CHAPTER NINE

I get a very strange call in April. It’s a Sunday, near the start of the month, when it’s still pretty cold in Michigan—colder than usual this particular year. What warmth that does come only turns the frost outside to a loose, brown mush that steals your shoe if you happen to step in it. I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, and Dad’s there reading a book on Benjamin Franklin. The phone rings. It’s Mom. My heart jumps when I see her name on the caller ID box. We haven’t spoken in ages, way longer than usual.

I pick up. And then, just like she’s telling me the weather, Mom says, “Your grandmother is dead.”

I say, “Oh my God, Grandma Andrews?”

“Yes, Derek.”

“When?”

“A week ago. She’s already in the ground.”

I say, “Excuse me?”

But I heard her right. My grandma died, and Mom didn’t even tell me.

“How did it happen?”

“She was old.”

I say, “I thought she was in her sixties?”

“Sixty-five is old.”

Trying to get more information out of my mom is like taking a crack at Fort Knox. She won’t budge.

I say, “Why didn’t you tell me? I should have been at the funeral.”

She says, “This hasn’t exactly been easy for me!” Then she slams down her phone, just like that.

I set my own phone down extra delicately.

From the look on my face, Dad says, “What happened?”

“Grandma Andrews died.”

“Oh, Christ,” he says. He kicks himself out of his chair. “Come on, I’ll take you to the airport.”

I shake my head. “They already buried her. I wasn’t invited.”

He’s still standing, and he shifts on his feet for a moment like he can’t tell for sure what to do. “Well, come on anyway,” he says. “Let’s go for a drive.”

Despite the fact that it’s thirty degrees outside, we get ice cream cones from Dairy Queen, then we head out onto the country roads east of town and just keep driving. The roads stretch on along open swatches of farmland, with cornstalk stubs in frozen rows of frosty, brown-gray mud. Soon, even the roads are made of dirt, and Dad drives slow. I think it’s the first time he’s really had to think about Mom in at least a couple months.

“It’s sad,” I say. “I never knew her, but it’s still sad.”

Dad just nods.

I say, “How come Mom is so weird about her parents?”

“You’ll have to ask her that yourself.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because I don’t know, Derek. I didn’t even meet them until you were born—your mother wouldn’t invite them to the wedding.”

“But why not?”

“Derek,” he says, “I really don’t know.”

* * *

It takes a week before I cry. I stay mostly in a state of confusion over things, more frustrated than sad. It isn’t until I’m in school, a Monday morning, and Miss Hyatt sends a note to my Spanish teacher to call me to her room.

Miss Hyatt doesn’t have class third hour, so it’s just her in the room when I get there. She says, “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

I say, “Give me the bad.”

She shrugs toward Darwin and DaVinci’s tank. “DaVinci died over the weekend.”

I look at the tank, and, true enough, there’s Darwin, just sitting by herself in the tank like even she is aware that now she’s alone. That’s about all I can take. The tears well up in me, and I just start bawling. “Why is this happening now?” I say.

She rubs my back. “It’s alright,” she says, “DaVinci was four—that’s a ripe old age for a rat.”

“No,” I say, “it’s not DaVinci. It’s just, my grandma just died, and now this.” I start crying harder.“Why does everything keep dying on me?”

Miss Hyatt doesn’t know what to do with me. She just keeps patting my back until I calm down. She says, “I guess this isn’t the best time for the good news.”

“No,” I say, “what is it?”

“Our paper on microbe evolution, it’s been accepted for publication.”

I smile. My face must be red like crazy. “Next time, give me the good news first.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I will.”

* * *

Easter approaches and, with it, spring break. I fly to Florida feeling weird about seeing Mom. She’s been awkward on the phone since she told me Grandma died. At the airport, she’s equally awkward, and she looks awful, like she’s just been a wreck for weeks and weeks. As soon as we’re back at her house, she collapses into her bedroom and won’t come out. She stays like that all day.

Easter Sunday, I make eggs in the morning and attempt to bring breakfast to Mom in her room. She won’t eat it, though, and she won’t talk to me. “You have to eat,” I say. “You look like you haven’t had a meal in days.”

“Honey,” she says—she talks from her stomach, with her face in her pillow— “just leave me alone.”

It’s so bad, I resort to calling John. He’s number one on the speed-dial in the kitchen. Go figure.

I say, “I hope I’m not interrupting your Easter.”

He says, “Naw, I’m a heathen like your mother.”

I ask if he’ll come over, and in an hour he’s pulling up the driveway in his little red pickup truck. He tries coaxing Mom from her bed. He tries even harder than I do, and still it’s no use. She won’t budge. Finally, he gives up, shutting the door to her room, and he just shrugs at me. He motions for me to follow him outside to the front porch.

John pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” he says.

“No thanks.”

He lights one for himself.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why is she acting like this?”

John says, “Death is hard on people.” He holds his cigarette like he’s studied a lot of John Wayne movies.

“Did she even go to the funeral?” I say.

He nods. “I took her myself.”

And then I get an idea that’s awful—because I know he’ll have to say yes, despite what a terrible favor it is to ask. “Would you drive me there?” I say. “To her grave? Right now?”

He only hesitates a second. “Get in the truck.”

* * *

It’s a four hour drive to Miami from St. Pete. Four hours with a man I barely know, to tell the truth. He drowns the silence out with his stereo—a mixed CD of 70s rock songs that seem a little too old even for someone John’s age. When the disc ends, he starts it from the beginning, again and again, until the drive is over. We hear the whole disc six times.

Grandma is buried in the northern part of the Miami, not far off I-75. John pulls into the cemetery. He parks his truck along the side of the drive and points me toward the grave.

“Back there,” he says. “Almost to the corner.” He stays in his truck while I walk to the grave.

I imagine it should be cold when you visit a cemetery. That’s just how it’s supposed to be—it’s supposed to be cold and gray. But it’s eighty degrees in Miami, and bright, and muggy as hell. That just makes it surreal. That just makes me want a hole of my own, so I can crawl down in it and die there.

Grandma Andrews’s only giveaway is the headstone. There’s already sod covering over the dirt, and it’s had enough time to root in. It’s just the headstone that gives her away—it’s newer than its neighbors, without so much as a single chip worn off the edges of the lettering.

