Just One

by Richard Boe

His father said he was only going in for one.

He said it through the half-open driver’s window with the easy certainty of a man saying something he expected to be believed because he had said it often enough before. The boy sat in the passenger seat with the seatbelt still on and nodded as though he had been consulted in some meaningful way. Outside the pub the late afternoon had gone the colour it went in summer when the heat did not so much lift as alter its mood, the white of it dimming into yellow, the road giving back the day in waves. The wall of the pub held the heat too. Everything did.

“Just one,” his father said again. “Then we’ll head off.”

The boy nodded once more.

His father took the keys from the ignition but left the window cracked at the top. He shut the door carefully, as though carefulness itself might prove the shortness of the errand. Then he crossed the carpark without looking back, one hand already in his shirt pocket for cigarettes, and disappeared through the side entrance beside the gaming room sign.

The boy watched the door swing shut behind him.

He had been left in the car before. Not often enough to count as a routine if someone official were asking, but enough that there was a way to do it. First you waited properly. It made things worse to act restless too early. Restlessness could offend a man who might otherwise have returned in a decent mood. So you gave it a fair go. You sat still. You looked out the window. You did not check the time too much.

He waited until he felt he had done the first part well, then he undid the seatbelt and moved across a little towards the strip of air from the window. The vinyl seat had left a hot pattern on the backs of his legs. He lifted one thigh and then the other to peel himself loose without making a noise. After that he arranged his tasks.

Across the road was the tyre place, shut now, its roller doors down and a calendar still hanging in the office window. Next to that was the chicken shop with three white plastic tables outside, two empty and one occupied by a woman and a teenage girl sharing chips without speaking much. Past that was the chemist, then the hardware place, then the bottleshop joined to the pub but not directly, as if even buildings preferred a little discretion.

He counted the parked cars in the lot, then counted them again to see if he had missed one. He read the number plate on the SUV beside them backwards and decided that reading number plates backwards was only satisfying when there was a Z in it or maybe an M. He looked at the dashboard clock and then immediately regretted it. Time moved worse once you had challenged it.

He put his hands under his thighs for a minute to cool them.

From where he sat he could see part of the pub through the front windows. Not enough to distinguish faces. Just movement and shadow and, every now and then, the pale blur of a shirt moving past the glass. He looked for his father without expecting to find him. Outside the pub his father had the ordinary singularity of a father. Inside it he became harder to pick from the rest of them.

In the pocket of his shorts was the remains of a Mintie, warm now and sticking to the wrapper. He worked it loose with one fingernail and put it in his mouth. It tasted mostly of pocket lint and old sugar. He kept the wrapper because there was no use making rubbish in the car.

A Falcon with one door in primer pulled in two spaces over. A woman got out, not old but made older by the way she checked her handbag before shutting the door. She looked into the back seat first. There was a child asleep in there, about four maybe, with his mouth open and one hand looped through the strap of a stuffed dog. The woman stood for a few seconds with the back door open, thinking. Then she shut it carefully and went inside.

The boy watched her go.

It made him uneasy, though not for any proper reason. Children were left in cars all the time. He himself was in a car and was not dead. What bothered him more was the pause she took before shutting the door, the way she had stood there as if doing sums in her head and disliked both answers.

A man came out of the pub and stood near the entrance lighting a cigarette. He had no shirt on under his flannel and wore thongs blackened by old dust. He smoked with his head tilted up as if scenting rain, then coughed into his fist and spat into the garden bed. After that he looked over the parked cars in the loose, uninterested manner of people already occupied, and let his eyes rest briefly on the boy’s car, not long enough to count as interest, only long enough for the boy to feel that he himself had been noticed as part of the afternoon.

He slid a little lower in the seat.

The heat in the car had changed by then. It was no longer the fierce first heat of being shut up. It had settled into something more tiring. The air smelt of bitumen and old chips and beer from somewhere and the faint sweet dust from the floor mats. He opened the glovebox.

Inside were the usual things: a torch that probably did not work, three pens that definitely did not, two pairs of scratched sunglasses, the registration and insurance in a plastic sleeve, and a service station receipt folded twice through the middle. He took out the receipt and flattened it on his knee. Fuel. Two sausage rolls. Winfield Blue. One chocolate milk. He found this comforting for reasons he could not have explained. It proved the car had been somewhere else. It proved there had been another day arranged by ordinary wants in an ordinary order.

