The Shirtless Fathers of Red Hen Lane

By Craig Loomis

The family across the street has two or three girls; because they are a blur of activity, it is hard to tell the exact number, but the girls—however many—have far too many girlfriends visiting them every weekend, and that is when they take their brightest Barbie pink chalk and outline the four squares in the middle of the street. They will spend what feels and sounds like all Saturday afternoon bouncing a pink rubbery ball and playing Four Square. Playing the game is not the issue, but the squealing is. They scream Four Square talk that, if truth be told, makes little sense to me. And although there never seems to be a winner or a loser, the rubbery ball twangs when it hits, rolling under parked cars, crashing into her favorite rose bush, ricochetting off little Jimmy’s forehead, but never mind, because once again, the game is all about making loud girlie noise. If any car dares to come down the street, it will simply have to wait until their Four Square squealing can find a time-out. That, and the bright pink chalk will last for days, and just as it is beginning to become less pink, a new Saturday has already arrived and more pink chalk needs to be applied, and so on.

The father is a tall healthy slim. He’s always opening his garage door, walking shirtless out into the midday, stretching and yawning like some bear that has just finished hibernating; he will then drag out one of those folding chairs and with beer in hand settle down to happily watch the girls do their Four Square. Pretending to water my lawn, I sometimes see him fingering his beer can while staring off into the middle distance, or peering at some robin on the fence, the way it tick-tocks and hops and then blurs away. If the girls call him, he simply waves, smiles, his fathering all done for the day. Even after the girls finish and disappear into the house, he will continue to shirtlessly sit and sip and look up into the sky. The mother, on the other hand, is nothing more than a loud voice, giving orders, complaining that somebody needs to take out the trash, insisting that the cat needs to be fed, “Where are the car keys?” and so on. In the meantime, what is he looking at, thinking about, this father of theirs? With loud Four Square daughters and friends on the one side, and a demanding wife-voice on the other, he seems to be the calm in the eye of the storm.

When he opens his garage door, I can’t help but see stacks of brown boxes leaning this way and that, something like rakes, brooms, and shovels are scattered about; a lawn mower is tilted on its side. Some sort of tubing dangles from the cross beams, spiderlike. There is what looks to be a sports car but it is covered with a dusty tarp. Two of its tires are flat.

I only know his name thanks to his wife. “Don, are you still out there?  Don, come and take a look at this leaky washer. Don, where’s the check book?” Don has a mustache, but it looks all wrong, like a smudge of dirt that he keeps forgetting to wash off. I have no idea what he does, his work. He arrives home at about the same time every day; he wears nothing like a suit, nothing formal, he carries nothing like a briefcase.  Once he enters the house and deals with her voice— “Did you pick up some milk? You know, you left your clothes on the floor again,” etc. —he will move quickly into that garage of his. My wife tells me to mind my own business, to stop looking out the window, to “Leave the poor man alone.” I tell her I’m just an interested neighbor. She does not like that answer and says so: “That’s a terrible answer.” I shrug and take the broom to sweep the front porch.

On Wednesday, he, like always, opens the garage door, and although there is no Four Square to supervise, he shirtlessly drags out his folded chair, arranging it to look thataway, down Red Hen Lane. I hear the pop as he opens his can of beer. I watch him until finally she announces, “Where’s your new shirt, Don?” He continues to watch the street. I turn to see what he is looking at and see nothing but a long unimportant stretch of Red Hen Lane. He stays that way—shirtless, sipping and stretching his legs. When somebody’s cat strolls by, he snaps his fingers at it and of course it scurries off. He thinks this is funny, sipping and smiling. Once again she asks him about his shirt and this time he groans up out of his chair and walks into the house. When he returns, he is still shirtless.

The next day I decide to go into my garage. My garage is not full of brown boxes.  My rake and broom and lawn mower are neatly tucked into one corner, next to a large sack of plastic bags. I have two cabinets full of tools that I almost never use. I have a bicycle that I used to ride. Although I don’t open the garage door often, this time I do to see what it feels like, and it feels fine. I walk around the garage with the door open and of course everything is brighter, clearer. I can see places on the walls that need painting. Once I shut the garage door again, I do something else. With me being the only one home, I unbutton my shirt and neatly place it on top of one of the boxes. Surprisingly, I don’t feel cold. I walk around the garage that way, shirtless, just like him.

The next day I do it again: shirtless but this time with the garage door wide open. I move from box to box, looking to see what is inside, although I already know. Christmas decorations here. Blankets. Old college books. That is when my wife, who has come home early, sees the open garage door with me standing shirtless. She gets out of the car and with hands on hips, says, “What in the world are you doing?” I glance across the street and he is there, beer in hand, shirtless, looking up at the trees. But this time he has two folding chairs, one for him and one for his feet.

I turn to her, saying, “I am doing whatever I want to do.”

Like me, my wife is not used to this. She stares at me and then walks into the house. I walk around the garage a while longer. I sit on the bicycle that I never ride anymore. I don’t remember the seat being so hard and narrow. I thumb through an old college textbook. When I finally finish, shutting the garage door and slipping my shirt back on, she continues to say nothing. At dinner I start to say something about being sorry but suddenly change my mind. She goes to bed early.

The girls have decided to give their Four Square a time-out, and I am grateful but he never wavers as he opens his garage once again. This time I open my door about the same time he opens his. While he walks into the garage shirtless, I wait and take off my shirt later, once the garage door is fully open.  He drinks his beer, I have a glass of red wine. I don’t have one of those folded chairs to sit on but I can lean against one of the boxes that is labelled “Blankets”. From my vantage point, I can see most of the lawn, the rose bushes, a slice of the front porch, a patch of Red Hen Lane, and of course him. She comes home early again; this is two days in a row. As she pulls up, I raise my glass of wine. I want to think it is funny, if not funny then certainly nothing to be angry about, but she only gets out of the car, slams the door and walks into the house.
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I watch her go and then look over at him and wave. He waves back like we are the best of friends.  This is both good and bad.

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​For twenty years (2004-2024), Craig Loomis taught English at the American University of Kuwait in Kuwait City.  Over the years, he has had his short fiction published in such literary journals as The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, The Prague Revue, The Los Angeles Review, The Prairie Schooner, Yalobusha Review, Fiction International, Critical Pass Review, The Owen Wister Review, Juxtaprose Literary Magazine, Cumberland River Review, REVUE, Consequence Magazine, SAND, and others.  
 
In 1995 his short story collection, A Softer Violence: Tales of Orient (London: Minerva Press) was published; and in 2013, Syracuse University Press published another collection of his short stories entitled The Salmiya Collection: Stories of the Life and Times of Modern Day Kuwait. In October 2021, his novel This is a Chair: A Lyrical Tale of Love, Death and Other Curriculum Challenges was published by Sixty Degrees Publishing. His short story collection Where the Clouds Begin: Tales from the California Foothills (Sixty Degrees Publishing) was published in Nov. 2022.