ADRIAN ANDREWS
June 17, 1937 – March 29, 2003
LOVING MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER

There’s nothing more. It’s a very simple headstone, carved in gray granite. It’s strange that her tombstone is so blank. It’s like, I hardly know anything about her—and that’s just what got put on her tombstone.

I haven’t got anything to leave at the grave. I just rub my fingers over the stone, say my goodbyes, and try not to think too hard about what really lies six feet below me. Some blue-haired lady I can’t even picture just rotting away to bones.

I slink back to John’s truck. He says, “All set?” I nod.

We’re rolling again. I say, “John, how did my grandma die?”

He says, “She was old.”

I say, “People don’t die of old age at sixty-five.”

“Some people do.”

“Did you ever meet them?” I say. “My grandparents. Back when you and my mom were dating?”

“Nope.”

“So you don’t know where my grandpa lives?”

He says, “Your momma and I didn’t date that long before she left me for your daddy. I never met her folks.”

That shuts me up for awhile. But then it starts to bug me. I say, “I thought my mom left you before she met my dad.”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “We were still living together. She ran away in the middle of the night.”

* * *

Mom stays all but comatose the rest of my week in Florida. Why exactly that is, she’s not saying. John’s not saying. Nobody is saying, so why should I care?

Wednesday night, with three days left to go before my flight home to Michigan, I do something I never did before—I call my dad from Mom’s house. He picks up sounding bewildered.

“Sharon?”

“No, it’s me.”

“Oh,” he says. He sounds really relieved. “What’s up?”

I tell him I just called to talk. You’d think I told him something in Greek.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just talk,” I say. “It’s lonely here. Just talk to me.”

So we do. We talk, I don’t know, maybe five minutes. That may be a record for us. I don’t tell him about visiting Grandma—or about Mom being stuck in her bed. I sure as hell don’t tell him a word about John. I just ask him about the weather and say, “It’s really hot down here. It’s awful.”

“That so?” he says. “It’s cold as hell up here.”

“I know, Dad. I was just there.”

He says, “Oh. Right.”

And then I say, “Did I tell you? That paper I helped Miss Hyatt with, it’s getting published.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” I say.

And then he goes on and on. Why didn’t I tell him sooner? And, wow, he’s really proud. And now I’ll get accepted at Michigan for sure now.

I say, “That’s a long way off, Dad.”

“No it isn’t,” he says. “You’ll see.”

End of Serial Number Nine. Chapter Ten is coming on September 6th.

Previous Chapters:

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The last day of January, it’s crazy, bitter cold outside, and wind drives snowflakes into the air from mounds around the house. Dad gets home early, even for a Friday. He walks into the house with a look like he’s stumbled into a foreign universe. “Derek?” he says.

I lean my body back far enough so he can see my head through the kitchen door. “Yes?”

“What’s that smell?”

“Cake.”

“You’re baking a cake?”

“Yes.” I start squirting the frosting on a little faster so I can stick the dishes in the washer before he has a chance to see the mess.

“What for?”

I pick the cake up and walk it out for him to see. It’s a double-layer, round cake with chocolate frosting and green letters. Across the top, it reads Free On Time Served. “Today is our last session with Demetri,” I say. I set the cake down on the dining table. “Our six months are up.”

He scratches his head. “Your school let out thirty minutes ago. Where did you find time to bake a cake?”

I say, “We had a half day.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Okay,” I say, “so I cut out on gym class.”

“You have gym at ten in the morning.”

“So I cut out on a couple other classes, too.”

“Derek!”

He looks at me like he’s going to grab the icing knife off the counter and gut me with it. “How did you even get home?”

“I walked.”

“Two miles?”

“Why not?”

“Through the snow!”

I push past him out of the room. “Look,” I say, “I waited until after algebra. I’ve got A’s in everything else, and I only did it so I could bake us this damned cake, so what’s the big deal?”

He points his finger at me. “You intentionally did this to deceive me.”

“You’re paranoid.”

We don’t speak again before it’s time to head to Demetri’s office. Once inside, Dad makes it about thirty seconds into the session before he starts throwing the whole conversation onto me.

“Derek cut school today.”

I swivel around in my chair to face him. “Well, you came home early, too. Should we talk about that like it’s the end of the world?”

“I can come home whenever I want; I’m my own boss.”

I say, “Everybody’s their own boss. Some people just aren’t smart enough to realize it.”

“Derek,” Demetri says, “let your father speak.”

“He’s turning into his mother,” Dad says. “More so every day. All impulses, no restraint. It’s bad enough he cuts class, but the reasoning. He wanted to bake a cake.”

“That was not on an impulse,” I say. “I planned that for ages.”

Dad keeps ignoring me. “And the way he schemes! I can only imagine the things he does that I don’t even know about.”

As the hour runs out, I pop up from my chair while Demetri is still midway through telling me I need to work on my listening skills. “Well, Doc,” I say, “it’s been great and all, but as you can see, our time is now officially up. You wanna waste another minute of my life, you better get an order from a judge.”

“I’m not a doctor, Derek.”

I say, “I know that, asshole. I was patronizing you.”

I slink out, and Dad stays back a good twenty minutes with Demetri before he comes out to meet me in the hallway.

“That could have gone better,” he says.

I haven’t got a response to that.

We grab a pizza on the way home and eat it at the table with my cake there staring at us like it’s going to explode any minute. Dad keeps eyeing it. “It’s not poisoned,” I say. “I promise.”

He lets down his guard a little. “Where’d you learn to bake?”

“It’s just following directions. I do harder stuff for Miss Hyatt.”

He nearly cracks a grin. “You mean you make it all the way to sixth period sometimes?”

“Hey,” I say, “it’s not my fault if I can ace a class without having to be there.”

“Tell me that again when they fail you for truancy.”

I get up to grab forks and a knife to cut the cake with. “Come on,” I say. “You’ve at least got to try a piece before you say it wasn’t worth it.”

He says, “Get out the milk.”

The cake is pretty tasty. Chocolate has a way of drowning out the rest of the world, even if just for a little while. “Almost a shame,” I say.

