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Back At Dawn Save as PDF
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

“Got paid yesterday,” he tells me. It’s his first paycheck in a year and a half. “Finally got the electric turned back on,” he continues, as though this bit of news is meant to impress me. It doesn’t. Over the winter the gas was shut off and I had to take cold showers, which is one thing in the summer, but an altogether different thing on the coldest days of December. When he works he is short with both my mother and me and sometimes even hits her. He’s only ever happy when he’s able to drink late and sleep later. If a man is made by his ability to provide for his family, or his knack for discipline, or even his willingness to sacrifice, then my father is no more a man than the log on which he now sits.

“Does this mean we’re leaving?” I ask.

“Why don’t you go grab us some snacks from the lodge,” my father says. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a few dollar bills and holds them out to me. I don’t reach for them. I look to my mother and she nods.

“I don’t want to.”

“Well go anyway,” he says, his voice firm and adamant.

I turn around without taking his money. I stay gone for twenty minutes, slowly walking along a familiar trail to kill time. When I return, our tent has been taken down and, along with everything else, loaded into the back of my mother’s car.

one

1

I LEFT NEW YORK on a cold November day of dark skies and sideways rain, but I don’t care to say why other than the city itself had changed and I no longer felt I could sustain a living there. Gone was the New York I had idealized in the years before I finally arrived, the city of milk and honey, a place where dreams were achieved. But I’d been without a job for six months, my unemployment benefits had run dry, and work, once plentiful, had become as scarce as a street free of litter; the perpetually high rents were now higher, even in the outer reaches of Queens, Brooklyn, and Jersey, all of which once served as safe havens for the less-than-affluent; each day brought new demonstrations, sign-wielding protests and marches in the streets. The fight against inequality. Wall Street versus Main Street. Even the homeless seemed to have multiplied and, truth be told, I feared becoming one of them. Living in perpetual fear for the future. Each day more rife with anxiety than the day that had come before it.