This short story is the result of an unusual collaboration. It is inspired by photographs posted to Instagram by Richard “Koci” Hernandez, an Emmy-winning multimedia journalist and two-time Pulitzer nominee. Spurred by conversations between Koci, Spencer, and two other writers, Spencer developed characters that might inhabit the world as Koci sees it. He began writing this piece from a single image, then pulled in more photos as he wrote. The other writers used very different techniques. Follow the series here. — Jackson (Editor)
ROSIE WATCHED HER FATHER OVER THE SNEEZE GUARD. She had brought him to the sandwich shop where she worked, because there was nowhere else to take him and her manager’s hours no longer overlapped with hers. At the bus station that morning, she'd found him arguing with a newsstand cashier. He didn't hurry to finish, but after some prodding he came with her, paper folded under his arm. He pulled his roller bag to a corner of the shop as she put on her apron and gloves.
He seemed comfortable, but there was something too organic about him in this place, with its mood lighting, burnished marble, and well-dressed customers, a landscape that felt strange enough as it was. Here he looked like a mushroom.
In one well-practiced motion, she hefted a glob of mayonnaise on the long edge of the spatula and spread it across a roll.
“No mayo,” the customer said. He leaned forward onto the balls of his feet, his face a taut-necked look of chagrin. She looked from the customer to the clock and back, and then down.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. She dropped the roll into the trash and started over.
When her shift was done, she gathered up her father. He needed her help to lift himself from his chair, but refused to keep her arm once he was standing. He insisted on pulling his little roller bag himself.
They walked in silence across the lobby. He stayed one or two paces ahead, as he always had. When they came to the heavy doors, he tried to open them, throwing back his shoulders and pulling with both hands. After a moment, he raised his arms in defeat.
“I’ll get it,” she said, and pushed. He followed her out. As she zipped her coat, he grabbed her elbow and raised his eyebrows.
“I thought you were a librarian,” he said.
JOBS HER FATHER HAD HELD: mechanic, mover, roofer, groundskeeper, truck driver, city bus driver, long-haul bus driver, salesman, touring musician, night security, day security, ten years of construction. Realtor, somehow, in Tampa.
These the ones she knew, these the ones he cared enough to share, in phone calls that inevitably became one-sided jags of reminiscence and braggadocio.
Most of his work had been hard, she knew. Anyone knew: he dwelt on his wounds with affectionate detail, endlessly retelling how he came to be so damaged, usually ending with a punchline, often at his own expense. But the jokes were clearly cover. His left arm couldn’t extend, his back couldn’t straighten, his right pinkie ended in a knot at the first knuckle. One eye was bleared with a cataract he was convinced was work-related. Not everything was work-related: there was the smoking and drinking.
Now, she thought, he is sick, broke, and come to stay with his daughter, no longer a librarian.
“So you lost your job?”
He spoke loudly, uncritically, and pursed his lips. They were two blocks from Rosie’s apartment, walking, on the last meandering detour she could think to make.
She stopped and looked into his face. He had lifted the little collar of his jacket to keep off the wind — it wasn't a cold day, but it was never warm in this city. He cocked his head.
“Yes,” she said. “They closed my branch.”
He nodded. “Your mother never answered my voice message. You think she'd come down and we'd all have dinner together?”
He had always been scattershot. His letters veered sentence by sentence, from madcap scheming to long-buried, suddenly important memories. His text messages were worse: A week before he arrived, she had awoken to six from him, six messages that could have been summarized in one:
I’m coming to stay with you. Dread.
Dread because he hatched schemes. Because he started fights. Because he womanized, condescended, yelled, drank, became teary and nostalgic and sentimental. Because he filled a room, and her apartment was small. Because he cast a long shadow.
Because, aside from the half-remembered embarrassments and impositions, whoever this man had been, he was a true unknown now.
THE FIRST NIGHT, AGAINST ALL INTENTIONS, Rosie found herself cooking for her father. There was ground beef in the freezer and bread in the pantry; she made hamburgers. He put his roller bag by the door and planted himself on the couch. He rifled through the things he could reach, lifting the books on her coffee table, examining them, grunting.
Rosie was thirty-two, felt older, and was often mistaken for half her age. She was a small person and unsure of how to carry herself. During the library’s death throes, she was recruited into running the youth programs. She wasn’t surprised that most of the teenagers were taller than her, but she was a little shocked that most were also better-dressed. They took to calling her “Little Rosie.”
Looking at her father, suddenly asleep, chin on chest, she was surprised to see not simply that he was old and sick, which she had known for many years, but that — in spite of his big belly, in spite of his old machismo — he was little, like her.
When the library was closed, a pit had opened inside of her, and she had fallen into it. For months, no one responded to her job applications. There wasn't much to recommend the sandwich shop, but at least it papered over the pit.
She tried to keep her father at home.