“What?”

“Now that the counseling’s over, we’ll have to come up with a new reason to pick a fight every Friday afternoon.”

He grimaces and swipes chocolate from around his bottom teeth with his tongue. “About that…” he says.

“Oh, God.” I drop my fork. “You didn’t agree to more sessions, did you?”

“Not exactly.”

I just look at him puzzled. “Then what?”

He says, “Demetri thinks it would be a good idea if we sent you to some sessions on your own now. With a psychiatrist.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I agree with him.”

“You can not be serious.”

“Derek, you’ve been acting really funny lately. Frankly, every time I think we’re getting along like we’re supposed to, you go and do something I can’t even explain. I’m not saying it’s your fault. If anything, it’s your mother… Not that I’m blaming your mother, either. It’s just—”

“Don’t bother,” I say. I pick the rest of the cake up off the table and throw it at the wall. The plate falls and breaks against the floor, and there’s a wide brown splatter left all over the wallpaper. I say, “Crazy enough for you?” I get up from the table and walk to my room.

* * *

I sob into the phone. “I want to come see you!”

“You can’t see me until Easter.”

“I’ll run away.”

“Don’t you dare, Derek. You’ll ruin things for both of us.”

“I don’t want them prying around in my head.”

“Then don’t let them. Derek, even if you were crazy, you’re a smart enough person to make people think you weren’t. Just tell the shrink what you know he needs to hear, and it’ll be over before you know it.”

“What if they try to put me on drugs?”

“You should be so lucky.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Hey,” she says, “I’m not the one who threw a cake against the wall.”

* * *

I spend a week just crying, I mean, just crying all the time. I want to strangle my dad. I nearly could, I swear. Wednesday comes, and Dad takes me to see the shrink. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it. Seriously, I don’t even want to believe it.

Dr. Shelley’s office is in downtown Lansing. It takes half an hour to get there from home, mostly on account of the traffic—and the meeting is only for fifteen minutes! I’ll see her every Wednesday, which should make for an abusively long hump-day.

The first time I meet Dr. Shelley, I say, “So, what’s your deal? You’re one of these doctors, you want to act like you’re down-to-earth, so you go by your first name?”

“No,” she says. “I go by Dr. Shelley because my name is Meredith Shelley. And I didn’t go to school for eight years so some self-righteous punk could talk down to me.”

I have to smile. “You don’t pretend you’re neutral,” I say. “I like that.”

“Nobody is neutral. We all view the world through a lens, even doctors.”

“Demetri tried to pretend he didn’t have his own opinions about things. It just came off passive aggressive.”
“Well, Demetri is an idiot,” Dr. Shelley says.

I keep smiling at her. “You only said that to get on my good side, didn’t you?”

She nods. “I have no idea who Demetri is. I assume he’s not somebody you made up?”

I shake my head.

“Well, good,” she says. “That’s one less thing to deal with.”

* * *

By February, I get to where I really look forward to staying after school with Miss Hyatt on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know it’s just a lot of busywork, but the rats are fun to play with, and she’s always giving me photocopies of journal articles she knows I’ll find interesting. There’s an article she’s been working on herself that she thinks she may actually be able to publish. She says if she does, and if I help her with the proofreading, she’ll give me credit as a coauthor.

I say, “That doesn’t seem very fair. I haven’t really done anything except wash test tubes and keep notes.”
She tells me I shouldn’t worry about that—that in the world of science, ninety percent of the credit is taken by people who do ten percent of the work. “We call most of those people professors.”

Then she takes out a little box of chocolates to give to me. “Here,” she says. “For Valentine’s Day.”

I say, “But Valentine’s Day isn’t until tomorrow.”

By the look on her face, I suddenly get the sense she’s going to ask me a favor.

“True,” she says. “And President’s day is Monday.”

She tells me she wouldn’t normally ask on such short notice, but her fiancé just surprised her with a trip to Chicago, and she needs someone to watch Darwin and DaVinci over the long weekend. “It’s not safe to leave them for three days,” she says. “If they knock over their water bottle, they could die of thirst.”

I tell her I’ll do it, and since my dad is already planning to pick me up from school, I may as well just take them with me now. We load the two rats into their plastic travel cage, and she gives me enough pellets to make it through the weekend.

When Dad picks me up, I climb into his truck with my big winter coat billowing up all around me and a yellow rat cage in my lap.

“What on earth are you doing with those?” he says.

“I’m assisting Miss Hyatt with an experiment.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I say. “We’ve given these rats a potion, and they’re madly in love. Now we’re going to see if they can make it a whole weekend without killing each other.”

Dad grins. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

It’s pretty fun having the rats around. I spend Presidents’ Day in my bedroom with a towel plugging the gap under the door so Darwin and DaVinci can’t get out while they’re crawling all over the place. They’re neat animals. Rats are actually pretty smart—or at least really curious. They want to explore every inch of the room, and they just about perform acrobatics to climb up on things. At one point, Darwin manages to jump from my bed to my desk chair, then up the chair back and onto my desk. At that point, she nearly squishes herself by knocking over a five-pound math book.

I grin at the thought of having to tell Miss Hyatt that Darwin got herself naturally selected.

* * *

At my February head-shrinking appointment, I go on so much about Miss Hyatt that Dr. Shelly starts getting suspicious. She says, “Derek, do you have romantic feelings for your biology teacher?”

I have to laugh. “Now I’ve got a crush on Miss Hyatt? The last guy thought I was gay.”

“Are you?”

“You tell me.”

She says, “Frankly, Derek, I don’t care.”

I smile. “That’s great. I love that. Maybe I’ll have a crush on you now.”

She smiles back. “Have you been taking your medication, Derek?”

“I have.”

“Your father says you’ve been having fewer mood swings.”

I say, “I don’t think I was that moody to begin with.”

“Mmhm. Do any baking lately?”

I say, “That was a one-time thing.”

“Of course it was.”

She renews my prescription, this time for ninety days. And that’s pretty much the end of the session—fifteen minutes doesn’t last very long. You’ve got to love that about shrinks. It’s like psychiatry from a drive-through window.

