Electro [hs]

Two

 Two ♂

The minute I step off the plane and into Florida the air seems to pull in close and crawl up my ass. It's the kind of wet heat that makes me think of cellophane wrapped tight over a bowl of hot soup and of the little droplets of condensation that form underneath it.

My dad is waiting for me at arrivals. He was a firefighter when my parents were still together, but after the divorce he broke his hip on duty and apparently found Jesus when the doctors crammed a new metal bone into his side. Born-again-Ben, that's what my mother calls him now;  a giant viking of a man with a sandy colored receding hairline, leaning heavily on his stick at the gate.

It's been a couple of years since I've seen him and I suppose he's expecting his little girl to have grown into something in a floral dress with a lot of hair. What he gets instead is me; shiny faced, totally without makeup, sweating through the thick gray hoodie and beanie that makes me look like a creature from a different planet among the Florida women with their bare legs on show, slapping their high heeled flip-flops against the tiles.

He doesn't even register me at first, looking somewhere beyond my shoulder as I approach him, looking for the daughter he was meant to have.

"Dad. It's me," I have to prompt.

He blinks. We have the same gray-blue eyes.

"Wow, Charlie. You look...."

The pause he takes scanning me before speaking is damning.

"You got so tall. Wow," he finally settles on, reaching out to take my luggage. "You still playing basketball?"

"Eh, not really. Mostly I do track and stuff."

There's an awkward silence that passes between us and I find myself listing off my old school extracurriculars to fill it up, "Wrestling. Swimming. Long jump...."

"Lot of sports," he says feebly.

"Yep."

And so goes our emotional reunion at the airport.

I start to wonder just what in the hell this summer is going to be like; stuck in America's sticky armpit with Born-again-Ben trying to make perfunctory, painful conversation with me. On the bumper of his car is a sticker that reads Give God what's right, not what's left, inside, a wooden cross hangs from the rear-view mirrorand he doesn't once ask me about boys or friends or my plans for community college in the fall or anything much at all.

But maybe things might turn out okay, I tell myself; thinking about another Nico situation. France and Switzerland. I can make it through this summer even if it isn't quite what I'd had planned. Even if my plans had mostly involved a casket. Wicker maybe; the kind that burns easily. No burial, just a swift cremation so I could leave my body fast and far behind in a twisting cloud of ashes.

My father lives in a trailer park just outside of Tampa. Well, the sign at the beginning of the drive actually reads Elysium Executive Mobile Homes, but I'm not quite sure what separates a regular trailer from an executive one.

Maybe it's the glare of the whitewash painted onto the metal exteriors of the long row of homes and the too-green green of the turf and trees around them. Maybe it's because there are little white picket fences encircling the trailers, blue and red flags flying and painted shutters in primary paint shades like a crude homecoming poster. I miss the gradients and the grays you find in Minnesota from the minute we step out into the little driveway outside of my father's trailer. Miss them like a hole in the tooth.

"And I've got the other bedroom all set up for you," says dad, thrusting his stick into the scattered gravel of the path and hauling himself towards the front door. "So, I guess...welcome to Florida."