Excerpt Time!
Jerry usually pretended to read the newspaper in the mornings to avoid talking to his daughter, but he usually just looked at the pictures. He didn’t hate her. Sometimes he would even smile when he thought about her jerky dancing as she tried to find a rhythm to the endless guitar solo that is “Jessica.” But they didn’t talk much and both of them liked it that way. Melissa liked how, when they were driving around town, Jerry would point at a building with his thumb and say, “I delivered there.” They still have conversations, just not with their mouth, the types of conversations only close family can have: Melissa would do the dishes because she could tell by the way Jerry was sitting that his back hurt and Jerry would keep rented DVD’s past their due date because he knew Melissa would want to re-watch them. But actual words rarely passed between the two of them.
Melissa was twelve and in sixth grade at Northside Middle School when Jerry, fifty-two, ex-Marine, ex-husband, ex-trucker and unemployed due to workplace injury, happened to look up from a front page photo of a man in a lime green polo, who was holding two tiny dogs wearing fringed, tye-dye vests, topped with the headline: MACON’S WOOFSTOCK IS A BARKING GOOD TIME. He watched Melissa slide her slightly overweight by national standards, but normal by Warner Robins standards body into the chair without pulling it out. Jerry broke his stare by glancing back at the picture of the man with the dogs. Jerry felt uncomfortable looking at his child for more than five seconds at a time like he was scared his eyes would stab her. He looked back at Melissa because he noticed how a certain area, around mid-chest level, rested just on the ledge of the table.
He looked back at the man with the dogs and asked himself a question that made him feel like he’d swallowed a cup full of worms and beetles.
Are those breasts?
He wasn’t exactly sure when little girls hit the equivalent of a squeaky-voiced, pimply-faced, pubescent thirteen-year-old boy. Maybe it was the same age, but Jerry through he read somewhere that girls develop faster than boys, maybe as early as nine; it had something to do with processed chemicals in mother’s milk. Or maybe what he was seeing was some remnant of what people like to call “baby fat,” or “another excuse for allowing your child to eat Bic Macs at the age of three,” as Melissa’s pediatrician, a thin-lipped, skeletal twenty something, liked to call it. And then Jerry had another question.
Where do you buy bras for twelve-year-old girls who might not really have breasts yet?
(Note from the author: The previous is an excerpt from a longer short story called “Gather Up the Fragments.”)
