Comfort, America

Robbie’s cell phone rings at work. The call is about his…son, Tove.

He blinks and realizes he has been sitting very still in a block of early afternoon sun, as if his body knew the call would come today. The dreaded call, the call that keeps him awake weeknights and weekends alike. The architect’s modified drawings for the Dunning house project sit on his desk on top of other scattered documents. The styrofoam cup of coffee from the early morning is cold. He barely took two sips.

The jingle of his cell phone is distinct. He knows before he digs it from his pocket that it is not his second work phone. After the first two rings, he sits in the stretch of the inevitable future.

Tove is five weeks into his kindergarten semester. Since the first day, Robbie has monitored Tove’s drawings to make sure they don’t feature a green monster devouring his elementary peers.

Nobody has a child like Tove, so there are no books on the matter. Robbie checked.

Robbie’s gut turns to cold, blunt stone as he takes the cell phone out of his pocket. It vibrates in his palm as the Caller ID burns into his eyeballs.

Asa Bartholomew Elementary. His dry tongue clicks off the roof of his mouth.

“Hello?”

“Hello, may I please speak with Mr. Marquez?”

“This is he.”

“Hi Mr. Marquez, this May Perido, Bartholomew Elementary’s school counselor. I’m calling about your…son, Tove.”

Suddenly, the door of his trailer shudders from someone’s pounding.

The gavel of Robbie’s heart rattles the plate of his chest bone, drowns out all else. His eyes flicker to the the silver doorknob and watches it quiver with impact.

May the school counselor continues, oblivious, “He’s okay, he’s fine. There’s just been an incident, and we would really like you to come in and sit down with us to talk through some things.”

The knocks on the door are far enough away that he can hear her crystal clear, but her words swirl around his head. The best he manages is to capture the abstract gist.

In the pause between knocks, he replies, “Sure, I can come by.”

She speaks right into the knocks this time. “That would be great, because you see, he was very distraught and I just think that you as his support system would be very…” He loses the trail of her voice, eyes fixed to the door that grows near and the bear behind it.

“I’ll come right away,” he says, his own voice strange in his ears.

The minute he stands up and tucks his phone away, the trailer door swings open. Cal pokes inside, hands on his hips in his brown boots and blue jeans. Yellow hard hat.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he says. “Heard you’ve been cooped up in here all day. Nice to see your pretty face.”

“Cal, listen, I’m sorry,” Robbie replies as he hooks his coat onto his shoulder and comes out from behind the desk. “I have to go pick up my son from school.”

“Everything okay, man?”

“Yeah, yeah—”

“Well listen, um,” Cal puts his chin in his hand and scans the mud-stamped carpet. “Just…come see me when you’re back.” Cal rolls his bottom lip under his teeth and nods, satisfied with the phrase.

Robbie arcs around the project manager to get to the door. “I’ll be back soon,” he says. “I promise.”

He knows what Cal wants to talk to him about, he has seen the conversation coming, is surprised it took this long for Cal to work up the courage. They granted him twelve weeks of leave when his son was born, but he has not truly returned, not in the promised Marquez Way. A year into resurrecting his late father’s general contractor legacy, an ache in the subterranean of his heart warns him that the peak of the business is already behind him.

He avoids the skeleton of the new house, takes the long way around among the shrill shriek of drills and hammers. The project is two months behind because of the storm, but the rough frame will be complete by tomorrow at the latest. The laborers’ eyes follow him to the truck.

He curses as the keys fumble and clatter under the passenger seat. A hot ring wraps around the perimeter of his hairline and flushes his face as he bends over the console. The wheels shriek as the truck lurches out of the gravel lot.

Coward, they must think, he thinks.

At a stop light, he scrambles for a CD of The Four Preps, because Tove seems to like their sound. He makes a call to the Belland residence, soothed by the idea of finding his grip on the situation. Then he wants to kick himself because of how stupid it is to expect anyone to pick up at this hour: Sam is at school and Veronica is asleep, she works nights. It isn’t her fault, but why does she have to work nights only? What kind of sustainable parental lifestyle is that? Of course, she’s a single mom.

So what, I’m is a single dad!

He leaves a voicemail.

“Hey, this is Robbie. No rush or anything, but could Sam possibly watch…uh, nevermind. Sorry.”

Stupid! He thinks. Why would Sam watch Tove on a school night? Besides, Robbie isn’t even going back to work most likely, so what is the point?

I suppose I just want him here, another voice within Robbie says. He shakes his head at such a notion. A fifteen year old shouldn’t make a father feel at ease about his own…child. What would Priyanka say? She wouldn’t call him a terrible father, but part of her would think so at least. No,

he knows that is not true—how can he even think it? But it is true.

Robbie rubs the side of his face miserably. He rolls through stop signs, and the only time he lets up on the gas is when a police car rolls by in the opposite lane.

Asa Bartholomew Elementary is 8 total rooms, not including the front office: 5 for the grades, one small, windowless library, and a cafeteria. Recently, the recreational center across the street reinstalled a gym with new, hardwood floors, which used to be wall-to-wall rubber. It looks just like his old elementary school because it is his old elementary school: Robbie grew in Comfort and brought his family here when they were ready to settle, which was as soon as Priyanka found out she was pregnant. He had great memories at Bartholomew, but those memories had since become plagued by the overshadowing fears of his middle adulthood. He parks in the visitor section, a 2-hour limit that isn’t enforced.

On his way up the steps to the line of glass doors at the front, the sharp half of the keys cut into the flesh of his hand, and his knuckles blanch. The smell of wood chips from the old playground out back and coffee from the front office wafts around him. His guts bubble with familiar apprehension, and he suddenly has a thought that never before occurred until now: Why did I bring my family back here?

Tove was born in the dark of Hurricane Howard. The birth was 6 weeks premature, and there had been many complications along the way, not least of all her whiplash states of euphoria and depression and spontaneous obsession with plants. Labor started the first night of the storm, the hardest night.

Winds scraped past at 75 miles per hour, a body of hot black clouds like the lid of a box closed over them to suffocate any light. The wail of the wind was deafening. Houses quaked from their foundations, the bells of glass fixtures, framed pictures, and fine China rung together. Rocking chairs on porches clattered to the boards. The overhead lights strobed in the Goody’s grocery store, and the blue-haired cashier looked up her flat forehead, pierced lips parted. The conveyor belts halted. Streets went dark that night.

They threw him out in the break of the second morning. She began to hemorrhage and they would not let him get close to her, the doctor holding up her blue gloved hand drenched in his wife’s blood. He lost control of his body. He did not know this man who swung his limbs and kicked at them like they were cattle. They dragged him out. One nurse’s hand tore at his chest as if to lift him by the hairs, and in that burst of pain, he saw the blink of black and silver scales behind his wife’s wet arched leg.

He begged them to let him stay in the lobby at least, got on his knees. They vowed to call security to watch over him, and he emphatically agreed. He looked around, hoped he would not see any other patrons on the floor, but he was alone. He paced back into a chair and stewed in the agony of listening.

A big hickory by the old gremlin in the trailer park was split in half. Parts of the town flooded so bad their cars floated a few yards down the street.

That night, sat sweating in the lobby, leaned forward on his elbows with his eyes peeled to the tile. His knee shook his limp right wrist to try and distract him from the screams of his wife. The hospital’s backup generator whisked the night on. Some floors had turned off their lights to save power for the heavy surgery and maternal ward and, of course, the morgue. A couple of electric lines caught fire on a deserted block, but their blue flames blew out quick by the grace of whatever creature watched over Comfort.

Priyanka’s screams stopped.