And how something
you thought wasn’t even worth remembering
gets remembered anyway.
Our Songs
There’s a bunch of notebooks full of our songs.
My scrubby handwriting and mostly
Daddy’s words.
I leaf through one of the books and find this:
Grease stains on my pocket forever,
Mama tryna get the truth out of me—never.
Liver in the pocket? Nah, son.
Tell my mama that? Be ready to run.
But ain’t nobody cook like you, Mama.
So let me off the hook with this drama, Mama.
Liver in my pocket gotta be
a story for when I’m grown—trust me.
I remember how much fun we had rapping that,
my daddy’s voice strong and me,
I’m singing the backup echo parts,
never and nah, son and Mama
and gotta be and trust me.
And some nights, after my own mom went to bed,
we’d put on some music—old-school groups like
Digable Planets and Arrested Development
and even sometimes
Menudo and Boyz II Men. And we’d drop our lyrics
over theirs.
Ours are way better, I’d tell Dad.
Used to be I could go to my daddy anytime, say
Let’s put down some music.
And he’d stop whatever thing he was doing or turn off
whatever show he was watching,
smile at me and say Yeah, let’s go drop some real beats.
Now mostly I play my guitar alone.
Sing those songs.
And remember how good it felt to make music
together.
Skate Park
Me, Ollie, Daniel and Darry
meet up at the skate park for Daniel’s twelfth birthday.
It’s crowded with kids doing ollies and grinds and kick flips on the ramps but we don’t care.
Daniel can outskate every single one
of them
because wheels are wheels. Bike, skateboard, blades, doesn’t matter.
I don’t believe in gravity, he says, flipping his board up into his hands.
We have boards too. Pads and helmets and
even mouth guards. Darry’s got braces now, and his mother
said if he even breaks a bracket,
she’s going to take his board away.
I’m not so good on the board—just go slow and try
to make some cool turns on the back wheels,
but I fall.
The four of us skate off to the side, away from the
other kids, but then Daniel jumps over into the circle
of everything, does some magic and skates back
to us. And even though it’s him
with the skills, feels like it’s all of us.
Feels like we’re all just one amazing kid
the four of us, each a quarter
of a whole.
New Normal
Monday morning, I come down all dressed in
jeans, a football jersey and a T-shirt underneath
to find Mama kneeling in front of Daddy,
pulling socks onto his feet
and him staring out the window.
Already hasn’t been a great morning, Mama says.
Zachariah, say good morning to your son,
she tells my dad.
But he keeps looking straight ahead, his brow creased
like he’s deep in concentration.
Hey, Dad, I say anyway, come over to him, kiss
the top of his head. He jumps a little but keeps staring.
And now Mama is at the stove, spooning oatmeal
into a bowl for me, sprinkling nuts on top and slicing
banana over it.
I can do that, I tell her.
But you don’t have to, Mama says back.
Not yet. Be a boy for a little while longer.
I look over at Dad again, his head hanging now
and moving slowly from side to side.
This isn’t some kind of new normal, my mom says.
We’re gonna get this figured out, ZJ.
She pushes the bowl of oatmeal toward me.
What time is it? my dad says. I got to get to my game.
You have time, my mom says back to him. You have plenty of time.
Memory like a Song
Sometimes I’m just sitting in my room
and a song will come on the radio that stops
something inside of me, makes me
and listen. Sometimes, it’s the piano chords,
a sweet riff that has all eighty-eight keys talking.
Sometimes it’s the drums—high hat telling
a story—I don’t know
how to explain the way music moves
through my brain and my blood and my bones.
Doesn’t make me want to dance like Darry, though.
Makes me want to move inside the story the song
is telling me. Makes me
want to live there
always.
Makes me want to feel all the things
all the happy
and even the sadness too.
Makes me know that, kinda like the chorus,
the happy’s going to come around again.
Right now I’m listening to that song
that my daddy and mom love called “September”
by Earth, Wind & Fire.
There’s this part where the singer keeps asking
Do you remember?
