. We speed by the Jackson Street parking lot, past Alex Tucker, who despite the ugly Maine hoodie he was wearing today, is a hot lifeguard in the summer (the group chat debates this often). The bus stop shelter is scratched, either by the yorkie the Hendersons own or the bulldog the Gallaghers practically raised on Facebook. In each picture their daughter Miley has her arms around the dog’s drooping face and smiles big enough for the two of them. 

     I scrub the window again as a halfhearted attempt to erase the marks I made, but instead I distort it. 

     II. 

     Before I was born, Mom and Dad played a game. When the sky was gray, they each guessed what time it was going to rain. If one of them got it correct to the minute, they both went home. I found this out by reading a note someone had written in their wedding album: 

     I genuinely don’t think anyone could forecast rain as accurately as you two.

     The note was scrawled in red ink around a picture of my parents wearing rain ponchos with a background of glossy hills. The picture was worn around certain folds. 

     When I was ten, I read through the entire wedding album while sitting in my parents’ closet until Mom walked in. I don’t know why I felt the need to shut the book so quickly when I saw her. Maybe I was protecting her from her own memories I thought she had forgotten. 

     She came over and combed through my hair with her fingers, her touch like pins and needles. 

     “Your dad used to be very handsome,” she nodded at the album, still guiltily in my hands. 

     I smiled. “Yeah, especially in this one,” I flipped to the page about rain. Both her and Dad’s smiles were like waxing moons. His hair was oil-slicked. 

     “We used to play a game,” she squinted to read the red-inked note. “We went home too easily.” 

     I looked up at her. Her hair was pulled back, not damp at all. I couldn’t imagine her in a rain poncho. 

*** 

     When I was twelve, Mom and Dad separated. Mom and I went grocery shopping the weekend after, but all I wanted was to stare at the shelves of carrots, trying to make a pattern of their bruises. As I recalled a Martha Stewart article I cut up for a collage once, I wondered if magazine catalogs airbrush carrots too. I hoped that, if I was an advertisement, the slashes in my family tree wouldn’t show up as scars on my face. 

     I felt a deep embarrassment translate to an itchiness as we walked to the register. Mom handed the cashier a 100 dollar bill and got back two twenties. I think I could have screamed at her right then—it was this split-second where she felt the least like a mother, and I felt like I had no one. 

     III. 

     We pull over at Polly’s Sweets, an ice cream parlor I know the layout of in past, present, future tense. It’s raining. The street lights drip into my vision and make me hesitant to open the door. 

     “Can you believe it’s our last time here?” I look over to the driver’s seat at Dad. He’s still around eight inches taller than me, so I don’t ever feel any older. 

     “I can’t wait to forget about Polly’s terrible customer service,” he squints at the fluorescent lights of the store, generous enough to spill onto the pavement. Technicolor. “Are you excited for Minnesota?” 

     “I don’t know. I’ve memorized everything here. Like the back of my hand.” My eyes drift to the fingerprints still pooled on my window. 

     “Come on, you don’t know anything about the back of your hand. College will be different for you, for sure. Culture shock. I’ll probably have culture shock in Florida too, even though I’ve been many times.” This speech comes out of him in bullet points, practiced in beads but never before strung together. He waits for me to look away before adding, “You can always visit your mom here.” 

     I look at families huddled inside Polly’s, sharing one large sundae. I wonder if that was us ten years ago, or maybe me ten years from now. I think about Jackson Street and the Gallaghers’ dog, about the 7-Eleven near Swanley Park that smells like grass stains, about the stone church that only hands out KitKats on Halloween. 

     “Are you sure you want ice cream? Do you want to just go home?” Dad asks over the rain, its bullets pelting our car hood. It hits the windows like a taunt. 

     “I don’t want to go home so easily,” I look at him, red light smearing his face. His mouth sits in a stencil of shadows, but I see him smile. I imagine he mutters something. I imagine it’s one-hundred.