“Green” by Vincent Scarpa

When the light turns green but the truck doesn’t move, I see that Frank, my best friend’s father, has fallen asleep at the wheel. It is five minutes after whatever time the liquor store closes. I know this because we’ve just left Bubba’s Spirits, where the manager had already pulled the drawer from his cash register and begun totaling the day’s sales by the time the three of us came to the counter. The man sold Frank a twelve-pack identical to the one we’d watched him buy earlier that afternoon at a liquor store further from our trailer park, as well as the scratch-off tickets we were promised upon the delivery of good behavior, which we had exhibited in the truck. If the manager smelled beer on Frank’s breath, or if he was worried at all about the safety of eleven-year-olds being driven by a foggy man on foggy roads, the concern was likely outweighed by his desire to finish the transaction, take inventory, and go home.

The red light that turns green is as many streets away from the liquor store as is necessary for Frank to doze off and not a street further. Ben is in the backseat grinding a quarter against his Lucky 7 and wiping away the metallic dust, and consequently doesn’t realize that we aren’t moving when we ought to be. Frank’s head is tilted down and his shoulders are slumped, his posture suggesting that a priest has just said Let us pray. In the cupholder, a half-empty Corona sweats in its cozy like it’s under stage lights. The rear-view mirror is absent of any vehicle that might honk us out of this situation, and for a second it’s as if the whole world has been put on pause. Before Ben can notice, I place my hand on Frank’s forearm and shake off his sleep. He coughs, comes to, and turns left toward the trailer with no blinker. I twist the volume knob and the radio releases a swell of distorted guitar and static.

The brief look that Frank gives me, his eyes meeting mine quickly, makes me feel one hundred years old. It makes me see him as if he’s someone I have made and raised.

And this is the memory I return to ten years later, a passenger now in Frank’s funeral procession. Too soon, too soon is all anyone can come up with, but I think maybe he was already trying to leave then, that night. Maybe he was willing himself to shrink, or melt, or dissolve. Maybe he was halfway to somewhere else in that moment, one foot in a new world of white lightning, but I’d gone and pulled him back.

Vincent Scarpa is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas. His fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Baltimore Review, and Plain China: Best of Undergraduate Writing. He is the 2012 recipient of the Norman Mailer College Fiction Award.