helps me think.
Tell me something, I finally say.
Tell me what’s happening with Dad.
Outside, a whole flock of sparrows
cry out as they fly away, the sounds they make
fading before my mom says
More doctors. More “It could be this, it could be that.”
I ask her Aren’t doctors supposed
to be able to figure it out? And if they can’t, then
how are they going to fix him?
He’s not broken, ZJ, my mom says back.
He’s just not himself right now.
When’s he gonna play ball again?
They don’t know.
When will his head stop hurting?
They don’t know.
When’s he gonna be himself again?
They don’t know.
I want to scream What do they know?!
But my mom is sipping her coffee.
One sugar, a little milk.
The birds have all flown off somewhere.
The kitchen is quiet as a prayer.
When I look at my mom again, her eyes are closed
and her lips are moving, silently.
And then, almost too soft to hear but I hear it anyway,
she says
In Jesus’s name, I pray. Amen.
Driving
The doctor said my dad
can’t drive anymore.
Now, when the weather’s real bad,
Mama’s gonna have to drive me to school.
The doctor said to Daddy
Look on the bright side. You have this beautiful chauffeur.
Then he winked at Mama.
Look on the bright side, my daddy said back to the doctor.
You’re a total chauvinist.
Mama said she worked hard to hold herself together until they left that doctor’s office.
But when they got back in the car, she burst out laughing.
Zachariah Johnson! You made that poor man
turn bright red!
Bet he’ll think twice, my daddy said, about what dumb thing
he’s thinking about saying next time.
So even though the news about driving
was terrible, the two of them
just sat there, laughing.
Call Me Little Man
The first time you forgot my name
feels like yesterday. Feels like an hour ago.
Feels like I blink and you forgetting
is right there in front of me.
Me and you were sitting at the dining room table
doing a puzzle. Daddy, I said, your hand keeps shaking.
And you looked up at me, slowly. It was like your eyes
lifted up first
and then the rest of your head followed.
I don’t really know how
to explain what I saw. The way everything
seemed to slow-mo down
to nothing except your eyes
looking at every part of my face
like I’d just appeared in front of you.
What’s your name again, boy?
Daddy, I say. You play too much.
I asked you, what’s your name?
And then your eyes weren’t your eyes anymore
and I got up and ran through the house yelling for Mama.
But when I got to the top of the stairs I heard you say
Little man.
It wasn’t like you were whispering it, but it sounded like a whisper.
Little man! you said again. Like you were just figuring out
who I was. Little man. Your son.
And I came back down the stairs because
you sounded so sure this time.
The Whole Truth
Sun so bright over Maple
Daddy walks real slow down to her,
sits beneath her branches—all the leaves gone now.
I watch him from the kitchen window, see him
lift his hands high into the air
as though he’s reaching up for a ball,
snatch them back down again.
Again and again. Reach. Snatch. Reach. Snatch.
Beside me, Ollie watches too while his mama and mine whisper
in the living room. I hear the word doctors.
I hear the words don’t know.
I hear my mom say Bernadette, I think they’re not telling
Then she gets quiet.
Your dad is so different now, man, Ollie says. I miss
your old dad.
He used to call me his son from a different mom and dad, remember?
Now he doesn’t really call me
anything anymore.
It was like . . . it was like I had a dad again, ZJ.
And now I don’t. Again.
I want to yell at him, but his voice is so tiny
that I want to hug him too.
So instead I just say
I miss my old dad too.
A Different Kind of Sunday
Now it’s Sunday night and the game’s on
and the television’s turned all the way down.
My daddy’s in his chair,
watching with his eyes half closed the way he does
when he’s studying every move
and trying to remember the rules, the players, the teams.
I feel like I used to know so much about everything, he says.
Where did my memories go?
And the confusion in his voice makes him sound
so lost and alone.
When I was small, I’d climb up on his lap
when he was home and we’d both sit there.
We didn’t watch the games together that much back then because
if it was football season, my daddy wasn’t home.