I don’t know why but every time he sings it,
I want to yell Yes!
I want to say I do.
Darry Dancing
The way Darry dances, it’s like
all the beats ever made
were only made to get his body
to twist and pop and turn and dip
and slide and jerk and spin
around them.
It’s like the beats bow down
when they see him coming
cuz even with the new dances,
he sees somebody doing it one time
and already he’s doing it better.
When we ask him how he got so good,
he says It’s just in my body. I just love it.
When you love a thing,
you gotta love it with everything you got,
my dad always says.
The Trail
The woods aren’t really woods, it’s just a park
with trails and trees and rabbits skittering
away from you.
Me, Daniel, Ollie and Darry meet there after school
because just before lunch,
Darry passed a note to me that I passed to Daniel
that Daniel passed to Ollie
that said
I need the trail.
I need the trail means I need my boys, means something is happening,
means come be around me.
Darry has the loudest laugh but mostly
he’s the quietest of all of us. And now he
needs us.
I know what it is. To just need
to have your boys around you.
Cuz they’re your boys and something about them surrounding you
makes you know everything’s going to be okay.
So after school the four of us walk and walk that trail, our backpacks bouncing,
our hoodies on under our coat
s because it’s too cold now
to tie them around our waists.
When we get to the place where so much sun
is coming in through the trees
it looks like a scene in a movie, Darry stops walking,
says So guess what.
My mom and dad are separating. They told us last night.
Darry’s sister is in high school. He has a brother
who’s already in college.
So in a way, he’s like an only child.
My dad’s gonna mostly stay in the city since
that’s where he works, Darry says.
The way his voice chokes around, you know he wants
to cry. It’s strange, he says,
even saying this stuff out loud, you know. Like saying it makes it true.
That is truly messed up, Ollie says.
And me and Daniel say Yeah. Sure is.
I gotta be in the city a lot of weekends with him, Darry says.
They said that’s the agreement.
Okay, what we gotta do, Daniel says,
is look on the bright side.
You’ll have a second house, and we’ll be having sleepovers in the city!
We could just wake up and walk
to the Empire State Building.
We’ll still be the Fantastic Four, I say.
Nobody and nothing’s ever coming between our crew,
Ollie says.
We all high-five each other, echo Ollie.
Nobody and nothing.
Darry smiles and looks so relieved. And then
we all get quiet.
And keep on walking.
Snow Day
Ollie calls me early in the morning and tells me everybody
is meeting at the park for the snowball fight of the century.
You need to get there, he says
and I’m already pulling on my ski pants, my sweater,
looking everywhere in the house
for my lucky snow gloves—dark blue with reflector tape.
I don’t know why
but those gloves seem to have a superpower
when it comes to shaping snowballs and firing them
at the sucker who didn’t duck fast enough.
I find them in the basket under the bench by the door
beneath scarves and hats and a plastic bag of LEGOs
from when I was little and my mom had to carry some
if we went to a restaurant.
Then I’m yelling goodbye to my mom and dad,
who are both sitting in the kitchen
drinking coffee—my mom reading the paper,
my dad just staring out the window.
Be safe, my mom yells back.
Be safe, ZJ, my dad says.
Then he says it again.
Zachariah Jr.?
Yeah?
Be safe. Be safe, okay?
And when he turns my way, he’s not looking at me.
He’s looking at something else.
Something that’s not there,
something
nobody but him can see.
Dream
You ever had a dream that shook you awake?
And even then you still believed it was true?
Last night I dreamed I was a quarterback,
running behind my dad
and he was there on the field, pushing players out of my way.
I had the ball and was running like if I wanted to
I could lift off
and fly.
And in front of me, my dad just kept taking the hits,
keeping me safe
making sure I touched that ball down.
I woke up still hugging the ball, only my arms were
empty, pressing against my chest.
In the dream, my daddy’s helmet had cracked in two.
And I kept saying to him Be safe, Daddy. Daddy, be safe.
But he just kept on running.
Kept on tackling.
Kept on going.
For me.
For me.
