Mac tapped his pencil along to Travis Tritt on the radio thinkin bout how badly he wanted to be like the boy in the song, so much so that he even spent one week’s pay from the Tastee Freez on a pair of Levis, speakers, a composition notebook, and a pencil, and had spent the whole day in his room singing lyrics and saving the good ones for the notebook and letting the bad ones die in the air, and he sang over and over until his old man came in, screamin, talkin bout what the hell is with all the ruckus boy the ‘Stros are on and Mac tried to explain to him, tried to tell him that he wanted to be a famous singer, wanted to write his own songs and travel and see the rest of America, the parts in the movies, wanted to maybe even learn guitar down the road but his old man propped himself on the doorframe with a forearm and laughed and told him that for every Travis Tritt there’s a million fellas you ain’t never even heard of who can’t put food in their own bellies let alone play on the radio, and that made Mac get embarrassed and maybe even a little mad so he turned away, but his old man let himself off the doorframe, came a step further in his room and said it’s fun to want things and fun to think about em but a man gotta do right by hisself and everyone round him and make an honest dollar, that way he can have a house and food and kids and shit like that, the good shit, the shit they sing about in them songs anyways, so Mac nodded his head more so to get his old man to leave his room than anything but his old man kinda lingered there at the foot of the bed because he could tell he was supposed to keep going but he didn’t really know what more to say, just had the feeling that he was supposed to say something more to his son and so he did something he didn’t do very often, which is that he said something about himself, and he said that when he was a lil boy, prolly round Mac’s age or so, he actually wanted to race cars, wanted to be like Bo Duke, slidin on hoods and shit, and he wanted to do it on a track and go in circles and hear the cheers cause, and I know it sounds foofy lah lah, he said, but I figured they’d never stop cause there was so many laps, they’d always jus be cheerin and I’d always jus be drivin, but then you came along, or rather your momma came along, and she was damn pretty, prettier than I’d ever seen and we couldn’t help ourselves, we was like jackrabbits and okay, Mac said, okay okay God ew I hear ya, but listen, his old man said, listen cause when we got down to it, he said as he sat on the corner of the bed he had bought for his son, you happened and I knew I couldn’t be Bo Duke and pay for diapers at the same time and so I talked to Red and gotta good job, a solid job at the refinery, and I worked my ass off cause I wanted my boy to have more food than I did and wanted to buy baseball gloves for him and hell even a fuckin car one day if he keeps his nose clean and shit and okay Mac said, okay okay he said, shooing with his hand, still facing the wall, but anyways, his old man continued, that’s all I’m sayin, that’s all, I just wanted to say, that I doubt to high hell I’d have been any happier goin round in circles the rest of my life, plus chances are those circles woulda been to the food bank and back and I aint no fuckin sissy lookin for a handout boy you know that and Mac accidentally snorted a laugh and turned his head a little at him with an upturned eyebrow and that made them both laugh and even look at each other a bit, just a quick bit, before Mac laid back on his bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling while his old man sat in silence with him for a minute, maybe two minutes, and he half realized this doesn’t happen that often, him just sitting around with his boy, so he looked around the room a bit taking it in, and he got the urge to tell Mac to clean this damn mess up but one thing at a time, so he bit his tongue and he just nodded, slapped Mac on the thigh a couple times, and went into the living room to eat his pork chop and drink his beer and watch the ‘Stros blow a goddamned ‘nother one, and Mac laid there for a bit, imagining the popcorn ceiling specks as zoo animals or movie stars, before slowly picturing them all as the individual tops of heads in a giant swarming crowd, a crowd screaming out Mac Mac Mac Mac, and then he got up and shut the door and decided that he’d write that night anyway, to hell with his old man, he thought, he was gonna be somebody just like the boy in the Travis Tritt song and he hushed his lyrics and made em quiet,

but all the while he couldn’t shake the idea of himself in the General Lee going around and around and around like his old man said he would and he kept at it for a couple days but on the third day he kinda stopped doin it, took a day off, then a couple days, and soon his notepad made him guilty, made him stressed and mad to even look at it, so he hid it under a stack of Rolling Stone magazines, where it couldn’t look back at him, and he laid on the ground instead of his bed, wanted to be further away from the popcorn ceiling crowd, and he threw a baseball in the air to himself and thought about what he’d do when he was 18, what he’d do if he really had to get a good job, a solid job, and he didn’t really have any idea other than he’d probably work at the refinery like his old man and everyone else in this damn town and by the time he got to that age the momentum of that half thought had snowballed to a speed greater than that of any other active decision and so that’s actually exactly what he found himself doing after he graduated high school and he even met a girl at Thirsty Jonny’s while out with the rest of the guys from the job one night and he took her to Tastee Freez on their first date and his old boss still worked there and he thought that would make him sad but it actually made him proud of his old boss and a little prouder of himself and he chucked his chin up at him before ordering, but his old boss didn’t recognize him, on account of he was too tired to ever work up the energy involved in ongoing recognition, but Mac thought it was on account of the bulk he’d put on working on the rig and that made him more confident on the date which allowed him to keep his mouth shut long enough to pique her