Dad is late picking me up, which is really unlike him. It must be the traffic. I bet he decided not to even bother parking and just spent my appointment time circling the city. It’s so cold out in front of Dr. Shelly’s building that I duck down the alley for a break from the wind. As I come to a halt, I notice a maintenance man about ten feet ahead of me holding a joint and looking startled as hell.

I say, “It’s all right, man. I’m cool. No worries.” He’s so relieved, he offers me a hit. And I take it.
When Dad shows up, I hop in, and right away, he wants to know how the meeting went.

I say, “The drugs are working.”

He says, “That’s good news.”

On the way home, we stop at the grocery store to fill my prescription and pick up a few things for dinner. While Dad is at the pharmacy counter, I nose around the produce section. It’s so strange—the dead of winter, and you can buy yourself a great, juicy piece of fruit grown forever away. I admire the navel oranges. There’s one in the pile that’s just so bright, it shines under the florescent lights, and I just pick it up without so much as a thought. I peel the orange like Mom taught me, with the skin in one continuous strip, and then I take a piece and eat it. It is so, so very sweet.

Dad comes up behind me with a paper pharmacy bag in his hand. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “what are you doing?”

I say, “I needed to know if it was as sweet as it looked.”

He takes what’s left of the orange and sticks it back in the pile—like it’s just going to blend in there. He says, “They’re not like grapes, Derek. You can’t do that.” Then he ushers me away from the produce, and we leave the store without getting any groceries.

End of Serial Number Eight. Chapter Nine is coming on August 30th.

Previous Chapters:

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven

Next Chapter

Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Flying to Florida every couple of months doesn’t help the feeling like I’m floating all the time. I tap-dance out of the terminal and catch my mom off guard with her nose in a holiday edition of Entertainment Weekly.

“Mom!”

She’s up hugging me before I have a chance to set my carry-on down. She’s wearing a new perfume that smells just like a little yellow rose. She brushes my bangs away from my face. “Jesus, Derek, you look like a complete stranger every time I see you.”

“You do too.”

She shrinks back. “It’s the hair, right?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Daniel insisted I’d look fabulous in a bob.”

I never heard of any Daniel before. I give her a funny face.

“Oh, honey, he’s just my stylist. The man’s fruitier than a bowl of raspberries.” She giggles, then promptly goes back to clutching her head. “It looks terrible, doesn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “You look just like a celebrity.”

She takes my bag from me to carry and starts walking toward our exit. “Betty Rubble doesn’t count as a celebrity.”

* * *

It’s my first time seeing Mom’s new house in St. Pete. It’s a little bigger than I expected—two stories tall and fairly old. But it’s nice, with pastel-teal stucco and terracotta shingles. We aren’t quite finished pulling up the driveway before I come to realize it’s going to be an interesting Christmas.

I say, “What the hell is that?” There is a white plastic skeleton hanging on her front door.

“That’s Mr. Bones, honey.”

I say, “What, are you trying to set a new trend in wreaths?”

“You could say that.”

I shake Mr. Bones’ hand on my way inside, still confused as to what he’s doing there. Then, “Oh, God…” I drop my bag and start gaping all over the house. There are fluffs of spiders’ web on the curtain rods and pumpkin cut-outs on the walls. In the living room, there’s a shoddy plastic Christmas tree standing by the TV, but instead of bulbs and lights it’s covered in tiny candy pails shaped like cats’ and witches’ heads.

I say, “You’re living in a funhouse.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

She frowns. “Look, I’ll level with you,” she says. “Halloween was the only holiday on steep enough clearance to afford this year.”

“You never heard of a dollar store?”

She shrugs. “Sure. I’ve heard of the Ritz-Carlton, too. Mr. Bones was only thirty-seven cents.”
I say, “Touché.” (See, Joe, that’s the way you do it.)

“You ready for dinner?” she says. “I’m starving.”

“Aren’t you going to show me around?”

“Food first, tour later.”

From the kitchen, I get a pretty good idea what the rest of the house is like. Everything is tiled, including the countertops, in shades of white and apple-green, like living in a giant Granny Smith. It looks like the place was built in the fifties. There are tiny chips and cracks on a lot of the tiles. The table has pumpkin placemats and a cornucopia of plastic fruit for a centerpiece.

“Looks nice, Mom.”

She says, “I hate this kitchen—it looks just like my mother’s.”

If that’s true, I have no idea. Grandma and Grandpa Andrews live in Miami, and I’ve never been there. I think I’ve seen them twice my whole life. I say, “Are we going to see Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas?”

She takes a frozen pizza out of the fridge and throws it on a cookie sheet. “No, honey, your grandpa is an atheist. He doesn’t celebrate Christmas.”

“I know that.” I lean against the counter. “But we are too, practically, and that doesn’t stop us.”

Mom says, “Miami is five hours from here. They may as well live on Mars.” She sets the timer on the oven. “You want that tour now?”

Sheesh, she’s always so sensitive about Grandma and Grandpa. She never says why.

The rest of the place is like the kitchen—outdated but still pretty nice. In the middle of the house, there is an open terrace, like a little courtyard, with red patio tiles and planter boxes. The terrace has doors on one side to the kitchen and on the other side to Mom’s bedroom. Her room is cozy but small for a master bedroom, and its bathroom is about as big as a pantry.

The last stop on the tour is my own room. Aside from a linen closet and a door to the attic, it’s the only thing upstairs. It fits a single twin bed and a desk, both of which look like they came with the place when she bought it, and it also has a view of the terrace.

“I love it,” I say. I set down my luggage inside the door.

“I moved your things from the old apartment.” I didn’t realize I had left anything behind, but sure enough, there’s a box on my bed. “I better check on that oven.” She nods at me like I should settle myself in for a bit.

I wait for her footsteps to stop creaking down the stairs before I move to inspect the box. Inside, good God, it’s the black bikini briefs, along with some balled-up socks and my Orange book.

I pick up the soft, coverless paperback and flip through the pages a few times until the dusty smell drives up into my face. “I nearly forgot about you,” I say, and I set the book down on my new desk. “Never again.”

* * *

“Happy Christmas, honey.”

I roll over, still holding my eyes shut. “What time is it?”

“It’s Christmas time. Get up.”