“Dad,” she said, “I know you might get a little restless while I’m at work. My computer’s not fast, but I can get you online. And there are these.” She gestured at a stack of books by her bed, a pile of mysteries and sci-fi novels she hadn’t cared to finish.
He looked at her blankly.
“While I’m at work,” she said. “If you’re staying,” she added.
He shook his head vigorously. “I’m not going to leave you all alone. Uh-uh. I’m coming with you to work. I’ll do just fine sitting there. Remember how much fun you used to have when you came with me to work? I’ll do just fine.”
She nodded.
He went through her paperbacks anyway, sticking a Heinlein novel and a Sneakie Pie Brown book in his roller bag. He read them sitting in the chair at the corner of the sandwich shop. He watched the patrons over his book, itching, she could tell, to chuckle at them for their self-importance. Every few hours, he would step out for a bathroom break and would nod at her as he went. He left his roller bag in the corner to mark his spot.
By the second week, she felt strained. She couldn't help herself: having him in the corner made her nervous. She screwed up her orders, spread mayo where it didn't belong.
That evening, she took him aside.
“Dad,” she said, “how long will you be here?”
He shrugged.
ROSIE DIPPED THE SPATULA IN THE MAYONNAISE JAR. She swiftly coated the roll.
“No mayo,” the customer said. His voice rose and trembled. He pulled his hands from his trousers, made them into loose fists, and shook them at her, as though he were shaking maracas. “Kid, I never want mayo. I hate mayo.”
Involuntarily, she looked at her father. They locked eyes. She saw him stand.
And she could see how things would go down. He would play macho like he used to, puff out his chest and suck in air until he turned brick-red and seemed to fill the room.
And his voice would rise, huge, in spite of his broken lungs. And he would grab the man by the shoulders.
And there would be a fight, and this gym-toned lawyer would send her father sprawling. Or, worse, her father would send him sprawling.
All of a sudden, she felt herself once again an actor in a drama she couldn’t control. Felt the reins of her life slipping from her hands, and felt dread, and felt shame, and felt herself falling.
This had all happened before.
THEY WERE LIVING IN TACOMA — a city she couldn't remember except for one morning’s snow, which looked like soot as it fell — and her mother was working in a mortician’s office up there, calling families and making arrangements. She was good at her job, because she was chatty and funny and mourners took to that.
Her father had found work supervising in a warehouse near the port. But he lost that job, too, and to salve the humiliation he took to lighting out for days at a time. He was probably going on benders, she realized later, or maybe was out with other women, but she never had the courage to ask her mother what was really happening. She knew well enough that something had gone wrong between her parents.
The last time he came back, she was at school. He had brewed himself a pot of coffee, and she came home to find him sitting on the couch with the pot and his mug beside him.
“Call your mother,” he said. “I’d like to go out tonight.” It was a ritual; every time he disappeared, he came back wanting a big meal.
They went to a steakhouse outside of town. He ordered for all of them: steaks and baked potatoes and pillowy steaming bread and Caesar salads more white than green, gin martinis for himself, a promise of chocolate mousse. Things they couldn’t afford but he needed.
He shouted, roared, snorted through the meal. He told stories about selling knives door-to-door and the half-naked women and drugged-up men who would meet him at the threshold. Her mother was mostly silent, but Rosie tried to keep up, laughing and joking with him. She knew well enough that the other patrons were staring, and a few had moved, but he seemed oblivious.
But then a man came to their table. He was tall and loose, wearing a ill-fitting suit — but still a suit, not her father’s denim jacket—and he spoke with the moral authority of the aggrieved crowd. “Will you please be quiet,” he said, “you people are being obnoxious.”
Her father pushed back from the table and stood. His arms hung by his side, but his hands were clenched.
“Would you please repeat that to me?”
The man didn’t stand down. “Please. Shut up.”
When Rosie heard that, she knew what her father would do next. Her mother knew, too, and clasped Rosie’s hand as they walked out of the restaurant.
It wasn't much of a fight. Her father was short, and no longer young, but he was strong and he knew how to place a punch. The entire restaurant seemed very still, but there was motion at the margins: people in the far corners stood and craned their necks to see what was happening. Rosie watched them, watched him.
When her father turned, wheeling away from his victory and seeing them walk out the door, she saw in his face the eyes of a trapped animal.
They left not long after, she and her mother, boarded a flight to California.
THIS IS WHAT SHE REMEMBERED WHEN SHE SAW HER FATHER STAND. And she felt herself begin to fall. She looked down at the mayonnaise and waited. She looked up. And like that, the chair in the corner was empty.
The roller bag was gone. He was gone.
The customer cocked his head and turned his hands palms-up. “Are you going to make my sandwich?”
Rosie put down the spatula, took off her apron, and walked out the door.
Good read?
Over the next week, more stories in this series will be published to this collection. Click the green “Follow” button below to stay updated. You can also learn how to tell your own visual stories here.
This story was written by Spencer Strub and edited by Jackson Solway. All photographs were taken by Richard “Koci” Hernandez.
