September

Enjoy!

It took Dean three decades and two divorces to finally realize he’d gathered his life’s most valuable lessons from the crusty old timer with no hair and two perfect rows of teeth who had lived right across the street his entire childhood. He was always there, living in the neighborhood’s only pink house, always ready to give him a meal or a scolding, whichever one he needed most. His own mother barely did the one, and though she did the other, it was seldom from the right side of sobriety.

It had been a decade since Dean had seen Solomon. Most days he thought of the old man at least once, other times he would go a month without a thought. Sometimes, Saul barely strayed from his thoughts the entire day.

Dean had waited until about five minutes after graduation before getting the hell out of Dodge. He managed to finish high school, but did so while sleeping a few hours each night on the floor of his own apartment after pulling grave yard at the gas station. He lived in a single room above a garage, rented by a kind family of four who pretended not to know he was only seventeen. Once the caps were thrown in the air, Dean was a dust cloud. He loved Solomon, though not enough to ignore the proximity to his mother, and felt bad about leaving his fifteen year old sister behind, but Maya was whip smart and plenty capable of taking care of herself. Dean saw his sister through high school and college, always tending to her every need. It was at a distance for the first couple of years, but had always been as close as she wanted since.

After trading coasts and spending the next couple of tattered chapters of his life building a thriving business and destroying a marriage, twice and each time in that order, Dean finally returned to California and settled right on the sand of the Pacific.

He could have easily bought a first class ticket for him and all three of the friends he still spoke to in Jersey, but chose to drive cross country instead, stopping for a day or two in every other state and usually at a waffle house. The three day drive took nearly a month and when Dean was finally racing the sun into the edges of the golden state for the first time in fifteen years, something inside him did a little dance. He realized he was excited to be going home, and that home might not be such a bad word after all.

Though he should have gassed up before crossing the Arizona border into Cali, Dean found it difficult to pass a perfectly good chance to race against a dipping red line. He ended his trip in a fit of laughter, slapping the steering wheel with nothing but fumes in the tank, parked beside a pump at the same station where he’d mapped out maybe two-thirds of his future dreams. Dean walked into the station and saw his old boss a second later, fifteen years later and looking thirty years older. His boss had always been kind, working his fingers bloody for thirty years with little hope of retirement.

After a quick handshake and So how’ve you been? Dean offered him twice what the station was worth, in cash, and even threw in the faded black F 150 sitting idle by the pump. “You’re responsible for filling her up,” Dean said with a smile, tossing his old boss the keys.

This was more than a homecoming for Dean, it was a reboot. He had spent the last decade and a half with his eyes fixed just enough on his future to make him turn a deaf ear toward his present. Now something inside him was stirring. It was high time to reconcile all that lay behind him with everything still sitting in front.

He was back in town for three days when one of his best buddies from high school, Jake, came into the station for a pack of cigarettes…

Writer Dad

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