Because That's How Jack Chose It — Chapter 8 — Nobody Ever Asked
The envelope went to the backlands. What Jack has been sending home, in secret, for years.
Nobody ever asked. So he never told. Now he tells it — laughing, the only way he'll do it.
The envelope went to the backcountry.
To my parents. The same ones who handed me over at two because there was no food at home. I send them money every month, have for ages, and nobody in the world knows this but the three of us.
Hold on, I'll explain how we found each other again. And I warn you: the first part is ridiculous.
It was by letter.
LETTER. You get me? Paper. Envelope. Stamp. In an age where I've got a phone in my pocket that does more math than NASA, my connection to my parents was, for years, a LETTER.
Here's how it worked. Back at the aunt and uncle's house, a letter came now and then from my parents. Aunt almost never handed it over, but I'd grab the sender's address off the corner of the envelope and memorized it — told you that earlier. It was an address out in the backcountry, and it stayed burned into me.
When I got settled on the street, the first letter was one I sent. I wrote crooked, because I barely knew how to write, to the address I'd carried by heart since I was four. And I also wrote, in big letters, the address where they should write back.
From there it turned into back and forth. Every time I changed spots — and I changed a bunch, from the gap to Mr. Nestor's shop, from the shop to the rented house — I'd send a letter first with the new address. They wrote it down and started writing there.
Weeks of waiting between one and the next. The reply always came more crooked than mine, because my mother writes worse than I do and my father just signs his name at the end.
The content of the letters was as follows: nothing.
"It rained last week, thank God." "Your cousin got married." "Are you eating right?" "The goat had a kid." Page after page of absolutely nothing happening, written with an affection that didn't fit on the paper.
I keep all of them. I won't say where.
Then I started making some money, and my patience with the last century ran out.
I bought an old phone, one of the cheap ones, and sent it to the backcountry. I set it all up first: saved my number as "SON", in big letters, because I know my clientele. And I pay that phone's plan every month to this day — because if it's up to the two of them to top it up themselves, we lose contact and go back to the mail.
Now we do video calls. Once in a while. The image freezes, the audio lags, my mother holds the phone a hand's width from her face and I spend the whole call staring at one giant eye and the wall behind her.
It's the best thing about my week.
My parents worry about me in a way that has no size.
Every call is an interrogation. What did you eat. How many hours did you sleep. Are you dressed warm. Who are these people you run with. Is this Kim guy really trustworthy. Are you studying. Are you getting into trouble — and there I lie, obviously, because "what trouble, Mom, come on" goes down better than the truth.