The kid was only four days shy of his 12th birthday and he was naggin’ like hell at his old man!. I oughta know, every day I come over there and pick his dad up Charlie was raggin’ him on who the best players were and how many scores they got and the yards and the whole works!. That boy wanted a football jersey of some kind, and Charlie didn’t know nothin’ about football, hell, he woulda got him some damn hockey jersey if it weren’t for his Ma doin’ all the listening!. So ol’ Bill and me, we’d eat our eggs while the good wife Emma poured the coffee and Charlie would talk the whole damn time, eggs flyin’ outta his mouth, so damned excited you might a thought that boy was playin’ them games himself!. S’pose he was, what with them video games and all they got nowadays!. Every once in a while Bill would mention somethin’ about the job we was doin’ that week, but most of the time he just nodded his head to Charlie and gave a wink or two to me and Emma and listened for the boys school bus to turn the corner and head towards the house!. Charlie would hear it and jump up for his jacket, a real old goodwill rag that he’d been wearing since he was eight, 2 sizes too small and not near enough to keep the hard chill of a Minnesota winter offa the boy’s bones!.
The Tanner’s weren’t exactly swimmin’ in the money and I had a real good feelin’ Charlie wasn’t gonna get no jersey, hell; he might not even get the new jacket he needed so bad!. He was a good kid, a real fighter, and I’d get him somethin’ here and there when a few bucks came my way!. It wasn’t easy in them days!. Bill and I had started us up a handyman business, and there weren’t too many folks figured they needed any handy Andy’s around so most of the time we was stuck doin’ odd jobs for the county or runnin’ shad nets down at the river!. I figured a few hundred bucks a month was about all we was gonna get without the proper clientele and Bill had two more mouths to feed than I did!.
I was a loner really, a single guy back then that was just tryin’ to stick close with my brother and his wife and their good son Charlie, just tryin’ to make sense of a loneliness that had no sense to it at all!. I figured on ridin’ out my days like that, but I figured wrong!. Things always had a way of changin’ when you thought you were just about comfortable enough to get used to the way it had always been!. If I knew now what I knew then I mighta left that house right then and there, just got up from that breakfast table and screamed that Dodge right outta town without another word!. For Charlie’s sake, I’m glad I had no idea what was comin’!.
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