He folded the receipt smaller. Then smaller again. Then into a square no bigger than a fingernail.

A dog appeared in the tyre yard across the road, a rangy brown thing with one ear bent over. It moved along the fence and out into the light as though it had been sent to fetch something and forgotten what. The boy watched it for a long time. It sat eventually in the one strip of shade beside the skip and scratched itself with calm concentration. He liked that about dogs, the way they could commit to a discomfort properly.

The woman from the Falcon came back out.

The boy sat up a little, thinking she was finally going to collect the sleeping child and go, but she only opened the driver’s door, reached in for a packet of cigarettes, and leaned against the roof to smoke one with her eyes closed. When she had finished she opened the back door, checked on the child, stood there for a little while, then shut it again and went back inside.

The boy looked away before she could catch him.

He had still not looked at the clock again, which pleased him. Instead he counted the tables outside the chicken shop, then the bricks along the lower wall of the pub between one drainpipe and the next. He made a rule for himself that he would not check the time until the truck from the bakery went past, because it often did around then. If it had already gone past without him noticing, that would mean quite a lot of time had passed after all.

He waited for the bakery truck.

It was not the bakery truck that came first but a little hatchback with two girls in it singing very hard to something on the radio, then a man on a bike towing a milk crate with rope, then the council car that always seemed to go slowly enough to inspect people’s business without being accused of it. After that came a truck from somewhere else entirely and he nearly let himself use that, but didn’t. Rules were no good if they shifted for convenience.

By the time the actual bakery truck went past he had become thirsty enough that the idea of asking for a drink when his father came back took on a kind of shape. He rehearsed the tone in which he would ask. Casual. Not accusing. A boy could not sound too dry in the mouth or too put-upon. If he heard reproach where none had been intended then the whole thing would go off in the wrong direction.

He checked the clock.

This time enough time had passed to annoy him properly.

His father had never said not to get out, but that had always been understood. The rule was less about danger than appearance. A child outside a car in a pub lot was a statement. A child inside it remained an arrangement. He put his hand on the door handle. Then he stayed where he was and folded the receipt open and shut until the paper began to soften at the creases.

The sky above the buildings had taken on that pale silver-blue that came before evening properly admitted itself. A truck on the main road rattled the windows. Somewhere nearby glass was tipped into a bin. His favourite sound. Farther up the street, someone opened a car door and a burst of music came out, then the door shut and took it back.

When his father finally returned it was close enough to dark that the first streetlights had come on.

He crossed the carpark a little too briskly, in the way of men trying to disguise that they had not meant to stay as long as they had. He had one beer on him and several more in his face. The boy knew the look. It was not drunkenness exactly. More a rounding-off, as though some edges had been packed in wool.

“Sorry, mate,” his father said, getting in and not quite looking at him yet. “Ran into Kev.”

The boy nodded. He had no clear idea who Kev was. There was always a Kev.

“Thought you might’ve dropped off.”

The boy shook his head. He tried not to let his face react to the newfound drawl of his fathers voice.

His father put the key in the ignition, then paused.

“Hot, was it?”

“Just a bit.”

His father started the car. Air came weakly through the vents, smelling old and mechanical.

“You right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

His father nodded, as though this were useful and sufficient information, then reversed carefully from the space.

As they pulled onto the road, the boy looked out at the Falcon. The woman had not returned. The sleeping child was still just visible in the back, his face pale behind the darkening glass. He wondered if the child could count yet. Then they turned the corner and he lost sight of it.

They drove for a while without speaking. The radio was on low, with the sort of songs that filled evening without demanding anything. Halfway home they passed the chicken shop and his father said, in the tone of a man producing a solution where none had formally been requested, “Might get some chips on the way yem.”

The boy said alright.

His father pulled in and came back with chips and two dim sims and a can of Coke, and they ate in the car with the paper spread between them on the centre console. The dim sims burned the roof of the boy’s mouth a little and the chips were too salty, but it was good enough. He drank from the can first because coldness seemed more important than sweetness just then. His father put one arm out the window and drove one-handed after that, and once or twice sang a line ahead of the radio in a voice almost tender with itself.

The boy looked out at the shops and houses sliding by and thought only that it was better to be moving.

When they got home his father said, “Good as gold,” in the tone of a man drawing a line under a thing.

The boy took that to mean the day was over.

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