Sprout

you know, the idea I was good at something. You show me a teenager who doesn’t like to be flattered and I’ll show you a teenager who’s got a steady source of sex. Since it seemed pretty clear Mrs. Miller wasn’t going to let me catch my bus till I gave her an answer, I told her it’d be up to my dad.
    Mrs. Miller looked at my hair one more time.
    “You mean, Mr. Sprout?”
    Something about the way she said it told me she was a little curious about Mr. Sprout.
    She was punctual, I’ll give her that. She showed up at my house at 11 A.M. the first Monday after school let out. I heard her pulling up the driveway and went out to meet her in an attempt to head off the whole Mrs.-Miller-meet-Mr.-Sprout scene, but my dad, who has been known to say “Is that you, Sprout?” when I walk past him in the living room in the morning (as though anyone else might be in our house at 8 A.M. ) decided that today he was taking a paternal interest in my welfare, and followed me outside.
    “This is my dad,” I said to Mrs. Miller. “He’s drunk.”
    “I am drunk,” my dad raised his glass, guilty as charged. “Nice to meet you,” he said, and went back inside.
    I got in the passenger’s seat and waited. Mrs. Miller was staring slack-jawed at my house. You might think she was staring at the invisible figure of my dad, but I was pretty sure she was just staring at the house. Most people stare at my house when they see it for the first time.
    She stared at it.
    After a minute or two she closed her mouth with an audible click. Then:
    “Is that … kudzu?”
    “Kudzu, grapevine, Virginia creeper, morning glories, bindweed, and ivy, both English and itch. Oh, and my dad planted sweet peas this year, but they haven’t come up yet.” I had the list down pat.
    Mrs. Miller managed to tear her eyes from the trailer, looked around the yard.
    “And the—?”
    I nodded my head yes, she was seeing correctly. “Stumps.”
    A nervous smile flickered over Mrs. Miller’s mouth.
    “Stumps.”
    She turned and looked at me. There was so much hairspray on her tortured bangs that when the tips tapped against the lenses of her glasses they actually clicked.
    “ Stumps ?”
    The house first:
    The day after we moved here my dad left me to arrange the furniture however I wanted while he returned the U-Haul. After the taxi brought him home, he didn’t come inside to see what I’d done. I was particularly proud of the pair of dining room chairs I’d balanced on two coffee tables and draped with an old sheet to make a tent, blinkily lit from within by a couple of strings of Christmas lights; since we didn’t have a dining room anymore (or, for that matter, a dining room table), it seemed as good a place as any for them. Instead he just walked around our trailer, taking liberal sips from the long-necked bottle of hooch he’d brought back from town. I followed him from window to window, wondering what he was doing. After about the tenth revolution he suddenly stopped, turned, headed into the forest. He had the air of a man setting out on a long journey. Part of me wondered if I’d ever see him again. A larger part wondered what was for dinner. Not that we had anything to eat off of. My ears hadn’t deceived me: every single dish I’d packed in the backseat of the Taurus had smashed to pieces.
    He was back an hour later, covered in dirt, his arms full of plants. Not just any plants: vines, which draped over his shoulders and tangled in his legs and trailed behind him for dozens of feet. It made me think of when you take your first bite of cup-a-noodles and you get a big glob of ramen plus like a foot more spiraling off your spoon. Or maybe hunger made me think that. At any rate, magnify that image by fifty (and paint it green) and you sort of know what my dad looked like.
    I.e., he looked like the Wild Man of the Forest.
    I.e., he looked crazy.
    Suddenly I was a little less hungry.
    Since we didn’t have a shovel (we’d had a shovel, on Long Island, two in fact, but neither made it into the U-Haul: yup, Christmas lights but no shovel, that’s my dad) he used a stick to dig a shallow trench around the trailer, into which he planted the vines he’d taken from the forest. It was only the next morning when he was more or less covered by a rash that we realized some of the vines must’ve been itch ivy. The rash went away but the vines didn’t. Now, four years later, our trailer is covered in a shimmering green cocoon more than a foot