My daughter’s husband broke her jaw six years ago and told her, “Nobody’s coming for you, Tash,” and for six years nobody did. Then an eleven-year-old slid his unworn sneakers over a resale counter in front of me, took forty dollars for a $260 pair, and asked where a kid buys a lock that goes on the inside.
I was in line behind him to get my chainsaw back.
I’d pawned it in August to cover a water heater, and Tariq had it hanging on the wall behind his register with a paper tag on the handle.
He kept a space heater under that register that smelled like burnt dust all winter.
The kid had the shoebox pressed flat to his stomach with both arms.
Gray hoodie, sleeves pulled down over his hands. One backpack strap held together with a zip tie.
The tissue paper was still folded inside the box. The little size sticker was still on one sole.
He’d never put them on.
He turned around and checked me once.
Most kids do. I’m six-five, I’m wide, and my beard comes down to the second button of my shirt. Grown men give me the whole sidewalk.
Then his eyes dropped fast and he set the box on the glass.
Tariq lifted the lid, flipped one shoe over and read the tag inside the tongue.
“Forty,” he said.
The same pair was up on the wall behind him, worn, with a $210 sticker.
The kid didn’t blink.
“Okay,” he said.
No haggling. Not even the face people make.
His thumbnail was chewed to nothing. Somebody had written numbers in pen on the back of his hand, a sum he’d been carrying around all day.
Tariq opened the drawer and started laying out twenties.
I put my hand on the counter.
“When’d you get those?”
He went stiff, but he answered me. “June. My birthday.”
“And you never wore them.”
“I was saving them.”
“For what?”
He shrugged at the bills.
“What’s the forty for, bud?”
He looked at the door. I could see him counting the steps and working out whether I’d be in the way.
“A lock,” he said.
“For what?”
“Our room. Me and my sister’s. The kind with a chain. It goes on the INSIDE.”
Tariq quit counting.
“How old’s your sister?”
“Six.”
“Who are you locking out?”
“My mom’s boyfriend.” He said it to the glass. “He gets loud after his shift. Last night he took the knob off our door with a screwdriver so we can’t shut it anymore.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She works nights at the nursing home. She says he’s just tired.”
He held it together right up until tired.
Then he didn’t.
I slid my hand over the twenties before he could get to them.
“What’s his name?”
“Jake.”
“Jake what?”
“Marino. He drives a beer truck.”
My pawn ticket had been in my other hand. I never felt it go. When I looked down it was by my boot.
Six years ago my daughter Natasha walked into my kitchen at two in the morning holding her face together with a dish towel.
Her jaw was wired for forty-one days.
She ate through a straw. I put pot roast in the blender for her.
Jake Marino. Her husband then.
She wouldn’t press charges. She said if I went near him she’d never speak to me again, and she meant every word.
So I didn’t go near him.
One night I sat outside his apartment for three hours with the engine off. Then I drove home.
Later she told me what he’d said while she was on the floor. “Nobody’s coming for you, Tash. Not even your DAD.”
She moved to Columbus. He moved somewhere I made myself stop looking.
Now he’d moved in with a woman who works nights. He’d moved in with TWO LITTLE KIDS.
And he was taking the doorknobs off.
I got my wallet out and counted $260 onto the glass.
“Those are NOT for sale,” I said to Tariq.
He didn’t argue. He pushed the box back toward the boy.
The kid took a step back. “I don’t need—”
“What’s your name?”
“Amari.”
“Amari, where do you live?”
“Why?”
I could have said a lot of things.
“Because I KNOW the man who took your doorknob off,” I said. “And he knows me.”
He thought about it longer than a kid should ever have to.
Then he told me. Westmoreland Avenue, the yellow duplex with a car seat on the porch.
Tariq held my chainsaw out without ringing it up. I left it on the counter.
I drove. Amari sat with the shoebox on his knees and both hands on his seatbelt.
I called Natasha at a red light.
“Tash. It’s Dad. I found him.”
She went quiet so long I checked the screen.