There aren’t any clocks in my bedroom, so I assume it’s some god-awful early hour. I shuffle down to the living room like I’ve been traumatized by sleep deprivation.

“Pep up, zombie-boy. It’s almost noon, for Christ’s sake.”

“Noon!” I check the clock on the cable box, and sure enough, it’s a quarter of. “Well, why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

Mom makes frozen waffles and microwave sausage for breakfast, which is fine by me. We eat, and she takes a mug of coffee into the living room. There aren’t any candy canes on the Christmas tree, but Mom filled up the little cat and witch buckets with trick-or-treat taffies.

“You really went all-out on the Halloween thing,” I say.

“Nothing half-assed, honey.”

“You sound like Dad.”

She gapes at me. “Blasphemy,” she says. “And on Christmas.”

We open up our presents from the relatives, most of which have wrinkled paper from coming out of FedEx packages. We get covert gifts from Grandma Andrews every year that are generally small and easily hidden from Grandpa, who, according to Mom, would kill Grandma if he ever found out. This year, she gets me a plastic puzzle box with a fifty dollar bill inside. Mom gets a bottle of Irish cream liqueur. “Mother knows best,” Mom says, and she immediately starts pouring it into her coffee.

From Mom, I get an almost-new DVD player that I won’t ask how she acquired, more stale candy, and a book on preparing for the possibility of a real-life zombie attack.

“Thanks Mom,” I say, “this is great.” I have to run upstairs to get my present to her from my luggage. It takes a few minutes before I find the thing crammed beneath my jeans and underwear. It’s a frame with a picture of her and me in it from when I was a baby, when my hair was still blond and my cheeks were always pink. It’s lame, I know, but it’ll do. I don’t think she’s seen any of the pictures since the divorce.

As I’m coming back downstairs with the present in my hands, I see Mom in the foyer with the door open. “Is there something out there?” I say. But before she has a chance to respond, I see it’s not a some-thing but a some-one.

“Mom,” I say, “what is he doing here? No offense, John.”

“None taken.”

“I invited him.”

“When?”

“Ages ago.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t think to.”

She tells John to take a seat by the tree, and I follow her into the kitchen to get him a mug of coffee. “What the hell is this about?” I say.

“The holidays are about spending time with friends and loved ones, honey. John is a very good friend. Besides, I thought you liked him.”

“I do, but still.”

“Lighten up, then.”

It’s awkward as hell watching Mom open her present with John in the room. Doubly awkward when she starts crying over it.

“It was nothing,” I say.

“This means so much.”

“It was nothing.”

John stays for most of the day. He even has some movies with him. We put Christmas Vacation in the new DVD player and spend the whole time it’s playing on a half-assed round of Scrabble. Mom wins by insisting that ‘jumpingly’ is a word, and John and I are too mellow to start an argument over it. We have a frozen lasagna and some wine for dinner, and afterward John leaves.

“Merry Christmas,” we shout through the door as he pulls from the driveway. I’m feeling more merry toward him with a glass of wine in my stomach.

As the door closes, I glance over at my mom. Almost like it’s just floating out of me on its own, I say. “Are you sure John isn’t my real father?”

“What?” she says. “Honey, you’re delirious.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, I’m certain. Of course I’m certain. Where would you ever get an idea like that?”

“It just makes sense.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

She moves back to the living room, puts another disc in the DVD player, sits down on the couch, and pats for me to sit next to her. I do, and we start the movie. It’s like the question never even came up.

“You wanna smoke?” she says.

“Sure,” I say.

Why not? Merry, merry Christmas.

End of Serial Number Seven.  Chapter 8 is coming on August 23rd.

Previous Chapters:

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

Next Chapter

Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”

CHAPTER SIX

I call my mom one afternoon in October, and she’s all giggles on the other end. “Good news,” she says.

She bought a house in St. Petersburg. A house! And she’s still a waitress. She just got back from signing the mortgage papers. John went with her to do it. She says she had him pretend he was a lawyer.

“How is that possible?” I say.

She chuckles. “I just cashed your father’s first alimony check.”

The alimony. Right—I forgot that was part of the divorce. Kind of surprising Dad never said anything about it. No wonder he’s been such a grump lately.

“How’s John?” I say.

“Oh, he’s good. He’s just fine.”

Mom sees John pretty often these days, supposedly just for coffee. She says they’ll keep it up, even with her living in St. Pete and him in Tampa. She says there’s a café near his house that’s worth the half hour drive for the biscotti alone. Personally, I suspect it’s more than shitty little cookies that’s making her go there.

The next thing I say comes kind of out of nowhere. It’s just this thing I’ve been considering for awhile. “How tall is John?” I say.

“Oh, five-six, five-seven. Why?”

“And how tall is Dad? Six feet?”

“So?”

“Just wondering.”

“I like little guys,” she says. “I like you. And you’re a little guy.”

“I know,” I say. “Believe me, I know.”

* * *

By Thanksgiving, I’m so anxious for a break from school, I’m practically excited about the trip to Grandma Barbra’s farm for dinner. Dad and I pile into his truck at dawn. I’m yawning. Seven o’clock is an unnatural hour to wake a person on a holiday. Doubly unnatural when that holiday falls on November twenty-eighth. Happy birthday to me. That’s right, I’m a Sagittarius—my mind is so open, it’s like a cesspool or something.

I wedge an arm against my window to use as a pillow. I try to sleep. When the sun climbs over the hood of the truck, I have to borrow my free arm to use as a visor. No good, though. I give up and punch the power button on the radio. Dad turns it back off.

“I was just checking the time,” I say.

“It’s eight-thirty.”

My stomach starts telling me I neglected to have breakfast, but it’s tough shit on that end—Dad won’t let us have so much as a crumb until we’re sitting down to dinner. He believes a feast isn’t a feast unless you’re starving to death.

My mind drifts to turkey farms and slaughterhouses, and then, out of nowhere in particular, a thought pops into my head that I say aloud: “Do you think a dog would be honored to be eaten by its owner? Like, if it died of natural causes?”

Dad keeps looking straight ahead. “You’re fifteen now, Derek. You have to start watching what you say. People will think you aren’t normal.”

