It's August. I'm five-almost-six, and there.s still a few months until my birthday. The important thing is that right now, I'm five, and not four-almost-five like my brother, Kenny. Kenny won't be five until next month, and we'll share October, until I turn six. But right now, in this moment, I'm older. I'm out at the garage with my dad, because I'm older, and I can count.
Paula and Leona are older than I am, but they're girls, which means they don't count for days like this, when it's hot, and we're at the garage, crawling around on the pavement surrounded by tools and greasy sticky-black fossils of transportation. I'm crouched next to the Buick, with my knees pulled up to my chest. The sun is beating down on us, making it feel like my head is on fire. My jeans are warm, and they feel soft and frayed at the bottom edge, but shorts are not okay to wear to the garage.
It's humid, and my arms are shiny with sweat and a little dirty from where I was laying on the ground until my dad said I was getting in his way. The heat rises and shimmers above the asphalt and the hood of the car, and it's easy to pretend that we're underwater, and that Chicago has fallen into the lake like an inland Atlantis. I feel like I'm breathing through a wet sock.
The tinny echo of a string of profanity hangs in the air like persistent smoke, no longer audible and in another heartbeat even the echo will be gone. My dad's hand is reaching out from under the the car, and the lines of his palm are permanently dark with work and grease. I look at his hand, and twitch a little as a gnat breezes past my ear, blocking out his words. I rub the sensation away on my shoulder and listen again as he reads off a number, nine-sixteenths.
The box of his tools sitting open next to me is my most favorite thing in the whole world. The inside of it is soft foam, covering over a hard plastic shell. Each socket has it's own place, and they all like up like silver knuckles, from smallest to largest, with the handle the magic wand that makes them all work. I love taking each one out, seeing which ones fit the ends of my fingers, poking my thumb into the three-eighths and feeling the teeth grip, and the wrench click. Seeing which ones fit my pinkie, my toes, the tip of my nose, clicking the wrench one way, and feeling it click me back when I turn it the other way. They're the cleanest thing I can think of, even though my dad's hands are always dirty, each cupped socket gleams, and they give off their own little heat shimmers because they've been sitting out in the sun. When I reach for one, I know it's going to burn my fingers, but there's no option of not picking it up.
My dad snaps his fingers, and I feel my fingers glow like embers when I touch the bit that reads nine-slash-sixteen, which means nine-sixteenths. I was right, it is hot and burning my fingers. I brush my thumb over the numbers and the slash, and the letters, and poke my finger into the end of it before attaching it to the handle. My dad's hand is made up of spiderweb black lines, from working at the factory, and tooling around with the car, keeping it running with prayed out curses and sweat. One of his fingernails is black where he slammed it in the door last week. His knuckle is similarly wounded. He probably needs a band-aid but he doesn't really notice that it's raw and red. It looks like he sanded it off, but I don't think he cares.
I put the tool into his hand, and his black fingers fold around the wand, and I think that for the rest of my life the word "Daddy" will evoke an image of that hand, and the gnat, and the sockets, the smell of asphalt and motor oil. When the most important thing was that I'm five-almost-six, old enough to count, and not having to share my age or my father with anyone else.
This was from a writing prompt, to write about a moment in time, using as much detail as possible. I chose the best memory I have of being around my father.
The thing I would like to note, that most people don't notice, is that I was much more willing to scald my hand on hot metal than to risk angering my father. That defines my childhood pretty well, I think.