“Dad,” she said. “You promised me.”
“He’s got two kids in that house, honey. A SIX-YEAR-OLD.”
The light changed. Nobody behind me honked.
“Okay,” she said. Just that. “Okay.”
The yellow duplex had a beer truck parked half on the lawn.
The front door opened before I had the engine off.
Jake came out on the porch in his socks with a can in his hand. He’d gotten heavier. He looked at Amari in my passenger seat, then at me through the windshield.
And he smiled.
“Well, look who it is,” he said. “Duane.”
Amari’s hand went for the door handle.
“Stay in the truck,” I said, and I opened mine.
The bottom step
I didn’t go up the steps.
I walked across the lawn past the beer truck and a pink scooter on its side in the grass, and I stopped with one boot on the bottom step and both hands in my jacket pockets.
I never took a swing at him. Not then and not later.
“Where’s the doorknob, Jake?”
He laughed. It was the same laugh he used to do at Thanksgiving, when he’d carve and call me Pop.
“That’s what you drove over here for? Hardware?”
“Where is it?”
“In my toolbox, where it belongs. Kids slam doors, Duane. Doors cost money.” He tipped the can at my truck. “You picking up strays now?”
The truck behind me had a number painted on the door. 114. Under it was a sticker that said HOW’S MY DRIVING? and an 800 number.
A screen door creaked. A little girl in a pajama top with a cartoon dog on it stood in the gap, one hand on the frame.
“Inside, Bri,” Jake said, without turning around.
She didn’t move. She was looking past both of us at my passenger window. At her brother.
Jake pointed the can up at a black box beside the door with a blue ring lit around the button.
“Say hi,” he said. “That goes straight to Samara’s phone. So go ahead and do what you came to do.”
The tire iron
The night I sat outside his apartment, there was a tire iron on the passenger seat.
I’d taken it out from behind the seat on purpose. I’d wiped it off with a shop rag, like that mattered.
Three hours. His kitchen light went off at eleven-forty. His truck was right there under the streetlight.
What I kept seeing was the straw. Natasha at my table with a coffee mug and a bendy straw, trying to get soup in past the wire without it running down her chin. She’d stopped looking in mirrors. She ate with her back to the window.
The night she came in with the dish towel, before we went to the ER, she let me take three pictures of her face with my phone.
“In case,” she said. It was hard to understand her. “Don’t you ever show anybody, Dad. Not anybody.”
I didn’t. They’re still on my phone in a folder by themselves. I never named the folder.
A year after, when she was living in Columbus and the wire was long gone, she told me something else on the phone. Like she was telling me what she’d had for lunch.
“First apartment, he took the bathroom doorknob off. Said married people don’t need locks.”
I asked what she’d done.
“Nothing. I peed with the door open for two years.”
Everybody liked Jake. My brother-in-law liked Jake. He brought the cooler to every cookout and remembered your kids’ names. When Natasha told people she’d fallen on the basement stairs, half of them asked how Jake was holding up.
I drove home that night at a quarter to three with the tire iron on the seat. I slid it back behind the seat in my driveway, and I left it there.
Standing at his steps, I could feel exactly where it was. Behind the seat of the truck Amari was sitting in.
It had been there six years.
The fridge
“Tash send you?” Jake said.
“No.”
“She still in Ohio? She still telling people I pushed her down the stairs?” He came down one step. “Because you know what I told Samara, the day I moved in? I told her about you.”
He let that sit while he drank.
“Crazy ex-father-in-law. Sat outside my building half the night. Wouldn’t let it go.” He smiled again. “She’s got your picture on the fridge, Duane. Off your Facebook. Says if that man ever shows up, call nine-one-one.”
I looked past him through the screen. I couldn’t see a fridge. I could see Bri’s bare feet and a basket of laundry on a couch.
So I tried the easy thing.
“Hey, Bri,” I said, as quiet as I can get, which isn’t very. “Your brother’s in my truck. You want to come sit with him till your mom gets home?”