I’m a little surprised. I say, “You remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

“My birthday.”

“What kind of a father doesn’t remember his son’s birthday?” He glances down from the corner of his eye. “Did your mother?”

“Yes.”

“What did she get you?”

“Shampoo.”

A padded envelope came in Wednesday’s mail with ten First Class stamps and no return address. The bottle is brown and labeled in Dutch. The note tucked inside reads, Straight from the Netherlands—bubble gum variety; right up your alley.

“What kind of a present is shampoo?” Dad says.

I grin. “She knows my tastes.”

* * *

You’d think a person elbow-deep in gizzards would be too preoccupied to attend to the torture of her grandchild—but that’s my Grandma Barbra for you. We aren’t inside her door two minutes before she’s calling after my dad, “Oh Howard, give your son his vitamins.” She has the nerve to call cod liver oil a vitamin. Runts like me, you see, we just need more cod livers in our diets.

“Open wide,” Dad says. He’s got the bottle in his hand and a spoon in the other.

“You really enjoy this, don’t you?”

“Immensely.”

“At what point am I old enough to refuse this crap?”

“You tell me.”

Yuck.

Grandma Barbra does not believe in religion or science—or common decency for that matter—but she does believe in fresh poultry. She buys her turkeys from a man she knows personally, lops their heads off on a stump out back, plucks them in her shed, and once the blood’s drained out, she guts the things in her kitchen sink. Grandma has a knack for disembowelments. I mean, she’s really a pro; her flowery little apron stays just as clean as you ever saw it.

A whisper comes from the living room. “Derek…” Cousin Joe is standing against the china cabinet while his dad changes a diaper in front of the TV.

“Hi, Joe,” I say.

Joe is seventeen, thinks he’s twenty-five, and stands with the kind of posture, you’d take him for twice the slacker he really is. His little half-sister gets cleaned up with dollar-store baby wipes. Uncle Rick seems pretty sober. Supposedly he drinks less since the baby was born.

Joe brushes the hair away from his face. “How’s it hanging?” He hasn’t fed me any Milk-Bones lately, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

“Let’s take a walk,” I say.

Joe nods. Dad is distracted with Grandma in the kitchen, and Uncle Rick is wrist-deep in poop. It’s pretty perfect timing for sneaking away.

We slip out the back door and walk along the edge of the property where trees stand, back to the barn where Step-Grandpa Fred used to work on tractors before he got Alzheimer’s. We hide ourselves in the rear and sit down in the grass. The trees around are mostly bare. Clusters of yellow leaves blanket the grass between the barn and the empty field of corn stalk stubs.

“You bring the stuff?” Joe says.

“Yeah,” I say. We make our trade. I give him a small baggie for a little glass pipe.

“For future reference,” he says, “you can buy these things at, like, every gas station in the country. You just gotta ask the right way.”

“For your own reference,” I say, tapping his baggie, “this stuff grows from dirt.”

Joe sticks his nose in the bag. “Good shit,” he says. “Kind of sweet.” He sniffs again. “Where’d you get this?”

“My mom keeps a supply in the pantry.”

“That’s messed up, Cuz.”

Joe suggests we celebrate our exchange by trying the new goods out.

“You have to be joking,” I say. “That’s the most suicidal idea I ever heard in my life.”

“You kidding me?” he says. “Cousin, here’s the first thing you gotta learn about people like your dad and Grandma Barbra—people like that, they’re so caught up tending to the bug they got up their asses, they don’t notice the shit going on right under their noses.”

“You’re crazy,” I say.

“Got a lighter?”

* * *

Grandma scoops a third helping of stuffing onto Joe’s plate. “My, my, Joe. You’ve sure grown a healthy appetite.” She waves her wooden spoon at me. “You could learn from this man,” she says. “Eat like a man, you’ll grow like a man. Howard, put some more meat on your son’s plate. For Christ’s sake, he’s wasting away.”
Dad starts picking up bits of grisly, dark turkey meat and dropping them onto the porcelain plate in front of me. Joe snickers below his breath, waiting for grandma to start yammering again, then motions for me to lean in. “Dude,” he whispers, “they’re so oblivious.”

Dude, we just smoked basil.

Uncle Rick grabs for the baby’s hands to keep her from banging her plate. Grandpa Fred zeros in on a drumstick like it’s the only thing in his universe–which, I suppose, is pretty accurate. Dad nods along to Grandma’s stories.

Joe times his laughing fits to coincide with Grandma’s chuckles at her own jokes. He leans back in his chair until his bulbous little belly sticks out from under its t-shirt, and he stretches his arms back behind his stringy hair. “Touché,” he keeps saying, like it’s the all-occasion quip. “Touché, Grandma B.”

When night falls and the old people start getting ready for bed, I act like I’m heading that way too. Dad and I share the basement together. There’s an old couch down there for him, a sleeping bag for me on the floor. “Shoot,” I say. “I left my duffle bag in your truck.”

Dad’s already under a blanket. “Keys are by the radiator. Don’t forget to lock it up.”

“Will do,” I say.

What kind of person locks their car on a farm in the middle of nowhere—I mean, other than the kind of person with Uncle Rick for a brother?

I snatch my bag from the truck and, since I’m too chicken to sneak back to the barn by myself, I crouch down by one of the truck tires. I fish mom’s present out of my bag and, since I forgot to bring a lighter from home, start working my way through a book of matches I fished from Grandma’s junk drawer. I’m too busy striking the useless things to notice any footsteps sneaking up on me.

“That’s pretty brave, little man, out in the open and all.”

Uncle Rick comes around the truck’s tailgate. “Jesus,” I say. “You scared the piss out of me.”

“You should be more careful. I didn’t think there’d be so many fireflies out this time of year.” I stare up at him, dumb. “Come on,” he says in his long, low voice, “ain’t you learned the sweet-spot yet?” He takes me back to the place behind the barn reserved for debauchery and pulls a lighter out of his pocket, taking my little pipe out of my hands while he’s at it.

“I thought you were sober lately,” I say.

“I’m off the bottle,” he says, and he holds up the pipe next to his face. “This look like a bottle to you?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know you didn’t.”

