The Home-Row Isn't Strong Enough to Rid the World of His Shadow

We were taking coffee break in one of the building's three designated lunch rooms, the four of us tired of choking on welding fumes and grateful for the reprieve. Our snacks were gone, our drinks down to one remaining chug. It was that awkward conversation time when no one wants to get up first and head back to the task at hand, but nobody wants their boots to drag last-in-line, either. Like a gift from God my phone rang. I stepped out into the hallway to answer it, a bit afraid since I didn't recognize the number aside from the middle three digits that told me it was a cellular line.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Michael?" a faintly Jewish-sounding voice whined. Could he have changed that much in a few years? A wife, a son; I guess he could've.

"Yes?" I asked more cautiously now that the chips were on the table

"Michael, it's your father! Where are you?" He sounded legitimately agitated at this mysterious Michael's absence. It couldn't have been whom I thought it was. That Christ-fearing coward couldn't care less about his first attempt at family, the holy hypocrite that he is and will be all the way to the grave. He started anew in one of life's rarely granted do-overs without as much as a card dropped in the mailbox. I'm not an afterthought he'll have in his precious afterlife. Sometimes that burns me as much as the flames of Hell someday will. There's comfort in knowing what's coming.

"You've got the wrong number. I was confused at first because my name is also Michael." My explanation trailed off. It didn't make sense to continue telling of the irony to a stranger in search of his son.

"Hmph," he half-laughed, half-snorted. This mystery man of mine hung up and I walked back into the break room. The three wise men were waiting: my stepfather, a forty-five-year-old friend who'd taught me the most in the pipe trade, and a man I'd worked for since the age of eighteen looked up from their styrofoam cups in silent anticipation of a report. I stood in the doorway, suggesting that I was ready to go back to work.

"He was looking for his son Michael," I told them. "Wanted to know where I'd been. I told him I've been wondering the same for the last four-and-a-half years." I felt the familiar muscle movement of that painkilling smirk used in defense of what lies beneath the bearded facade. It'd take a wrench or a bottle to pry it from my face. I know. I've tried it before.

The three of them laughed the laugh of the knowing uncomfortably, none of them wanting to admit their sources, and downed the rest of their beverages. Their chairs squeaked against the commercial tile floor as they rose to take on the rest of the day. None of us knew it'd be fourteen hours, but one of us knew he was lucky. As trite as it is, the woven blue-on-white framed number is right-- that thing on God and doors and windows.

Three or four fathers are better than one. Three or four anythings are better than one nothing. Three or four more sentences would make this more believable. I can't come up with them, though; there's too much truth in what really happened sometimes. Saved by a semicolon again.