And I’d be watching him on television.
And those times when I got to go to his games?
All the other football players used to pat me on the back and ask
when I was going to get in the game. Or they’d lift me up
on their shoulders and call me
their good-luck charm when they won.
I was just a little kid back then but I remember
the sky above me. And my daddy smiling.
And the sound of roaring that must have been fans.
Cheering the team.
And me.
And Daddy.
I hope my dad can remember that.
Waterboy
There was Sightman and Chase and this other guy
we used to play with.
Right now, I don’t remember his name.
My daddy has his head in his hands.
Uncle Sightman and Uncle Chase. And the other guy
is Uncle Willy Daily, I tell my dad. They’re your friends who
played football too. Sightman was a wide receiver
and Chase was a running back and Uncle Willy Daily,
he was the water boy.
You guys always tease him
and call him Waterboy.
Cuz he really didn’t have no game, my daddy says.
Tell me Waterboy’s name again, little man.
Uncle Willy Daily.
My daddy pulls his hands away from his head.
For a long time, he doesn’t say anything, just looks at them.
They’re shaking like dead leaves shake just before
the wind blows them off the trees.
Maybe he’s remembering how the ball landed
safely in his hands.
Maybe he’s forgotten what we were talking about.
Daddy? I whisper, gently touching his shoulder.
Some days his head hurts so bad, he just sits holding it in his shaking hands.
And we can’t touch him.
And we have to whisper.
And walk on tiptoe.
Does your head hurt?
My daddy nods. He’s a big guy, but he looks so small sitting there.
He reminds me of the ant I watched the day before—
it had lost its whole long line of ants
and was walking in circles,
its antennae searching the empty air
for the friends it had lost.
Tell me that guy’s name again, little man.
Uncle Willy Daily, I whisper. But you all called him Waterboy.
Wishes
The year Daddy tore two ligaments in his knee,
but made the touchdown anyway,
he was home like this
for a month.
And we made so many songs
and had so many laughs
and watched so many games that I wished
it could be this way for always.
And now I know what people mean when they say
careful what you wish for.
Too Many of Them
In the kitchen, my mom and Bernadette are talking
about some other football players my mom knows.
I am sitting on the stairs in the living room, half hidden
and listening.
Too many of them, my mom says. I hear her
put the coffeepot on the stove. Hear the
click, click, click of the igniter catching flame.
Too many of them are doing things nobody
understands. And they’re young like Zachariah.
The fridge door opens and closes. I hear the
glug of milk into a pitcher, the clink
of the sugar spoon against the bowl.
She tells Bernadette about Sarah’s husband, Mike,
who used to throw me so high in the air,
it felt like flying. Mike ran through
their glass door and kept on running, Mama says.
I hear Bernadette take a deep breath.
Harrison can’t say his alphabet, Mama tells her.
And he was premed in college.
Linebacker, wasn’t he? Bernadette asks. Even
before she met my father, Bernadette
could tell you the position of every player on
most of the teams in the NFL. She follows
football like astronomers follow stars.
Too many of them, Mama says,
are going through some kind of thing.
Headaches and rages, memory loss
and fainting spells. Zachariah isn’t the only one
suffering. And yet, Mama says,
setting her coffee cup down hard,
the doctors act like this is new.
I’m not the only football wife out here, Mama says,
who thinks they’re lying.
Over Breakfast
Friday night, Mama and I eat alone
while Daddy lies in his room with the lights off,
the door closed.
Light’s too much for him, my mom says.
We’re eating breakfast for dinner
pancakes and bacon and scrambled eggs
because Mama knows it’s my favorite.
We don’t say much, just eat in the quiet kitchen,
watch out the window as the sky goes from blue to black.
The headaches, my mom says. Then for a long time
she just looks at me like she’s trying to figure out
if I can take the news.
One of the new doctors thinks the headaches
have something to do
with all the times your dad got banged around, she says.
I stop eating.
So they know what it is and now they can fix him.
And he can go back to playing ball and
we can all be regular again!
