More Than Enough by John Fulton

as we turned the corner.
    When we stopped at the first light, my father hit the steering wheel with his fist about a half dozen times. “Did you see that guy’s shoes? Jesus.” I didn’t know what to say. I had been terrified that something bad had been about to happen between my father and the other man, that they would hit each other, that someone would get hurt. For the rest of the drive home, my father was preoccupied. He turned the radio on. He searched for a station—country, rock, classical—but nothing seemed to sound right to him, and he switched it off. He rifled in the glove box for a cassette tape he couldn’t find and swore and swerved out of his lane. He kept whispering something to himself, and once he even pulled off the road and into a parking lot and looked over at me. “I’ve got to ask you something,” he said. I nodded. “Do you believe that we are going to be doing better someday? Do you believe me when I say that we are going to buy ourselves a house in a few years and move in for good?”
    â€œSure,” I said.
    â€œA house with a nice yard and separate rooms for you and Jenny, a room for your mother and me, and a nice front room and kitchen. You believe we’re going to get that someday?” In those days, the house we talked about was more modest, more our size. It wasn’t until later, after my father had failed again and again to establish himself in a job, that we somehow began talking about a three-story house with large windows and five bathrooms and a swimming pool.
    â€œYes,” I said. “I always believed that.”
    That seemed to help him, and he was able to pull himself together and get back on the road. But closer to home, when we stopped at another light, he hit the wheel with the palm of his hand again and said, in a fierce whisper, “Those goddamned shoes.” I wanted him to forget about the shoes, but I saw in his face as he looked at the road that he couldn’t.
    *   *   *
    If you don’t want to talk to someone, you don’t look at them. My little sister evidently hadn’t learned that yet because she was staring right at the bum next to us. She was a beginner when it came to interacting with strangers. She still thought everybody in the world was more or less safe. It was hard not to look at him, though, with his feet covered nearly to the knee in plastic bags. Jenny stared right at the Gap bag, and the bum seized the moment, lifting that leg up and winking at her. “How do you like my galoshes?” he asked.
    She looked away, pretending he wasn’t there, and put her napkin in her lap. “At Janet Spencer’s house,” she said, “they always put their napkins in their laps as soon as they sit at the table. Then they say grace. They fold their arms like this.” She folded her arms.
    â€œWe’re not saying grace,” I said.
    â€œThey work, believe it or not,” the woman who sat opposite the bum said. The woman was extremely thin, especially in the face, where you could see the bony round shape of her eye sockets. She wore this fake fur that was matted down with water.
    â€œI’m sure they do,” my mother said, smiling and pretending to admire the bum’s weird footwear.
    â€œYou have to improvise sometimes,” the man said. “You have to be handy and work with what you’ve got.”
    â€œIt looks like you do just fine for yourself,” my mother said. I didn’t know why she had to speak to them. They didn’t look dangerous, but they were dirty and wet and had that smell of the outdoors on them. What struck me most about the woman was the fact that she had once been beautiful. Her face was too thin now and she was soaked, her wet, shoulder-length hair black as ink and stuck together in strands. But you could see the places in her face where the beauty had worn down and left her bony and tired in the