He takes a deep, long hit, holds it in for ages and then blows out the smoke without any kind of expression on his face. “Good lord,” he says. “What is this stuff?”

“Some kind of hybrid,” I say. “Bubble gum, supposedly.”

“Bubble gum.” He snickers. “Your mother is a hoot.”

“What makes you say that?”

He leans in and pats me a couple of times on the shoulder. “No offence, little man, but you don’t strike me as a guy who’s all that well-connected.” He passes back the pipe. “Too bad about the split,” he says. “Your mother’s a fine woman. Hooked the wrong brother is all.”

Creepy.

We finish up and head inside. Everybody but Joe is sleeping, including the baby who lies face-down on Joe’s chest in the living room. I guess it’s pretty warm there.

“I think we’re safe putting your sister to bed,” Rick says. He takes the baby upstairs to put her down.

I float into a spot on the opposite end of the sofa from Joe. I mean, you know, just float. I stare at the TV. Joe moves with a sort of sluggishness, but he still manages to grab my chin. He turns my face to look in my eyes.

“Jesus,” he says. “Twice in one day, Cuz? You better watch yourself.”

I shrug him off but keep staring at him. “Joe,” I say, “I don’t know anything about you at all.”

He just shrugs. “I’m right here, Cousin. Get to learning.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t think there’s anything there to learn. You and your father, and my father and me, we’re the most worthless people in the world.”

“Speak for yourself, Cousin.” He slides back to the far end of the couch and grabs the remote.

* * *

We get on the road pretty early Friday morning. When Dad notices I’m acting a little queasy, he says, “What’s the matter, you coming down with something?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“You didn’t even ask about your present.”

“My what?”

“Look in the glove box.”

I open it up. There’s an envelope with my name on it. Inside is a generic card and a gift certificate. “What is this?” I say.

“Book-of-the-Month club. I know you like books.”

Kind of thoughtful, really. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The warm engine air spills in through the vents, scented like plastic and pumpkin pulp. We ride on home, and the silence—the silence is so, so good.

End of Serial Number Six.  Chapter Seven is coming August 16th.

Previous Chapters:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Next Chapter

Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Demetri thinks it’s a good idea if we try out a counseling session where Dad and I each get ten minutes alone with him at the end. I wait in the hall outside his office while they’re in there talking. There’s no magazines or anything to look at, just a cheap, framed Van Gogh print hanging on the opposite wall—a self portrait of the man in a straw hat.

Dad stumbles out of the office looking like he needs a cigarette, and he’s not a smoker. I give him my seat and head into the office.

“Is there something the matter?” Demetri says. I’m staring over his head. His office is small. He keeps the window shades just cracked enough to let in the least amount of light.

“No,” I say. He’s got another cheap print over his filing cabinet—two ballerinas, one with her leg up on a pole, the other just watching. I don’t know the artist.

“When’s the last time you spoke to your mother, Derek?”

“Yesterday. After school.”

“You talk to her every day?”

“Most days.”

He nods. Demetri has a little goatee he’s always stroking. It drives me crazy. He says, “When was the last time you spoke with your father?”

“About sixty seconds ago.”

“I mean, when was the last time you had a conversation?”

I say, “I don’t know. A month, I guess.”

“A month is a very long time. You don’t talk at dinner?”

“Not really. He talks about stuff going on in politics. I don’t really listen, since I don’t care.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Is this what you brought me in here for?”

Demetri doesn’t keep notes. He just sits in a seat across from mine with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap. “How about this?” he says. “Describe for me, in your own words, a typical day in the life of your dad. A work day.”

I say, “Well, he gets up. Grabs the paper, hits the john, hits the shower. Skips breakfast. He’s off to work by seven-thirty, back in time for dinner. He watches Jeopardy, watches a movie, watches the news, and hits the sack.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, Derek, you’ve left an awful lot out.”

I spend a few seconds agreeing. “You’re right,” I say. “He stops at Blockbuster on his way home from work. He’s got a subscription I forgot to mention.”

“Derek, tell me what your father does for a living.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Sure you do.”

“He moves dirt.”

“He’s a contractor, Derek. There’s more to it than moving dirt. Your father has to run a whole business.”

“Okay,” I say. “He’s got some guys who work for him. They move dirt, too. And they smell like dirt. Dad likes his shower in the morning, so he goes to bed smelling awful most nights—this in spite of the fact that he’s pretty much a clean freak in every other way. Mom used to scream at him for it, but he didn’t care. He says he has to take his shower in the morning to wake up and taking two in one day would waste water. I don’t know the real reason why he does it that way. He’s just weird.”

Demetri uncrosses his legs. “Do you think he enjoys his work?”

“Nobody likes their job.”

“Sure they do.”

“Do you?”

He gives me a crooked look.

I say, “Did you always want to be a shrink?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, Derek. I just help people talk through their problems.”

I nod. “You didn’t ever want to study art or anything?”

He says, “I wanted to be something I would be good at.”

“So you’re not good at art.”

“No,” he says. “I’m terrible.”

* * *

It’s a Saturday, and I should be sleeping, but I’m up rubbing my eyes in the kitchen at seven o’clock. Dad struts up to the coffee pot and pours himself a mug. “I think this is an excellent idea,” he says. “You know, I was skeptical at first, but that Demetri is an alright guy. I think he’s got the right idea.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. “Because I think he’s an idiot.”

“Get in the truck.”

On Demetri’s advice, I’m stuck spending the only Saturday left in September with my Dad on some kind of take-your-kid-to-work day that’s supposed to somehow make us understand each other better. Dad takes the suggestion like an excuse to torture me. “We’ll make a man out of you yet,” he says, grinning like he’s joking, but he’s only halfway joking. I think he’d love it if I actually enjoyed poking around in the mud.

Dad drives me all the way to Flint, forty minutes east on I-69, to stick me in a hole in the ground with a Dixie cup and a five-gallon bucket. “Cracked pipe,” he says. “Gottta keep the hole dry until the cement truck comes.”

He’s been coming to this jobsite for the past couple of weeks—an old strip mall they’re tearing down to make way for another strip mall. Dad and his men are laying the groundwork and putting in new pipes for sewer and water. “Just think of it like one of your video games,” he says. “Isn’t that Mario a plumber?”

