Stepping into the Spee-Dee market is a tie-dye shotgun blast, all the posters and packaging an assault of colors. Every last pack of chewing gum and bag of potato chips, on down to each single-boxed condom and jug of windshield wiper fluid, is nauseating. Junior shuffles out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand and looking shell-shocked. He turns to a rack of prewrapped breakfast sandwiches, lured to the heat lamps like a moth. When Henry approaches, it’s as if he can actually smell the maple bacon, the pepper of spicy sausages, and the biscuits’ buttermilk seeping through the greasy wax paper—one for $2.50, or two for $4.00. Can’t swing it right now, not if he’s got to pump another couple bucks into the tank later. Still hasn’t forked over the boy’s lunch money either. The spit of bacon in a skillet cracks through him. He flinches, twists, then spots a case of ninety-nine-cent muffins and doughnuts, but even one of those can’t quite be justified right now. Puffs of enriched flour and granulated sugar are just empty calories, when what they really need is some nutrition. Vitamins and protein. He steers the boy from the heat lamps and toward the counter, before asking if he’s hungry.

Junior grips his tummy. “I don’t know.”

On the checkout counter is a basket holding red apples and overripe bananas. Henry sifts for the two plumpest bananas of the bunch. When it’s his turn to pay, he reconsiders. Returns the second to the basket.

“Big enough for ya?” The teenage cashier is wearing eyeliner and enough hairspray to style every male head in this buzz-cut county. His voice is gentle, lonely. Something like pity jabs at Henry, thinking about this kid growing up out here, like this.

But he’s got no flirt in him at this hour. Just reaches into his pocket and says, “Never is.”

$0.01

It was enough to put the world on pause, moments like these. Their two-month-old baby boy sleeping belly up, caterpillar fingers dabbing after dreams, tucked between Henry and Michelle. The two of them were a pair of parentheses, an afterthought tag team devoted to guarding this miraculous comma born of their own flesh and love.

A hiccup of calm, of clarity. A merciful respite from the mental and emotional bedlam brought on by these new responsibilities, this new life. Besides these crystal moments, few and fleeting, the thrashing was constant. Henry was drowning in a vortex of dearth. Never enough money, then never enough patience, energy, or sleep needed to scrape together a pinch of the last. Not so much a vicious cycle as a perpetual toilet flush.

So this was parenthood.