Rollback

by Alex Nichols

It was February, a colorless midweek afternoon. Dad picked me up from school in his beat up old Camry, as he did whenever Mom couldn’t get off work in time. I was embarrassed when he picked me up in the Camry, and he usually looked embarrassed, too.

But this time he had a weird expression I couldn’t interpret. His eyebrows were way up on his forehead, his eyes were wide open, but his jaw was clenched, and his mouth was configured in a shape that was toothy but not quite a smile. His knees bounced up and down rapidly like a busted Whac-A-Mole machine.

“Hey, buckaroo,” he said. “How was school?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I tossed my backpack into the car and climbed into the back seat.

On the way home, we stopped at the Walmart. Dad told me to wait in the car while he went in to “grab something.” I watched big wet globs of snow drift down and splatter and fill the faint cracks in the windshield. I counted as many globs as I could before I lost track.

When my dad returned a few minutes later, he was red faced and out of breath. He slammed the door and tossed something in my lap. Before I could even process what it was, we were in reverse, peeling out of our spot, almost crashing through a train of carts that an employee with special needs had been struggling to wrangle. Then my dad threw it into drive and sped out of the parking lot, sending us flying over a curb and barrelling through some dead hedges.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.