Knockout. John Jodzio

for a credit card for room deposit and incidentals. He runs an imprint on our credit card machine. He looks at the name on the card, hands it back.

      “Thank you, Ms. Brunell,” he says.

      The boy is polite and does well in school. When I go to teacher’s conferences I can’t get his teachers to say anything bad about him. He does his homework, shares, makes friends easily.

      “Can I have a room with southern exposure?” Ms. Brunell asks.

      I pluck a room key from the board underneath the till.

      “Let’s put Ms. Brunell in the Grover Cleveland Suite,” I say.

      The boy likes presidents so we named all of our rooms after the fat ones. While the Grover Cleveland Suite isn’t as big as the William Howard Taft Room, it’s the quietest. If I would actually get around to trimming the dogwood out back, the room would have a great view of the river. Right now about the only thing you can see is the swing set in the backyard of my neighbor Masoli’s house. I really hope Ms. Brunell takes into account all the potential we have here. I hope she can see what we could become, even though we won’t.

      The boy shows her to her room, and I hear Ms. Brunell drawing a bath, the pipes hissing and clacking.

      “What do you think she’ll write about us?” the boy asks over the noise.

      “Only good things,” I yell back.

      How Sandy died was a dumbass thing. One night, on her way to meet me at the Keg n’ Cork, she tried to go around a railroad barrier. Her car was speared by the front of the train, pushed all the way through our town, sparking and screeching, right past the courthouse and right past the barstool where I sat waiting for her. She went past the Riverwalk Mall and into Halsford before the conductor could get that fucking train stopped. The police report said she died in Halsford, but the coroner’s report said that she died on impact, and while it can’t really be both, it is.

      The boy was a year and a half when that happened. Up until that point, I hadn’t done much for him other than read him some bedtime stories and change the occasional diaper, but over the next few years, I did it all. My grief was not helped by the fact that each time I looked at the boy’s face I saw Sandy, and each time I thought of Sandy a curl of pain rippled across my chest—a feeling like something had been torn out of me and then that very same thing had been rolled in glass and shoved back in me upside down.

      “That’ll go away soon,” my sister, Marlene, told me.

      “If it was going away it would have gone away by now,” I told her. “I’m stuck with it.”

      I stopped drinking after Sandy died, but when the boy started kindergarten, I started up again. I ended up drinking on the job and I got fired when I cut off the tip of my pinky with a band saw. This started a long period of the boy and me making due, of one day melting into the next, of the occasional guest or two stumbling onto our doorstep. By now, the boy and I have developed a solid routine. He knows he can count on me to make him breakfast and hand him a bag lunch on the way to school. When he gets home, he knows that he’ll be the one making dinner and helping me up to bed.

      The boy chops up some onions for a stew and I go back outside and shoot some more holes in the boat. While I’m out there I see Masoli and his six-year-old daughter, April, smacking a beach ball back and forth in their front yard. When Masoli first moved in we got along great; I lent him my socket set and he lent me his hedge trimmer. One night I invited him over for a barbeque. While our kids played together, we ate ribs and talked about how my wife was dead and how his ex-wife was batshit crazy.

      “After I got custody she was so angry she lit my ’77 Corvette on fire. I spent ten years restoring that car and she burned it to a crisp in ten minutes.”

      For a while I imagined Masoli and me becoming good friends, drinking beer, and shooting the shit. I pictured us commiserating about single parenting and keeping each other sane. None of that happened. A few nights after that barbeque, I got blind drunk and walked into Masoli’s front yard without any pants on and he punched me in the face. We haven’t talked since.

      I hear April squeal as Masoli bats the beach ball way over her head. Sometimes when they’re outside goofing around, I grab the boy and we stand on our driveway and laugh really loud so Masoli knows we’re having fun too. I go inside now and pull the boy onto the porch and we fake laugh loud enough to drown out April’s giggling.

      “You ready for dinner?” the boy asks when we’re finished.

      I pump a couple more shots into the hull of the boat, and then I pick up a few of the bigger rocks from my driveway and chuck them over into Masoli’s yard so they’ll fuck up his lawn mower.

      “Now I’m ready,” I say.

      The next morning I make biscuits and redeye gravy. Sandy and I started dating when we were working together at a diner in New Orleans called the HunGree Bear. She was a waitress and I was the cook. We lit out of there right before Katrina, grabbing everything we could and throwing it in the back of my truck. We got out of there just in time, but we couldn’t find our dog, McGruff, before we left. Sometimes at night I dream McGruff’s on one of those incredible journeys. In my dream, he always shows up on our porch with a bunch of burrs and sticks matted in his fur, thinner, but not all that worse for wear. I’ve been thinking about getting another dog for a while now, but for some reason I still think McGruff’s coming back. I don’t want him to be pissed that I thought he wasn’t.

      “I trust your night was pleasant,” I say to Ms. Brunell as she sits down at the breakfast table.

      “Pleasant enough,” she says.

      She’s wearing a track suit. She still has on her sunglasses. I can’t tell if she’s got a decent body underneath her baggy clothes, but I’m leaning toward no.

      “Are you going to look around town today or go hiking by the river?” I ask her while I stir the gravy. This is a good batch, thick enough to not run everywhere, thin enough to get into the nooks and crannies of the biscuit.

      “I might lay low,” she says. “I’m not feeling the best.”

      I put a plate of biscuits in front of her and she takes a bite. There’s a spot of mold on the wall above her head that I keep painting over but that keeps coming back.

      “I wasn’t expecting much,” Ms. Brunell says, pointing at the biscuits with her fork, “but these are damn good.”

      I wonder if she should be taking notes for her review, but maybe she’s got a better memory than me. I decide to try to be on my best behavior for however long she stays, drink less than usual. Maybe my breakfasts will be the thing that wins her over; maybe my cooking can make up for everything that’s fucked up around here.

      I get the boy off to school and then I spend the rest of my morning napping under the dogwood. When I wake up, I see Ms. Brunell standing in the window with a pair of binoculars up to her face.

      Great, I think, she’s into birds. Maybe we can take a stroll along the trail and I can point out where all the reticulated woodpeckers nest. Maybe we’ll take a walk through the marsh and I can show her that family of owls that lives inside that hollowed-out sycamore.

      When I get back inside, Ms. Brunell is sitting in the living room in front of the fireplace, staring into its blackened mouth. I would love to light a fire for her, but a dead squirrel got stuck in the flue a couple of weeks ago. The smell isn’t that bad unless it gets really windy. Just in case she’s got a really sensitive nose, I light a scented candle.

      “What other bed and breakfasts have you stayed at?” I ask her.

      “I’ve been up and down the coast,” she says. “Tons of places.”

      I mention a couple of other B and Bs around here—the Carriage House, the Mount Angel House, the Geffon-Buckley Bed and Breakfast. These places are clean and quaint, full of flowery wallpaper and potpourri, packed almost every weekend. Those places are how our place was supposed to turn out. I can only