Down the hole, it’s dark and cold. The dank comes off the walls nearly as heavy as it does up out of the leaking pipe. Up top, the sunlight shines through the opening. I crouch on my toes like that’ll keep the water from seeping through my sneakers, and I call up to my dad with a question. “Not to be overly curious,” I say, “but which kind of sewer is this—storm runoff or sanitary?”

Dad’s face twists into knots as he smirks. “You really need to ask?”

Oh, man.

“Watch out for toadstools.”

Toilet water takes on a whole different kind of stench when it’s riled up with suds from laundromats and dishwashers. What’s coming from the pipe is a yellow-gray liquid that smells like pond sludge and lemon Pledge and foams when I dip in the Dixie cup.

It’s a fifteen-foot climb down the manhole to where the pipe spits out its contents on the bottom. It takes me ages to crawl up and down the ladder, and, the shrimp that I am, I can’t fill the bucket more than halfway and still lift it out of the hole. And the rope I tie to the bucket to hoist it out of the hole keeps slipping in my hands, wearing a raw spot. I’m too slow with the whole process and can’t keep the bottom dry, so Dad puts one of his workers, a young one named Jake, up at the top to do the hoisting for me.

“Just stay down there,” Dad says. “Let Jake do the grunt work.”

“But the bucket’s cracked,” I say. “It’ll leak on me.”

“Got you covered.” Dad fetches a hardhat from the construction trailer and tosses it down the hole. “That should keep the slop off your face, at least.”

“This is bullshit!”

Dad is already gone, but Jake shouts down to me. “Watch that mouth, young man.”

Jake is the kind of guy, he’d be really attractive if he weren’t such an idiot. He’s got arms like a man on the cover of a workout magazine and a mouth like a bona-fide prick. I spend the rest of the morning filling the bucket, then squeezing myself against the side of the manhole as Jake heaves the thing to the top. He takes arm-lengths of the rope at a time, and that makes the bucket wobble and slosh like crazy. I close my eyes and hold my breath each time the bucket rises.

Michigan gets cold in September sometimes, especially down a fifteen foot hole. Enough of the slosh rains on me that it starts soaking in through my shirt, and I shiver.

God, I wish I were in Florida.

There’s some yelping bleeps from a back-up alarm when the cement truck finally arrives. I get the hell out of the manhole and hide myself twenty yards away. Dad crawls down the hole with a trowel, and Jake wheels a barrow of the cement to the top, lowering it down to Dad a few gallons at a time with the same old bucket we were bailing with. After what seems like an awful lot of cement for one little patch, my curiosity gets me, and I jaunt back to the manhole to peek down. Dad isn’t patching the pipe at all but covering the whole bottom, pipe and all, in a layer of concrete.

“Won’t that make it hard next time someone needs to get at that pipe?” I shout down at him.

“What pipe?” Dad says.

Dad comes back to the earth shouting out over the whole jobsite, “Lunchtime, boys.”

Jake spikes his shovel into the ground. The others do the same. An old man who everyone calls Pops jumps out of a skid loader. I try to spike one of the shovels, too, but it doesn’t go deep enough into the dirt, and it falls over. I pick it up and lean it against a wall.

We head (my dad, all six of his men, and me) to a greasy little diner across the street from the jobsite. I’m nearly taken out of my misery by a sporadic lane-changer in a Lincoln Town Car as we’re crossing, but no such luck, and I make it to the diner in one piece.

We sit in two booths side-by-side. A waitress comes up with menus. She’s chewing on a French fry. All the men place their orders before the woman can even hand out the menus.

“And you, hun-bun?”

I look up at her. “I don’t even know what you have.”

“He’ll take a Coney,” Dad says. “Flint style, with cheese fries.”

“That all?”

“That’s it.”

The food comes in no time, and I’m staring down at this ugly, greasy chili dog. “I hate Conies,” I say.

“Everybody loves Conies,” Dad says. “It’s un-American not to love Conies.”

“This isn’t even food,” I say. “It’s dog meat.”

“Well,” he says, “if you want to eat real food, you better get good grades, go to Ann Arbor, get a degree, get a job—and buy your own food.”

I could practically stab him with my flimsy fork. “You don’t have to have a degree to eat like a human being.”

Pops takes out his partial dentures and sticks them in a shirt pocket. “He’s got a point, Boss-man.” Pops is eating soup and a salad, rather than something greasy, on account of the fact he’s got a heart condition. “I never got no schooling, and look what a ‘ristocrat I come to be.” He gives a wide smile to show his missing teeth, and his leathery face bunches around the eyes.

* * *

Oh Lord, Demetri wants us to stick with the one-on-one meetings at the end of our sessions. Our second time at it, I go first. I’ve practically still got sewer stink following me around from the results of his last suggestion, so I’m a little sore about the whole process.

“Tell me,” Demetri says. “Do you think you can give me a clearer picture of your father now?”

“Yes,” I say. I hate that stupid ballerina picture on his wall. “My father is an asshole.”

The man just rolls his eyes.

Dad goes in after me, and they’re in there forever talking—much longer than usual. On the way home, Dad acts a little nervous at the wheel. “You know,” he says, “you might be right about that Demetri. The guy, he might be a quack.”

Oh, boy, here it comes. “Why? What did he say?” I start to wish I hadn’t opted for being so snide during our one-on-one.

“I don’t know,” Dad says. “Nothing.” Then he’s back to looking fidgety at the wheel for a moment before something else bursts out of him. “You know what that man said just now? He said, I mean he suggested…” Dad laughs a little. “He says he thinks you’re gay.”

Well, that’s certainly not what I’m expecting to hear.

“Excuse me?” I say.

“I mean, that’s crazy, right? Where would he even come up with a thing like that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “That is crazy. That’s not what I was expecting you’d say at all.”

“Me either.”

“Well, maybe we should just drop the whole subject.”

“Yeah,” Dad says. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

We nod for a second in unison and avoid talking the rest of the way home.

End of Serial Number Five.  Chapter Six will be coming on August 9th.

Previous Chapters:

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four

Next Chapter

Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”