He had quit the job with the newspaper and was unemployed, had basically moved in with us. I would read the classifieds section of the newspaper with him and circle jobs that looked interesting. One of them was to be a delivery driver for Schwan’s, and Hobart applied and they sent back a catalog of their food. We’d spend a lot of time looking at ugly pictures of chicken Kiev and ice cream bars. We started checking for interesting sales, and we’d drive a few towns over to buy a bunch of VHS tapes of rare movies, ones I’d never even heard of but Hobart said were brilliant. He said he might open a video store in Coalfield, one with hard-to-find cult classics, and later on that is what he ended up doing, and even though it didn’t make much money, he kind of became famous among collectors and film buffs, all those weird people on internet forums. He had a knack for finding stuff. He was generally clueless, but he was good at this.

One afternoon, after I’d read a section of This Sweet Sickness, we were making peanut butter sandwiches, and Hobart said, “I hated being a teenager.”

“I don’t hate it,” I said, feeling a little affronted.

“Well, I did,” he told me, looking so sad. “Not because I thought something better was coming. I just never felt right inside my own body.”

“I feel that sometimes,” I admitted.

“And then I got older, and, guess what? I still never felt right inside my body. I don’t think I ever will. I kind of flamed out everywhere I went, always got a little less than what I thought I’d get. But I guess that’s okay. I think maybe it’s necessary to feel like you’re not quite settled, or maybe for some people it’s necessary.”

“Even if you do feel settled,” I suggested, “something could happen to ruin it.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he said, laughing. “I guess I just mean that sometimes your mom says that things will be better for you in the future. And I think they will, Frankie. I think you’re really smart and I think you’ll do fine. But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”

“Okay,” I said. I kind of wanted to hug him. I thought for a split second about telling him that I made the poster, but I knew I wouldn’t. But the fact that I considered it made me realize that he could marry my mom and I’d be happy about it.