May We Be Forgiven

small fries, and no shake.”
    “Fine,” he says, grudgingly.
    We go to McDonald’s and then to a movie—it’s some kind of 3D kid thing—and after I get used to the glasses and my nausea passes, it’s kind of great. Ricardo laughs so many times in his funny, strange way that he wins me over—pounding me on the arm when he likes something.
    “I have to run a quick errand—do you like hardware stores?”
    “I guess,” the kid says.
    The upstairs toilet needs a new handle. I find the part and then notice the kid poking around. From a couple of rows away I watch as he digs through bins of this and that, and then I see him digging through his pockets. At first I worry he’s shoplifting, but then realize he’s counting out change.
    “How much have you got?” I ask, coming closer.
    “Two dollars and sixty-seven cents.”
    “How much do you need?”
    “Two dollars ninety-nine cents.”
    “Plus tax,” I say. “What is it you want?”
    Ricardo points to a green frog-shaped flashlight that makes a sound like ribbit-ribbit. I give him a dollar.
    There among the nuts and bolts, a slightly older guy says to me, “Nice boy.”
    I smile. “He’s a good kid.”
    And then the man bends and pointedly asks Ricardo, “Where’s your other daddy?”
    Ricardo looks confused.
    “What are you doing?” I ask the guy, immediately protective of Ricardo.
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend, I just assumed you were from a two-daddy family; usually straight families get the white kids and they give the leftovers to the queers.”
    I pin the guy to a shelf. “You have no idea what you’re talking about; you don’t even have a clue.” I’ve got a fiery knot in my gut, and what I really want to do is punch the guy in the nose. All my life I’ve never punched anyone in the nose, but now would be the perfect moment.
    “My father’s dead,” Ricardo says, frightened.
    Realizing my behavior is actually freaking Ricardo out, I let go of the guy.
    “Cocksucker,” the guy says, shaking me off.
    I flip him the bird—another thing I haven’t done in years. Disgusted, the guy walks away.
    “What does that mean?” Ricardo asks, mimicking the gesture.
    “Please don’t do that,” I say quickly.
    “You just did it,” he says.
    “I know, but I shouldn’t have. It’s the kind of thing that can get a fella in a lot of trouble.” We go to the register, and while the clerk rings things up, I grab a couple of glow sticks from the bin at the counter, the kind you keep in your glove compartment for emergencies. I buy one for myself and one for the kid—spending nervous energy.
    “So what does it really mean?” Ricardo asks as we’re leaving the store.
    “What does what mean?”
    “That thing I’m not supposed to do again.”
    “It just means a person is very frustrated. …”
    “I was hoping it was like sign language or like an ancient Indian gesture,” Ricardo says.
    When we’re outside, I snap the light sticks; they spring to life, glowing like alien sabers against the waning afternoon light.
    “Cool,” Ricardo says.
    I hand him one. We pretend to duel—it’s fun. I haven’t played like that in … forever.
    And later, when I drop him off at his aunt’s house, I say, “Hey, I’m sorry about what happened in the hardware store.”
    Ricardo shrugs. “It’s cool,” he says. “You protected me.” And then he gives me a kind of a hug, like how maybe he once saw a kid on a TV show hug a grown-up, or like something from Two and a Half Men that would be punctuated by a guffaw from the laugh track. “Let’s do it again soon,” he says, exiting.

    T hat evening, while looking for something, I find myself in the basement. It’s like a multigenerational storehouse of stuff, skis, golf clubs, tennis racquets, sprinklers, old garden hoses, boxes of glass Mason jars, a good amount of which I suspect was left here by the previous owners and somehow memorialized by George and Jane as ephemera from another era.
    I decide to get rid of it all.
    Four hours later, with a dozen giant green plastic bags dragged to the curb and an overflowing blue recycle bin, I feel as though I’ve mucked out a stall. Someone had to do it.
    Why did George have four sets of golf clubs? Why were there tennis racquets galore and skis so long, bindings and boots so old, all of it caked with a kind of crusty residue, perhaps toxic?
    Finished and filled with a master’s sense of virtue, I microwave myself a late dinner and call