Why’s that, Daddy? asked Lorris.
Because they didn’t play sports as a kid, he answered, wiping his mouth with his napkin. I had set the table, and we used the white ones with blue borders that I liked.
This is how you raise your kids, Mom said. She was twirling her fork in her fingers. She’d gotten home late and he was back early.
My kids, yeah? He shrugged. It’s just true.
The new air conditioner was bigger than the others, mostly because it had extendable plastic wings on the side that were supposed to be for fitting in a window. That afternoon before Mom got back from work, he put it in the kitchen, balancing it above the heater and extending the wings so it sat snug. He got some blocks of wood out of the garage and pushed them underneath.
When she came back she had immediate problems. They had a session up in their bedroom where we couldn’t really hear what they were yelling. When they came down, she was pointing at the kitchen window. How am I supposed to hang the clothes out now? she said. I guess Dad hadn’t thought about that. The clothesline comes out the kitchen window. He moved it one window over.
That was the spring of people breaking their wrists. I had three friends who did, and at least two more from school. Everyone was walking around with casts on their arms and permanent markers in their back pockets to ask you to sign. It happened to our next-door neighbor first—he was playing basketball at the courts by Marine Park, and when he went up for a rebound someone kneed him the wrong way. He fell full on his knuckles. I wasn’t there, but Lorris had been riding his bike and said he saw him waiting for the ambulance, his hand doubled over and fingers touching forearm.
The one wrist I did get to see was right by our house. Behind the house there’s an alley for the sanitation trucks to get the garbage. This way they don’t clog up the avenues in the mornings. Hayden was over and Dad was showing Lorris how to skateboard. The alley has a little hill on each end and dips down in the middle. Dad had him getting speed down the hill and then showed him how to glide. Hayden and I were on our Razor scooters, trying to do grind tricks off the concrete sides of the alley. Then, after Lorris beat his own glide record and Dad was giving him a high five, Hayden decided to come down the hill backward.
Dad wasn’t watching. He was pretending to shadowbox with Lorris, who was saying, I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.
Don’t do it, man, I said. They don’t even try that on Tony Hawk.
It’s gonna be sick, he said, and gave it a little hop to get his speed up.
He made it all the way down before falling. I have to give him credit for that. But then he swerved toward the wall and got scared and fell. He wasn’t even going that fast. All I heard was a squelch, like the sound the black dried-up shark eggs make when we squish them on the beach at Coney Island. It was the same sound. His wrist looked bent sideways. He jumped up and was screaming, My wrist, my wrist, and my dad came running over, Lorris right behind, and that’s when the third air conditioner fell out the window, crashing and breaking into pieces, and my mom yelling from the kitchen, Goddamnit you’re an asshole. Dad and I drove Hayden to the hospital first, but when we got back we swept up all the pieces.
• • •
It wasn’t long after that until it was my birthday, and to celebrate Dad took me out driving with him. It was the weekend, so we had plenty of time. Mom was home with Lorris playing Legos, because in a recent school art project his portrait of the family had her smaller than the rest of us, off in the corner. She’d been at work a lot. I don’t think Lorris meant anything about it. He was always a terrible artist. But you could tell she was upset.
When we weren’t rushed, Dad liked to pull out all the stops in the driving. First he drove us to the parking lot in Marine Park, and let me drive around there for a few minutes. We pulled into and out of vertical spaces. Everybody learned how to drive in the Marine Park parking lot, and the cops didn’t mind as long as you were being safe. I’ve heard they’re much more careful now—they jumped all over the two underage kids last week who ran their mother’s car into a hydrant—but this was a while ago. We were particularly safe, of course, because we were in Dad’s driving instructor car. It had a problem with the wheel so that it lilted a little to the left if you didn’t correct it, but it was perfect and I loved it.