interest, long enough that they kissed once at the end of the date and she tasted like rocky road, Elizabeth Lee was her name, and she liked that he held a steady job and that he only drank three beers the first time they met at Jonny’s, that he was different than her old man in both those ways, and that he said beautiful little mushy things to her when they were alone, that he was different than any of the men in town in that way, and she even, over time, got to a place of trust where she believed those beautiful little mushy things, so they ended up going steady for a year and two months before they got married and Mac put down on a condo on the outskirts of town where the other families were, most of the guys from work with families lived around those parts, not great but not bad, and he got pretty good at BBQ on account of the space he now had with which to do it, even though he was tired most days and they didn’t get to share as much time together as they wanted, but they found that made them hungrier for each other when they could, and even when they couldn’t they tried to do little things for each other like the nights when Elizabeth Lee would peel his sweaty shirt off his body and massage the thinning hair on his head in the shower and or when he would fix the toilet when it went on the fritz or she’d put on a pot of coffee before bed, when he had a night shift and he would blow raspberries on her stomach to make her laugh when he got home and she was still asleep and they always laid together in bed after making love, when they had the time to, and she would talk about her job at the dentist’s office and how silly people sounded on the phone, like they were speaking in cursive, and about what her favorite candies were and what they’d get from the grocery store if they were millionaires and all the while they would hold each other and he liked the way her hips felt rounded and sound in his hands, even after the kids, especially after the kids, the power that he felt under her skin, the candied bewilderment he felt from this body that brought life into the world, two lives specifically, both boys, but she felt so grounded to the earth and even though sometimes her nobility scared him he found that she actually terrified him even more with how much love he saw looking back at himself in her eyes, far more than he saw looking back at himself with a Bic and Barbasol in the mornings, but he liked that glowing fear everyday, it kept him on his toes and coming home instead of running around like most of the fellas on the job, and they weren’t perfect but they kept their home as level as they could and their boys grew up healthy and strong and Mac made em ribs and beer brats, and Elizabeth Lee taught them how to spit sunflower seeds, and Mac loved watching their boys play together, he even pretended not to notice when, one night, they conspired together to steal a few of his Bud Lights just cause the thought of them working in cahoots together moved him so damn much, in fact that feeling caught him so off guard that he hustled to the garage with what he initially thought to be a surge of vertigo, maybe even a heart attack, and he tried not to get all worked up, and he bent over the minivan, trembling palms on the still-warm hood cause Elizabeth Lee had just got back from Albertson’s with groceries, but then she came back into the garage to stow the extra case of Cokes, cause God was good to them that month so the fridge was full, and she found him there, waist bent and belly hung, heaving shallow breaths over their van, and he couldn’t hold anything back anymore, he couldn’t think words let alone say them out loud, they weren’t tears from being sad or even from being happy, they just happened cause he felt too much all at once and she knew immediately and held him at his hips, tried her arms full circle around his belly which had now rounded and let itself get plump and satisfied, a jagged eclipse, she clung to him, clung to this body that could make her car run smooth, could punch the bleacher at a T-ball game and put a golden streak of forgotten fear into her, could chickenskin her to lust with calloused hands, this body that softened with time, had gotten more malleable, that had felt closer to her in its mortality and its openness, as known as one thing could be to another she often thought, this body that smuggled away its pain in limps and creaks and grunts and she laid her head on this body, on his chest, as to give him privacy in the emotion he felt without disowning his personage, to offer solitude without abandonment, this balance that she had, fair or not, cultivated as young girl which had now been perfected as woman, and his gratefulness for this balance that he always intuited but could never put to words brought even more emotion flying into his brain and he tried to get it out into his body, where he knew how to handle and tinker and delay and fix and manage, but it only came out of his feet in swooping steps, and she followed instantly, instinctively, and so they held onto each other in swaying loops, in rhythm with one another, like they were kelp at the bottom of an impossibly peaceful ocean, they were dancing, really, dancing together slowly in that oil-smelly garage around and around, revolving again and again, cardboard boxes jammed with Christmas decorations, a rusty Folger’s can filled with screws, a stack of Cosmos balanced atop a Craftsman tool bench, again and again, Christmas, coffee, Cosmos, Craftsman, Christmas, coffee, Cosmos, Craftsman, swirling alongside a minivan that to Mac, in that bright and nauseous moment, felt orange in the blur, and he thought he heard Travis Tritt, coulda sworn his work radio was on, coulda sworn he could hear it, and he pulled his wife in closer and felt her arms squeeze back, and kept swaying along with her to that familiar melody in his head, and he knew in that moment, knew for certain what he was talking about, after all these years, he finally knew what his old man meant, as they turned in slow swaying circles, again and again, while their boys were safe and healthy enough to snicker along to their first buzz, merely inches above his balding, sunburned head, separated only by a popcorn ceiling crowd that cheered for lap after boring lap.