“But I need them.”
Seever cried when they arrested him, real tears, and Hoskins thinks it might be the only time he ever saw the man being sincerely himself, with all the bullshit wiped away. He didn’t want to leave his home, didn’t want to be pushed into the back of the patrol car parked in his driveway. They’re mine, Seever had said, weeping. His forehead was mushed into the window, and he’d left behind a big smeary mark on the glass. They’re mine.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Joe asks, covering his eyes. His hands are veined, spotted. Trembling. “Please don’t do this.”
Hoskins doesn’t know what to say, how to make this better. He’s still holding the trash bag, and when he moves for the door the cans shift, clinking against one another with hollow metallic chimes.
SLOPPY SECONDS
HOSKINS
December 3, 2015
He tries to be quiet in the mornings so he doesn’t wake up Joe, creeping around his own house like a thief. He’s careful not to slam the bathroom door or to drop anything in the shower, and he usually shuffles around in socks and puts on his shoes last thing, but it doesn’t matter, it’s a shot in the dark, because there are times Joe is already awake, waiting at the kitchen table, his hands folded together patiently. Hoskins isn’t sure what he’s waiting for, and Joe doesn’t seem to know either—he was never the type of man who’d wait to be served, he’d never had a woman around to make coffee or iron his clothes—no, Carol Hoskins was a real flake, she’d been seventeen when Hoskins was born and she’d only put her life on hold long enough to marry Joe and shit out a baby, and then she was gone. As far as Hoskins knows, his parents are still married, and he sometimes wonders if Joe’s been waiting all this time for Carol to come back, to be ready to settle down. It doesn’t look like it’ll happen, though—she’s had forty years to come back and she never has—and Joe has gotten used to doing everything himself, but he still waits.
Joe isn’t at the table this morning, though, and that’s good, because things are easier when the old man’s asleep. Like the thermostat. When Joe’s still asleep, that’s his first stop. It’s on the wall of the tiny dining room, which seems the stupidest possible spot to put a thermostat, but maybe that was the standard when the house was built. He doesn’t know. He changes the temperature every morning, at least for a little bit, because Joe always looks at the thermostat, at least once a day, usually in the mornings.
Seventy-eight? Joe had shouted the first morning after he’d moved in. It was March, and even though it was spring the nights were still cold. Sometimes freezing. You stupid, Paul? Do you know how much the gas bill is going to be?
You’re cold, Hoskins had said, but that only made his father angry, and Hoskins remembered all the times when he was a kid, when his dad would see how far into the winter season they could go before firing up the furnace, and then he’d keep the heat in the house so low they’d expel hazy clouds every time they let out a breath. And if Hoskins kept the front door open a second longer than necessary when he was going outside, or if any of the plastic sheets taped up over the windows was peeling up at the corners, Joe would spend the rest of the day in a severe state of piss-off, and nothing would make it better. You need to be comfortable.