She took her hand off the door frame.
“Don’t,” Jake said to her. Then to me, still pleasant. “You put my girlfriend’s little girl in your truck, I call it in. Big stranger off the street, taking kids. And look.” He tipped his head at the blue ring. “There’s my evidence.”
Bri put her hand back on the frame.
On the other half of the duplex a door opened. A woman about my age came out in a bathrobe with a cigarette and her phone.
“Jake, you okay?”
“I’m fine, Kathleen. This guy’s harassing me.”
She looked me up and down, all six-five of me, and she didn’t need any more than that.
“Those kids are fine,” she said to me. “He’s good to those kids.”
“Ma’am, he took the knob off their bedroom door.”
“So they quit slamming it.” She lifted the phone. “I’m calling Samara. She’ll want to see this.”
The hook and eye
I went back to my truck. Not because Kathleen told me to.
Amari had the window down two inches. The shoebox was still on his knees. He’d heard all of it.
“She’s gonna be mad,” he said.
“At you?”
“At you. Then at me.”
I leaned on the door. The truck rocked a little under my weight, and he grabbed the box.
“Amari. Has he done this before? The door.”
He thought about whether to tell me. I let him think.
“The bathroom one was first. Back in spring.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Then Mom got a hook-and-eye at Dollar General. The little kind. She put it on our door herself, in September, with the screwdriver from the kitchen drawer.” He was talking to the box again. “Jake pulled on the door one night till it came off the wood. The screws were still in the hook. Mom was in the hall.”
“Your mom saw it.”
“She picked up the screws. Then she said he was just tired and went to work.”
He’d been holding the size sticker under his thumb. He peeled it the rest of the way off the sole and stuck it to his jeans.
“That’s why I had to buy one,” he said. “She put the first lock on. He took it off.”
The screen door banged up on the porch.
“Amari,” Jake called. Easy, like calling a dog. “Inside, bud. Your sister’s hungry.”
Amari looked at the porch. At Bri.
“I can’t leave her in there,” he said.
He left the shoebox on my seat, got out, and walked up the steps past Jake.
The screen door slapped shut behind him.
Scrubs
Samara’s car came around the corner eleven minutes later, a silver Corolla missing a hubcap. Kathleen had stayed on her porch for all eleven.
She parked behind the beer truck and got out in purple scrubs with her badge still clipped on. She was younger than I’d figured. She had her keys between her fingers.
Jake came down the steps to meet her. He put his hand on her back.
“Babe. This is him. The one I told you about.”
She looked at me. I was standing in her grass with my hands in my pockets.
“I know who you are,” she said. “I’ve had your face on my fridge since March. Get off my lawn before I call somebody.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I didn’t move off the lawn. I took my phone out instead and called Natasha.
She picked up before it rang twice. She’d been waiting.
“Tash, I’ve got Samara here. I’m putting you on speaker.”
Jake laughed. “Oh, come on.”
I held the phone out. Samara didn’t take it, but she didn’t walk away either.
“Is this Samara?” Natasha said. Her voice still goes careful on certain words, the ones with a lot of jaw in them.
“Who is this?”
“I was married to Jake. Can I ask you one thing, and you don’t have to say anything back.”
Samara looked at Jake. He shook his head at her and grinned. Like, can you believe this.
“Did he take the doorknobs off yet?” Natasha said.
Samara’s keys stopped.
“Bathroom first,” Natasha said. “Then the bedroom. He told me married people don’t need locks. Did he tell you that one?”
Samara turned her head and looked up at the screen door. Up at where the knob should be on a room she couldn’t see from the yard.
“How do you know about the bathroom,” she said.
“Because it’s the same house,” Natasha said. “It’s just a different street. Dad, show her.”
I opened the folder with no name and turned the phone around.
Unit 114
Samara looked at the first picture for a long time. Then the second one. She didn’t ask for the third.
Jake did all the talking after that.
