saw where my attention had gone again, and he wheeled his chair so he was leaning past me and looking out into the break room.
“Tara?” he called out, and the girl looked up.
“Yes, sir?”
“Isn’t lunch just about over?” Dad said, not harshly or mean-like at all, but not overly friendly either. He was irritated at me, and taking it out on her. An image of me dueling my dad for her honor sprang to mind and, in the daydream, I skewered him with my sword, and Tara leapt joyfully into my arms.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I just had to pet this cool dog, though.”
She rebelled against my dad by lingering a few moments longer, ruffling Bandit’s coat and cooing at him some more with baby talk. Then she was up, throwing her trash into a bin and walking out of sight, but remaining in my heart.
Bandit stared after her for a time before walking despondently into the office where the three of us sat. He settled on the ground beside me with a sigh, as if he were settling for second best. I tried to beam him a mental message.
Traitor.
His eyes rolled up at me as if he heard and was bored.
“She’s too old for you, son,” Dad said, and after a moment to register the words I turned back to face him.
“What? Who?”
“She’s fifteen and a half,” he said. “It’s some sort of work experience thing through her school. She’s only here a few days a week.”
But I heard none of that, save the first part. Fifteen and a half. Round down to the nearest whole number and that left fifteen. I was thirteen, with fourteen only a few weeks away. When you thought of it that way, you may as well just say we were the same age.
Dad saw my thoughts had trailed off again. Sighing, he brought us back to the subject at hand.
“These boys. Do you know their names?” he asked, facing Bobby again.
Bobby nodded hesitantly, but I interjected before he could say anything.
“I told you, Dad,” I said, knowing I was walking on thin ice by objecting to him when he was in a mood like this. Someone had threatened his family, and he wasn’t too keen on that. My dad liked books; obviously, he managed a bookstore. But he also had a punching bag in the garage, and he liked chopping wood, and seeing him shirtless like he often was in the summertime to do yard work, you’d think God had run out of flesh and bone and made my dad out of stone.
Once, a drunk man had accosted Mom when we were out for a family dinner. The drunk man had had two not-so-drunk friends with him, egging him on. Dad ended up accosting all three of them, and an ambulance took them away in gurneys for a stay at the hospital, where their busted teeth required of them a diet of Jell-O and apple sauce.
“I can take care of myself,” I finished.
“I don’t doubt that, son,” he said, and though he hadn’t raised his voice yet, his face was flat and stern, like a slab of rock with eyes, ears, a nose, and mouth. I knew he would only let me go so far. He wouldn’t lose his temper at work either. He’d wait until we were both home, then there’d be that disappointed look, he’d verbalize it, and I’d trail down the hall to my room with my tail between my legs. “But you know how I feel about fighting. There’s no reason for it—”
“Unless there’s no other option,” I finished for him.
“That’s right.” He ignored my mildly mocking tone. “And here we have an option. And that option is to call the police. Now, Bobby,” and here again he turned to face my new fat friend, “can I have those boys’ names please?”
Dad, poised over the office tabletop, pen in hand.
Bobby, head bowed, not looking at my dad.
Me, thinking Bobby doesn’t know what he’s doing. Son or no son, it doesn’t matter. My dad wants something from you, you better give it over.
“Bobby,” Dad said, his tone prodding and urging, but uncompromising at the same time, “where I come from, when an adult asks a kid something, the kid gives a response.”
The quiet between them stretched for a few moments more. The ticking of a clock somewhere could be heard. I thought if I farted it would be like a bomb blast in peacetime.
“Bobby?”
Dad’s gaze penetrated like a drill.
I looked at Fat Bobby and saw his double layer chins quiver. I saw that glimmer of a tear in his eye again. This kid is a real waterworks, I thought, again with a hint of disgust, and quickly on the heels of that, shame at the thought.
“I … really don’t want you to call the police … sir,” he said without looking up.
“Why on earth not?” Dad asked. He was leaning forward in what he probably thought was a confidential, comforting manner for Bobby. But a large man, muscled and burly, leaning towards you in such a way would seem like a mountain with a face leaning over you, towering over you. The shadow would probably eclipse the sun. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
The quivering chins flapped faster. I remembered something on The Discovery Channel about Hubble or other telescopes picking up the wobble of distant stars. Fat Bobby’s wobbling chins would have short circuited NASA’s instrumentation.
“I … don’t want my dad … to find out,” Bobby said. A single tear began to roll down his cheek.
Dad looked at me, and I shrugged. I saw the same look of mixed concern, mild disgust, and shame at his disgust that I’d felt many times around Bobby in the short time I’d known him, pass over my dad’s face.
“Again, I ask the same question,” he said. “Why not? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Whatever dam had been holding it all back finally gave way under the pressure, and Fat Bobby really started crying. Embarrassed, but also saddened without knowing completely why, I reached out and swung the door to Dad’s office closed. In the room with the door shut and the wider world cut off, it was only the three of us, and Bandit too, who again stood and moved to Fat Bobby’s side and rested his head on the fat boy’s leg.
Dad scooted his chair closer to the crying boy and something amazing happened, something I’d never seen before outside my own home and my own family: he leaned over, pulled Bobby close, and engulfed the large boy in his larger arms. Those arms that had held me before in the aftermath of nightmares or scoldings or the various and countless other things in a boy’s life.
“It’s alright, son,” he said to a boy not his son, and I knew as never before my dad was a great man. He tried to keep his voice a whisper, but it was a soft rumble like a swarm of bees. “It’s alright, everything will be alright.”
And because my dad said it, I trusted it to be true.
2.
Dad gave us ten dollars each and told us to get some comics with it or a drink from the café. With the ten dollars in his hand, you would have thought Fat Bobby was holding the Holy Grail or something, his face was beaming so. His sudden and simple joy made my dad smile, and when Bobby and I made as if to leave the office for the sales floor, Dad stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. I called to Bobby and told him I’d meet him in the comics aisle. He waved, still clutching that ten dollars like it was something magic from a fairy tale.
“You’ve never chosen your friends easily, Joey,” my dad said. “You march to your own beat. Always been a bit of an outsider that way, and I can respect that. If you and Bobby are friends, then he must be a pretty okay kid.”
Knowing he wasn’t done yet, that he was working his way to what he really wanted to say, I didn’t respond. Just