Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke Page A

obligations, over time his ex-wife’s position morphed
into mourning that she would never be a mother. Seeing the naked
sadness in her eyes whenever they were around the sons and
daughters of their friends, Phil had agreed to consider altering
his own stance on the subject. But his heart had never been in it.
His own childhood had been a train wreck, and rather than emerge
from that endurance test better prepared for parenthood, he
suspected it had probably ruined such prospects for life. Whatever
the case, he wasn’t in any great hurry to find out. His hope had
been that, given time, Stacey would realize the limitations a child
would impose upon their lives and bury her maternal need. She
hadn’t. Instead, her impulses bred anger and resentment toward him,
rendering him little more than an obstruction to the natural course
of her life. Even so he might have stood a chance of pleading his
case if not for the unwavering, and often openly hostile support of
her friends, few of whom had cared for him from the beginning.
Their dissolution had been a cold one, and despite halfhearted
efforts to stay in touch, they never did unless the topic was a
practical one, such as ownership of certain items discovered in the
basement of the house they’d once shared.
    Now, as Phil looked at the child with
the runny nose and puffy eyes, his clothes remarkably pristine and
oddly old-fashioned, he wished Stacey were here if only so he could
use the kid as an example of why he had never conceded to her
wishes. “This,” he would tell her, “is just a taste of what we’d
have been forced to put up with.”
    Aware that he was staring but unable
to stop, drawn to the sad tableau as one might be to the
interaction of animals in an enclosure, Phil moved his gaze back to
the mother and immediately felt a pulse of guilt for his
uncharitable thoughts.
    “ Honey?”
    “ Yeah, babe,” he said into
the phone.
    “ What’s going
on?”
    “ I think you can
guess.”
    The woman might once have been
beautiful. All the elements were there, but appeared to have been
sullied by hardship and filtered by distress so that to find them,
one had to look harder than her appearance invited. Her dirty
blonde hair was in disarray, as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it
after getting out of bed, or had, in some fit of rage or
desperation, tried to pull it out. Or perhaps that was the child’s
doing, for in his eyes, behind the shimmering tears, Phil thought
he detected a glimmer of glee, as if nothing gave the kid greater
pleasure than the reaction his histrionics wrought from his
suffering mother. Indeed there appeared to be the slightest upward
curve at the corners of the child’s bow-shaped lips.
    In contrast to her son’s rosy
complexion, the woman was pallid and drawn, cheekbones pushing
against her waxy skin like hangers beneath a sheet. The cold
fluorescents did her no favors either. She looked lost, her focus
not on the child yanking at her threadbare brown coat, but on the
riotously colorful bags of Gummi Bears, Cola Bottles, and sour
candy suspended on hooks before her. She stared as if the secret to
some elusive quandary might be hidden within. Phil estimated the
woman to be in her mid- to late forties, but suspected her Thrift
Store sense of dress, general unkemptness of her appearance, and
the obvious weathering of the child’s attention probably made her
look a decade older than she actually was.
    “ That kid has a hell of a
pair of lungs on him,” Lori said.
    As if he had somehow heard her, or
maybe just because his attempts to get his mother’s attention had
proved unsuccessful, the kid clenched his little fists, tilted his
head back, opened his mouth, and let loose another scream.
Throughout the aisle, people flinched, winced, and abandoned all
pretense of obliviousness to the root of the awful
sound.
    “ Fuck sake ,” exclaimed one shopper, a
heavyset man in coveralls and a dark red beard that looked like
lichen moss eager to reclaim