Giving Dad a Shave

photo by cristal78023.

William was sitting on his mother’s lap, leaning back into the crook of her shoulder while the family watched television, only his father wasn’t looking at the screen. He was scowling at William. “Boy, you’re eleven now. You shouldn’t still be sitting in your Momma’s lap.”

“Leave the boy alone,” she said. “You’re still my baby, aren’t you?” she teased, hugging him close, but William started to squirm away as he watched his father. He had always been intimidated by the cigar smoking, gruff man, but now he studied him closer. He felt that inevitable tug as a boy starts to cross the threshold of boy to man, the trepidation of leaving the protective wing of his mom, and yet drawn to those masculine instincts just starting to form. He noted the way his father chewed on the cigar at the corner of his mouth, the casual tilt of the whiskey glass in his hand. That night he heard his mother and father arguing in their room. William tucked his head under the pillow, buried himself beneath the sheets and tried to become invisible.

Each night his father came home from work, his mother needed to give William a push to go hug him. His whiskers scratched the boy’s cheek. When he slipped off his shoes, his black stocking feet stank. William had the job of putting his shoes in the closet, and hanging his father’s hat on a peg. He ran his fingers over the felt brim, smoothed the brown feather tucked into the sweat stained band.

He turned twelve that summer, the last summer vacation before he would have to start working, and he spent his days secretly trailing after his father from twenty yards back, to and from the plant, in the evenings when he’d stumble out of the bars, on the weekends when he would run his errands. He adopted the way his father would lean against a wall or a tree with one leg cross over the other and propped on a toe. He carried change in his pockets and jingled the coins when he’d walk down the sidewalk. He learned to spit into the sand without getting any on his chin. He substituted a toothpick for the cigar and sucked on it all day, shifting it from one side to the other using only his mouth.

Now when his dad came home from work, there were no more hugs, but his dad grinned proudly, ruffled the boy’s hair, slapped him on the shoulder and told him to go get him a glass of whiskey, “two fingers high, no ice. And no sipping,” he chided, shaking a finger at his son. When the boy returned with the glass, he said, “Okay, you can have a little sip,” as though relenting, but William hadn’t asked. He took a small taste anyway, just enough to wet his lips. It burned.

That weekend, he tailed his father as he went on another of his errands, this time to the barber shop for a cut and shave. William’s mom still cut his hair, but something about the barber shop drew him. He had only been there once a few years ago, but remembered the checkered tile floor, the smell of pipes and cigars, and a baseball game playing on the radio. His dad never wanted him to come along, for some reason, so he followed him in secret and waited from behind a tree across the street. After twenty minutes, his dad came out with a clean shave, trimmed hair, and his arm slung around the barber’s sister. They disappeared up the stairs leading to a small apartment above the shop. The blinds dropped shut. Half an hour later, his father came slinking out of the building and around the coiled barber pole and swaggered toward home.

Back at the dinner table, he watched this man accept food from his mom without a hint of guilt or regret, watched him tell her the pork was overcooked and the peas too cold. The next time he announced that he was going for a cut and a shave, William followed. Once again, his father came out of the shop with the barber’s sister and disappeared upstairs to the apartment. William balled up all of the fury a boy of twelve can muster, ran into the barber shop, grabbed the straight razor off the sink, and stomped up the stairs with a man’s bearing instead of a boy’s. He slashed his father forty times and left the barber’s sister untouched but soaked in the blood of his father. “That’s for momma. It’s you that was never good enough.” He dropped the razor, walked out of the apartment, and disappeared into the streets.