Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

Down the hall, Exequiel passed the boy’s room. There was the chessboard. All of its pieces in place. Between the two sides, a field of empty squares.

The telephone poles had been trees. He tried to imagine them rising out of dirt and bursting, their canopies green and lush. In the training yard, his group studied the class and sizing of each pole.

Elle had told him about her father’s stories. Mostly the times the man had parachuted into forests as they burned. Exequiel tried picturing how the trees filled the air with their burning. The smell of smoke cast out for miles on end.

During the middle of the final week, training had ended early, and he was looking forward to getting home and showering. Maybe nap before she finished her shift. One of the guys from the class had dropped him off on the main road, a few blocks from the neighborhood. Exequiel was grateful, though his legs were tired.

Turning onto their street, he was surprised to see Elle’s car in the driveway. There was another car there. He didn’t know whose it was. It looked new. Maybe Marsha had gone and bought one with some of the money Elle suspected the old woman had squirreled away.

Closer to the house, he slowed his pace. Wendell lay on the ground in the front yard, the bicycle next to him. Exequiel didn’t hesitate. He dropped his bag. He yelled Wendell’s name.

The boy didn’t move.

Exequiel crouched down to check his breathing.

There was no movement.

Then, suddenly, the boy laughed, giggling. He sat up.

Wendell pointed at Exequiel’s chest and said, “I got you, Dad.”

“You got me,” Exequiel said.

“I got you good,” Wendell said.

“Yes, you did.”

“What’s wrong?”

Exequiel finally collapsed on the ground. Beholding the burnt orange sky above them. He let out a breath.

“Are you tired?” Wendell said.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Oh.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Inside talking.”

“With your grandmother?”

“No,” the boy said. “With some man.”

Wendell picked up his bicycle. “That was a good joke, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Exequiel said. “A good joke.”

He remembered his tools and went into the street to gather them. Wendell followed on his bicycle, wobbling as he rode past. Exequiel fought off the urge to say, “Watch out.”

The boy went a few houses down and then turned and raced back. Exequiel realized he had never been taught how to ride a bicycle himself. He laughed at the thought that Wendell might one day have to teach him.

“What?” Wendell said as he approached. He hit the brakes and skidded to a stop.

“I can’t do what it is you’re doing,” Exequiel said.

“Do what?” the boy said, smiling. “Ride a bike?”

Exequiel nodded.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Wow.”

“I know. You’re getting older.”

“If you want, I can show you how. It’s easy.” Wendell studied his face.

“Maybe later,” Exequiel said.

He looked at the house. He dragged his foot behind him.

He could hear them in the kitchen. Their silence as he rounded the corner. Elle looked out of breath herself. The rims of both eyes red as flares on a roadside.

Exequiel thought the puffiness of her lips, the faint pink smear on one side in particular, had been from some scuffle, but when he looked at the man standing across from her, the smirk on the man’s face, Exequiel knew. On the man’s mouth, the same coloring.

Among Exequiel’s tools was a thick, fourteen-inch flathead screwdriver that he had been taught that morning to use for testing the integrity of a telephone pole. It functioned more like a dagger. The instructor had shown him how to go around in a circle and stab at the base of the pole, deep into the wood, to see if any of the outer ring would flake off. He had to do this before he started his climb. If he failed to perform this step, he would be penalized.

“This is Joshua,” Elle said nervously.

Joshua wiped at his chin and grinned without saying a word.

Even so, Exequiel could still hear the man’s voice. He was talking to him on the phone again. Exequiel didn’t need for him to speak. He didn’t need to be insulted anymore.

He set his bag down and rummaged through the contents until he found the screwdriver. He grabbed at the metal end, holding it to his side like a hammer.

Joshua looked sheepish with his lips smeared pink. Exequiel could not put out of his head that these were the same lips that had formed the words spic motherfucker. Exequiel was glad that the voice on the other end of the line could hear him breathing and that now the body that had made the voice had come into his life in this way.

He did not pretend, as Joshua pretended, that everything was fine.

They could not just go back into their lives as if nothing had happened. Everything had already happened.

Outside the boy rode his bicycle.

Exequiel held his breath. His chest shuddered. He thought he could hear the boy racing past the house. The wheels whirring like the engines of a distant airplane. It was headed this way. Inside, the smoke jumpers waited to vanish into an inferno.

The phone number was written on a small slip of paper that had been left inside a book of poems. He found the book in the trunk of the car, under a box of tools. He had kept the same tools over the years, as he traveled from one small town to the next. The motel parking lot was a bleached field of random shoots, cracks spidering out in the pavement. He held the slip of paper and studied the phone number and remembered the boy and the smell of his hair. Elle’s way of standing in the kitchen. The warmth of her body as they shared coffee in the mornings before he left for work.

He went inside the motel room and pulled the dusty curtains to the side. Through the window, the sound of the highway threatened to become something else. He wondered if