“She FELL, Sam. She was drunk and she fell down the stairs, ask anybody in Hempfield. That whole family’s nuts. He’s been sitting on this for six years, you understand that? Six years. He’s sick.” He pointed at me with the can. “You’re gonna believe a phone? I pay the electric in that house. I fixed the dryer. Who fixed the dryer?”
“Go get the doorknob,” Samara said.
“I’m not getting the doorknob.”
“Go get it out of your toolbox and put it back on their door.”
“Sam. Look at me. You want to wreck your whole house over a doorknob? Because of HIM?” He came across the grass at me. He was breathing beer. “You came here for this. So do it. Swing. Camera’s right there.”
I kept my hands in my pockets.
He looked at my hands. Then at the camera. It took him a second to get it. I wasn’t going to give it to him.
He put both hands on my chest and shoved.
I’m sixty-three and my right knee has been bad since the Clinton years. It went. I sat down hard in the grass next to the pink scooter, and my phone landed face up with Natasha still on it.
“Dad?”
Samara’s phone buzzed in her hand. Then again. She looked at the screen, at the little clip the doorbell had just sent her of her own front yard.
“He came at me,” Jake said. “You saw him, he came at me.”
“I’m watching it,” Samara said.
Jake looked at her a while. Then he threw the can in the grass and walked toward the beer truck, digging in his pocket for keys.
I got my phone out of the grass. I didn’t get up. I couldn’t yet.
I hung up on Natasha, which I’d never done in her life, and dialed the number off the sticker.
When a woman answered I said, “Your unit 114 is parked on a lawn on Westmoreland Avenue in Greensburg. The driver’s had at least two beers that I saw and he’s getting in it right now.”
Jake stopped with one hand on the truck door.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “That’s my CDL.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman on the phone said to me. “Can you stay on the line?”
I said I could.
Samara had her own phone at her ear. She said the address twice, slowly, and then she said, “He pushed a man down in my yard. A sixty-something man. I’ve got it on video.”
Jake stood in the grass in his socks between his truck and her car.
“Nobody’s coming, Sam,” he said. “Who’s coming? Him?” He pointed at me, sitting in the grass. “Look at him.”
She didn’t look at me. She walked past him, up the steps, and went inside.
Kathleen put her cigarette out on the rail and went in her side and shut her door.
The cruiser came up Westmoreland with no siren, and Jake sat down on the bumper of the beer truck to wait for it.
Samara came back out before the officer had his door open. She had the doorknob in her hand, and she put it in mine.
Tariq’s counter
Two Saturdays later I went back to Tariq’s.
The chainsaw was gone. The hook it had hung on had a leaf blower now.
“Thirty days, Duane,” he said. “I held it two weeks extra. Guy from Latrobe.”
“That’s fine.”
He reached under the register, next to the space heater, and set a paper bag on the glass. Inside was a chain lock in a plastic clamshell, brass, the kind with the slide.
“I don’t take money for this one,” he said.
At the yellow duplex there were two ruts in the lawn where a truck used to park. The scooter was standing up against the porch rail.
Samara let me in without saying much. She’d taken the picture off the fridge. There was a rectangle of clean white where it had been, and a magnet from a pizza place holding nothing.
I put the knob back on the kids’ door first. My knee didn’t like the kneeling, so Amari held the screws for me in his palm and handed them up one at a time.
He had the sneakers on. He’d been wearing them since the day after. The white was already gone gray at the toes.
Natasha was on speaker on top of the dresser. We talk on Sundays now. This wasn’t a Sunday.
“Higher, Dad,” she said. “Up where a grown man can’t reach in with his arm.”
I moved the pencil mark up. Bri sat on the bottom bunk and watched me drill like it was television.
When it was in, I stepped out in the hall and Amari shut the door on me.
The chain went across from the inside.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who would have gotten out of the truck too.
For more family stories where old wounds surface in unexpected ways, read about a father’s birthday lunch that took a sharp turn and a daughter waking from surgery asking for two people – and neither was her mother. There’s also the brother who sent a seat by the bathrooms, just before Washington called.