For me.
Down the Hall from My Room
Down the hall from my room, there’s a guest room
with a bed, a dresser and a wall
full of black-and-white pictures.
There’s me as a little baby
in Mom’s arms with Daddy looking on, his grin so wide,
my mom says it looks like he ate the moon and it
came shining back out.
There’s Daddy in his football uniform, down on one knee,
his helmet in his hand, looking straight at the camera
all serious
like he wants to get the picture over with already
and get in the game.
Another one of his team—Uncle Joe and Uncle Eddy, and another player everybody just called Slide.
Cuz he never ran across the field, Daddy said.
He just slid his way past other players and slid
into every single touchdown.
There’s a picture of Mom and Dad that I took, looking up at them.
Giants smiling down at the camera.
That’s my favorite, my mom says, appearing beside me.
Then we’re standing in front of all the pictures, her holding my hand.
I know mostly I’m too old to be standing in a guest room with my mom holding my hand.
But sometimes, I’m not.
Sometimes, this is just a beautiful moment,
me and Mom in the quiet house with
all these before pictures looking back at us
reminding us there was another time.
Look at you there, my mom says, laughing.
In the picture, I’m climbing behind the couch,
and all you can see is half my body, a chocolate cookie in my hand.
You thought you were slick, my mom says.
You thought you could hide. And even though I caught you
on camera, you still swore it wasn’t your hand.
It wasn’t, I say, smiling up at her.
That was some other kid. That doesn’t even look
like my hand!
I say this same thing every time.
And every single time,
my mom just starts cracking up like
it’s the first time she’s hearing it.
A Future with Me in It
At both grandmas’ houses
there are also rows and rows of photos
of me. Kindergarten with my
two front teeth missing.
Second grade with me, Darry, Daniel and Ollie
all in the same class—Ollie sitting down on the floor
with the other little kids because he hadn’t gotten tall
yet.
There are pictures of me with my dad, my mom,
the whole family, even the grandmas and my auntie
at a castle in Spain. Pictures of me with water wings
and me without them when I finally learned
how to swim.
And each year, some more pictures get added,
my mom finding the perfect frame, and me
a little taller and hopefully with a better haircut
going up on the wall.
And I bet that one day, when I’m all grown
and in my own house,
I’ll still be on these walls—
licking an ice cream cone,
with a lame haircut,
looking good in a new suit,
smiling with my arms
around my boys.
I’ll still be on
these walls
making Mama and everyone else too
smile
and remember.
Audition
One day, my daddy says, his face half shaved
and his robe still on,
I’m going to be in commercials.
On the television a famous football player
is selling hotel rooms, and
I’m remembering the time we watched
this old friend of my dad’s
shoot a commercial. It was about shaving cream.
I watched him
rub it on his face, then take the razor to it.
He was supposed to look
like he’d just stepped out of the shower, so
the camera people
sprayed water all over his face and chest. Then put a towel around his neck.
He didn’t have on a shirt but
he was wearing pants, down below
where the camera wasn’t going.
That’s going to be me someday, ZJ, my dad would say,
making commercials about cars and
shaving cream and maybe even fancy hotels.
And now he’s sitting here and saying it again,
not remembering
last year when he finally went for an audition.
He only had to say one line:
I’m Zachariah Johnson, and this is my car.
Then he was supposed to open the door of a fancy blue car
and smile as he stepped inside.
He was wearing a dark blue suit,
had on his Super Bowl ring and the watch
Mama gave him for his thirtieth birthday.
But he kept freezing. Standing there by that car like
he didn’t know where he was supposed to be or
what he was supposed to say.
I watched him from the place they made me stand
back behind the camera.
I wanted to scream the line to him. To shout it
loud as I could.
I wanted to say it for him if he needed me to.
The guy next to me was holding a big poster
with my daddy’s line on it,
but still, my daddy couldn’t say it.
He couldn’t say it.
Take 1
take 2
take 3
all the way up to
take 72
and by then
my daddy’s head was hurting.
By then the director was saying