Records
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
I am home. Thoughts transit harshly like blips from pundits when you’re channel surfing. On my bed, staring at the ceiling, I get the idea that it’s time to do something and I go down to Dad’s study to lie on the couch and stare at the bookshelves.
People are still getting sick. Martin got COVID at work a few days after he came by the house. We went down to the basement to see if he and Rosie wanted Dad’s treadmill for their basement, and we hugged because what could be the harm?
I make Mom a casserole with Chorizo and sweet potatoes and cornbread, enchilada sauce made with my uncle’s Chorizo spice blend. The chilies came all the way from New Mexico, and so did I.
Mom sold Dad’s 2011 sea-green Ford Escape because he was the only one of us who wanted to drive a Ford Escape. It sold for enough money to buy a 2007 Volvo V50 T5, a car that's so nice it’s embarrassing. I drive a trunkload of Dad’s records up to Encore in Ann Arbor, and they buy all the rare ones that were worth trying to clean the mold off.
Martin gets to work from home for two weeks, over his hotspot from his house out in the country. Rosie is working. Their son has one set of the antibodies.
I sorted Dad’s Dewalt set into two piles: the drills mom uses (one with a screwdriver bit and the other with that size of drillbit that always breaks) and their batteries, and the other for the B-team of paint spattered drills for me, and the tools Mom never wants to use, like a reciprocating saw which will wait, and gather dust, until the magical time when I have a place to live, a place to store tools in and use tools on.
When I was paycheck to paycheck I never missed a minimum payment on my credit cards, paying out 53.17 here on one card and 64.29 on another just to keep all the engines of credit humming, when I was a plate-spinning confidence man. This month, I just forgot.
I almost threw away Dad’s toolbelt on accident because it was sandwiched between his old kneepads and his old backbrace but Mom saw it, fished it out. Inside are a dozen finish nails and a rectangular carpenter’s pencil from Menard’s and two nail punches and enough sawdust to make dust angels in.
Encore Records bought a bunch of Dad’s CDs, which I boxed up in the last of the printer-paper boxes Dad collected to store paperbacks and transport things to and from Camp. A Volvoload of CDs is worth more than a Volvoload of records.
Mom sends me a link to betterhelp at 3:00 in the morning. I spend five minutes looking for the .gif from True Detective where Matthew McConaughey says what’s wrong with my head ain’t something that gets better and when I don’t find it right away I give up. She’s never seen the show so the joke would have been just for me.
Who’s still buying CDs?
Sunny is doing fourteen-hour shifts all weekend because people keep quitting—the pay is shit, and people at the nursing home keep getting COVID. Martin says COVID feels like the flu, that he feels very weak. Five more people got sick at Martin’s plant.
Maybe it’s just the mold, but turning Dad’s music into wads of cash makes me feel nauseous. If I were a good kid I’d take his money to Soaring Eagle or Seneca Allegheny and get COVID betting on the poker machines he loved. When I was in State Line, Nevada, I put three dollars into a Haywire slot machine (between the diner section of the gas-station and bathrooms) and it turned into forty dollars: I know that was dad buying me breakfast and leaving a good tip, and I don’t need to trouble his ghost for more gambling assists.
The other night I was tired and hungry, and the only restaurant in Adrian open at 2:00am is Taco Bell. I got Doritos Loco all over my shirt and jacket, and tomatoes and cheese are deep down in the crannies of the Volvo. Because home is a place where they have things like StainStick and a Shopvac, by noon this is all just a memory.
Working the last of the mink oil into the smooth side of the leather, I nurse the cracked straps back into subtlety, preserving the patina of years of unwashing and taking care not to scrub away any of the paint, the sky-blue for the house and the sea-blue for the trim. I wear the toolbelt around all day. I put Dad’s hammer in the hammer slot and a 16’ steel measuring tape in the measuring tape slot and an extra Juul pod into the pouch for nails.
Mom and I get takeout from the Grasshopper. Steve, the owner, tells me my father was a great man and I said yeah, he was, and it didn’t seem like the right thing to say. Mom and I drink two bottles of wine and then set to work on Green Chartreuse. I feel like we’ve come to an understanding but I’m not sure about exactly what.
Martin is back at work.
Loren calls and tells me that the best and hardest thing to remember about living through a time like this is that someday you’ll forget about it. No part of this will get any better, you’ll just forget how you felt. This would have really bothered me years ago, when I hoarded memories. I have so many about Adrian and a lot of them are false: I remember watching 9/11 with Robby in the Drager Middle School band room, fifth period—but we didn’t have band together, we wouldn’t have been in that room at the same time, and yet we watched the planes go into the buildings again and again and again. I don’t think I remember how it felt.
Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
