What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Addict
A month before he moves in, I drive out to the shitty town where he lives. It’s the town I grew up in, but he inhabits a part of the town to which I had always turned my head. The trailer parks, the rotting porches, the dilapidated sheds. He contacts me using a broken phone, its motherboard exposed. I pick him up at a Shell gas station where he connects to Wifi.
We sit on the hot summer sidewalk in front of the Shell. I remember a different summer, fifteen years earlier, as he smokes. I remember him eating fistfuls of grass because he had never seen it before. Chattering in a language I didn’t recognize or know. Rocking him to sleep. Now, I update him on our parents’ move. They’re halfway moved already: two hours away in a city of industry. Desperate to stay in contact, my parents have offered to get him a phone plan before they’re completely gone. I relay the message. Somehow, he agrees to meet with them that day.
On the way, I stop and buy him fast food. He eats a Smokehouse Brisket and a Buffalo Chicken sandwich in the span of seven minutes. I keep driving. His jutted wrist bones and knees dance in my periphery.
His first night at home, I made him scrambled eggs. I sat, mesmerized, across the table. His big eyes creased into squints as he opened his mouth, deftly scooping eggs with his toddler fingers.
