Daddy and South Texas

It was the middle of June before they got in touch with my dad down in the Valley. He was driving a truck for some company down that way and was barely ever home. It was the 4th of July before he could get a day off to come pick me up.

I hadn’t felt anything but sorry since the whole debacle with Momma, but when they said my Daddy was coming to get me, I was actually kind of relieved. I didn’t want to go live in some foster home and I sure didn’t want to stay in Winnie with everyone knowing my business now. And since the furthest south I’d ever been was Interstate 10, maybe Alice, Texas was the place for me.

Daddy showed up around noon on July 4th. He was about six feet tall and stocky. Momma hadn’t talked about him much, but when she did, she had told me he was from Mexico. I had always pictured a guy with a mustache who could dance the Jarabe Tapatio, but when he got out of his brown and beige Silverado, he looked just like most white men I’d seen. His complexion could have been mistaken for the tan of a field worker and his eyes were just plain old brown. By my math, he was only 29 years old, but he could have passed for much older.

“You Shane?”
This question was becoming all too familiar.
“Yes sir.”
“Well I’m Ruben. I’m your dad. You, uh, ready to go?”
“Yeah, but you gotta go sign some papers first.”

The first conversation between my dad and I went about how I thought it would. He didn’t know what to say and I didn’t have much to add to that.

We were on the road within an hour and he was asking me questions, hoping I would have long answers to fill up the silence. I always assumed the cops told him how they found Sean and Momma because Ruben never brought it up to me. We stopped off in Houston at a Dairy Queen and he let me order whatever I wanted. To your average 11 year old, that isn’t a big deal. To me, it was a first. I was starting to like Ruben.

We drove on south and I started to notice a change in the scenery. I was expecting cactus and coyotes and roadrunners, but apparently those guys all hang out further west. We drove through small town after small town. We stopped off at some smokehouse in Hillje and got what I thought was the best beef jerky I’d ever tasted. It was getting dark around the time we hit Corpus Christi. Ruben said there was a shorter way, but he wanted to take me to eat some seafood in the big city. I didn’t tell him that Momma had worked at a cajun seafood restaraunt and that seafood was probably one of my least favorite kinds of food.

He again let me order whatever I wanted off the menu and even let me get a Coke. I figured Ruben must have been loaded or something. I knew what he was trying to do, too. But I figured if the guy wants to buy my friendship, I got almost 12 years worth of reasons to let him. When we finished eating, we walked a block or two to what he called the “Sea Wall”, where a bunch of people were sitting around. He bought a beer from a vendor and got me a red, white, and blue popsicle. We sat down on a step in silence, both of us taking in our new situations and trying to figure out what it all meant for the both of us.

As a series of rockets starting goin off in the sky out over the water, I caught Ruben stealing glances over at me from time to time. For a second, it almost looked like he had a half smile on his face. I guess having me there in his life again was some kind of righting of a wrong for him. Honestly, I don’t really know.

I just watched the fireworks.