“You okay?” Daltrey asks. “Are you guys getting along okay?”
I fiddle with the cuffs on my wrists. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. Like, Christmas. It’s been… I don’t know.” I sigh heavily. “It’s been a weird year.”
Carlos returns. “Ready to go?”
Daltrey whips his phone out and shows Carlos the image. “I want this, about three inches high, right here.” He points to the inside of his forearm, just below the crease where it meets his upper arm.
“Sounds good.” Carlos peers at the image for a minute before sketching it on a piece of paper.
Daltrey blocks my view. “Perfect,” he tells Carlos.
“Then let’s go.” Carlos positions Daltrey’s arm on the table and pulls a can of shaving cream and a disposable razor from below his station. “You’re a little hairy there,” he explains, shooting the cream into his hand. After he has the area shaved, he gets out his pen and begins to trace the image of what appears to be a young boy on Daltrey’s arm.
“So what’s the story here?” he asks as he makes more detailed strokes.
Daltrey looks at me. “Carlos here is big on stories. He always wants to know why his clients choose the tats that they do.”
“It’s a big deal,” he argues. “I’m putting something permanently on their body. That creates a bond, you know? You can’t mess around with that.”
Daltrey nods. “True. So when I was a kid, before my mom split, she used to read to me every day.” He looks up at me, his eyes sad. “And when she took off, I really missed it. It was one of the few things that was just for us, not my brothers, and I was so sad when it was gone. No one else in my family ever read to me.”
I feel a lump come to my throat. He rarely talks about his mom.
“But then we moved, and there was this little girl living in the house next to us.” He smiles at me, his expression less sad now. “A real brainy little thing, total know-it-all.”
I make a face at him, and he laughs softly.
“One day, I saw her reading a book on her lawn, all by herself, without any grown-up helping her. I couldn’t believe it. My brother Lennon couldn’t even read yet, but here was this tiny little thing in pigtails reading like a damn adult.”
He looks back at the sketch, which Carlos is now adding shadows to. “So I ran inside, all excited and found my favorite book—Where the Wild Things Are. My mom used to read it to me all the time, and we’d act out the wild rumpus thing. She would call me her own mad man, just like Max in the book.” He gets quiet for a moment, and I realize I’m hardly breathing. I think I know where this particular story goes.
“So I bring the book out to our neighbor, and I ask her if she can read it. Of course she said yes because she totally wanted to show off.” He shoots me another smile. “And she read it to me, the whole thing, just like my mom would have done. Didn’t even mess up any words.”
There are tears in my eyes as I stare at him. That little moment of our shared past seemed so inconsequential at the time.
“But it made me sad, in the end, you see,” he goes on, his voice softer. He’s telling me the story now, the part of it that I never knew. “Because at the end of that book, the little boy gets tired of being with the wild things. He hears his mother calling him, and he goes home. But my mom was never going to call me home. She didn’t have dinner waiting for me. And I think that was the day I realized she was never coming back.”
“Daltrey,” I whisper, crying in earnest now.
Carlos has finished sketching, and a perfect representation of Max, in his wild thing costume, is on Daltrey’s arm.
Daltrey shakes his head. “I cried, right there in front of a girl. How embarrassing, you know? But she never teased me, not at all. She just pulled me up from the grass and told me we should pretend like we were the wild things. She made us costumes out of pillow cases and the end of an old mop, and we played and played until I didn’t feel sad anymore.”
I bury my face in my hands, unable to look at him any longer. I had no idea that day affected him like that. I never understood why he asked me to read to him long after he’d learned to do it himself. I hear the legs of his chair push across the tile floor, and then his arms are around me, pulling me into his chest.
“Thank you for that,” he says, a sad sort of laugh in his voice.
“You’re welcome.”
He rubs my back for a minute or so while I try to calm down. When I’ve stopped crying, he pulls back and looks down into my face. “You okay?”