Prompt 2

“Go get your Father for dinner.” A simple phrase, but one that between the years of 4 and 9 I hated with all 82 lbs of my being. Mother, her back neatly sliced in two by apron strings, wouldn’t even turn away from the cutting board, oven, or sink. It didn’t matter all what she was doing when she asked. Every time it came the same way. She’d call my name, letting her sing-song voice have time to dissipate, before calling my name again. This time in a higher pitch, and coated with enough sugar to give Barney a heart attack. Why she bothered to ask a second time I never understood. I knew that she knew that I heard her the first time, but again Mother enjoyed doing things twice. When tying her shoelace, checking the locks at night, and even when placing the crust for an apple pie she always pulled out the the first attempt, and after rerolling the dough would once again lower the crust into the pan with all the precision of an Air Traffic Controller. Maybe the first time was her first draft. The uncut raw version of my name, and she didn’t feel complete until the pitch, tone, and love mixed into her voice had been edited, and remixed to suit whatever she needed from me. Who knows. I certainly don’t. All I know is that if the clock was anywhere near a quarter after five and my name was called twice, was that I would shortly be asked to fetch Father. A task that I never particularly enjoyed in my youth.

Father was always to be found in the rear of the house in a small attic apartment above the room. Mother referred to it as his ‘Study’, but Father never really called it anything. He just grabbed a few books, and with a nod of his head would grunt “Going to work, don’t bother me.” To me it was just the attic. That’s what it was. The ceiling stood no higher than six feet along the center beam, and down either side slide the ceiling until it reached the wall which stood a wholloping three feet high. Crammed into the rear corner was a desk. Our old lime green kitchen table to be truthful, but the steel folding chair and the black polished typewriter gave it the feel of a desk. Papers, imprinted by the pounding of keys, stacked on either end of the typewriters, and even more filled the cobwebbed boxes shoved under the table. Along either side were bookshelves, and like an overfilled refugee raft each book was crammed face to face with its neighbor. The room had a single window which showed out into the alley, but gauging by the brown leather throne my father loved to read in, one would’ve expected the green rolling plains of England, or possibly a glimpse at small café bubbling with night life. Not two metal garbage cans and the neighbors Mastiff curled up on the warm concrete. Just waiting for an unsuspecting student on his way home for school to get within a paw’s swipe.

Most noticeable about the room however was the sandy tan plank that ran right down the middle of the room. Everything, from floorboard to rafter, was stained dark. Mahogany, Cherry, No one ever told me what it was, but that plank stood out like the eye sore that it was. I once asked why he didn’t stain it like the rest of the room, or at least put a rug down so that the room didn’t look like a skunk turned in on itself. All I got was a raised eyebrow. My father, who had been standing on the very plank I was speaking of, simply looked down, then looked back at me, then back down. “Wouldn’t make a difference” he muttered, and began pacing back and forth along the length of the room.