Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski Read Free Book Online Page A

rowhome side would look out their front windows and constantly be reminded of work. Everybody who worked across the street was constantly reminded of home.
    I stood on the opposite side of the street, staring at my childhood home. What seemed so big to me as a kid now looked absurdly cramped through adult eyes. My parents’ black Dodge Dart was parked out front. The porch hadn’t been painted white yet; I remember my dad doing that when I was five or six years old, and me “helping” him. Now it was all the original brown brick and tan cement. There was a light on in the living room window.
    From across the street I could hear myself crying.
    At least I assumed it was me. The wailing seemed to come from directly behind the front window of 4738. And I was the only baby in the house at the time.
    I looked both ways—the street was dead—then crossed and walked up the three concrete steps to my old front porch. It felt like walking onto the set of a children’s school play. Everything was so tiny.
    I’d also forgotten what the interior of our home looked like growing up. It was straight out of the pages of Urban Hippie Digest : red velvet walls, brown rugs. A Buddha statue had been placed in the corner, surrounded by incense holders and ashtrays. A console TV—a hand-me-down, chipped in places. My mom was sitting on a hand-me-down couch. I remembered climbing on that couch until the frame threatened to break under my weight.
    My mom was shaking. No— sobbing. Face in her hands.
    There was a baby bassinet across the room. It shook a little, too. I couldn’t see myself, but I heard my unrelenting cries. I was either hungry, or I’d befouled myself. Didn’t matter. I needed some sort of attention.
    Come on, Mom. What are you waiting for? Pick me up! Where’s my dad? Why won’t he pick me up?
    Then I remembered. I’d been born on a Tuesday; this would be Friday. Gig night. My dad and his band would be out on a job.
    My crying just wouldn’t stop. I felt my hands tremble. Why won’t she pick me up? Was she already tired of me?
    Before I knew what I was doing, my right hand was up. I made a fist and started pounding on the window.

IV
     

     

My Father’s Killer
     

     
     
     
     
     

My mother looked up. Her face was bright red. God, she was young. So, so young.
    “Someone there?” she asked, her voice muffled by the glass.
    I panicked and darted to the left of the window.
    “Hello? Is someone there? ”
    After a few seconds I saw her face appear in the window, nervously peering outside from behind the parted curtains. I stopped breathing for a moment. She was only eighteen years old when I was born, but that age is an abstract concept. She’s always been my mother, always been eighteen years older than me. Except now.
    Now I was a ghost standing on the porch of my childhood home, I was thirty-seven years old, and I was looking at the face of the woman who gave birth to me—suddenly two decades younger. And she’s been crying. Her cheeks were still damp with tears, her eyes tender and red. She looked lost. Alone. Scared. Freaked out. Everything.
    And her husband was out in a bar somewhere in Frankford—or maybe nearby Kensington. She probably told him she’d be fine handling the baby alone, but what choice did she have? They needed the money.
    They had a new mouth to feed.
    After a while she moved away from the window and started talking to the baby, me, in a robotic monotone. Okay, she said. Okay, I’m coming. Stop crying, I’m coming. Stop crying.
     
     
    I started feeling light-headed and dizzy again. I didn’t know if I’d wake up in the same place where I’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t want to chance waking up on Darrah Street in the middle of the night.
    On the way back upstairs I ran into the red-haired kid again. He was sitting near the top of the first staircase, knees spread and hands curled into tight little fists. His green eyes, full of fury, bored right into mine. I wondered what