The happiness in my stomach takes the place of everything else.
My dad’s going to be well again. I don’t need food tonight.
Just this moment right here. This right now,
over dinner-breakfast,
with the doctors finally knowing.
But my mother shakes her head. Her eyes,
usually a gray-blue, are dark now.
There are even darker circles beneath them.
She takes a deep breath,
lets it out slowly. For the first time, I see how tired she looks.
And how sad.
I wish it was that simple, ZJ, she finally says to me.
He needs more tests. Some experimental drugs—
But Daddy doesn’t like drugs.
These might help him, Mama says.
Might? But how come they don’t know?
I push my plate away. Still not hungry but
a different full feeling now. A lamer one.
How come they can’t just fix him?
I’m remembering all the times over the years
I watched my dad get rammed.
All the times I saw his helmet
bang into another player’s helmet.
I’m remembering all the times I saw him go down.
How it felt like my heart stopped
until he got up again.
How that one time he got hit so hard, a vein broke
in his left eye
and it stayed bloodred for days and days.
How come they can’t just fix him? I say again,
but softer this time.
All those times he got knocked down
and knocked out, my daddy kept getting up
but maybe some part of him
stayed on the ground.
Playing Something Pretty
My daddy got me a guitar when I was seven. A six-string.
Acoustic.
I always wanted to play, he said.
I asked him how come he didn’t.
No money for lessons.
And the only instrument in our house when I was a kid
was a broke-down banjo that once upon a time
belonged to some distant relative.
It only had one string on it.
I’d plink at it but it never made any real kinda sound.
Just plink, plink, plink.
But I wanted drums, Daddy.
My daddy took me over to the window. See that beautiful yard?
I looked out at our yard, the grass sloping down
into a line of trees
that hid our pool and climbing bars and the swings
Daddy had someone design for me.
Yeah, I said. I see it.
Then Daddy turned me around. See all of this house?
I nodded again, looking at the way the marble stairs
led up to all the bedrooms and the floor above
that my dad always called the ballroom
because a long time ago
people used it for dancing.
Now we have a half-court up there
for indoor hoops in the wintertime.
What’s the house and the yard and the pool
got to do with a guitar?
Sometimes, my daddy said,
a parent’s going to give you something
they wished they had when they were kids.
He took the guitar from me, plucked at it and smiled.
Now you try it.
I strummed it, and the
sound that filled up the living room
was so soft and clear, I knew I was gonna love it forever.
Even though I was still mad about the drums.
You’re a natural, my daddy said.
Then I strummed it again, moved my fingers along the frets.
Back then I didn’t know they were called frets,
didn’t know how to tighten the strings to adjust the sound.
Didn’t know the difference between
picking and strumming.
Didn’t know the difference between
a soundboard and a saddle,
an electric and an acoustic guitar.
But I know now.
And in the late afternoon when my daddy sinks into his chair,
asks me to play something pretty, play something soft,
I do.
E String
The sweetest sound comes
after the string breaks
and after you complain cuz the string broke.
Then you have to find the right one,
an E-1st string still in its wrapping
at the bottom of your drawer
or in your guitar case, ready and waiting.
I wish this thing was as easy as an E string breaking,
a new one getting found.
The sweetest sound comes after you push your string into the bridge,
curl it around the post, twist it,
and turn the tuning key back and forth,
strumming, then listening, then back and forth,
more strumming until
the sound throughout the house is right
and everything and everyone is in tune again.
How to Write a Song for My Daddy
The first time I remember
you calling me little man,
I was real little. You said
Yeah, I know your name is Zachariah Jr.
But to me, as long as I live, you’ll always be my little man.
The first time I said
Daddy, that sounds like a song,
you told me to go write one for you.
But I didn’t know the first thing
about how to make a song.
Look it up, little man, you said. You know how to read.
And so I did. And I found out how to put parts together.
There’s usually a chorus—some words
repeating themselves
over and over again.
And maybe the chorus to this song is Little man . . .