My Father Threads Skewers Faster Now

When my father first came down from the countryside he could thread forty skewers in an hour. Now he does seventy, and the pieces are more even than mine. Nobody taught him. He sat at the low table by the door with the bamboo basket between his knees and worked out his own way of holding the stick so his fingers would not cramp after two hours.

He does not like the night market. Too loud, too many people, the smoke gets into his chest and he coughs in the mornings. He has never once said he wants to go back. He arrives at four, stays until the tables are stacked, and carries the heavy things so that I do not have to.

What he wants instead

In the afternoon, before the cart goes out, he sits with a notebook and draws the same thing over and over: a rectangle with a line across it, which is a room, and a smaller square at the front, which is a counter. A roof over all of it. Somewhere on the main road, he says, where the buses go past.

He draws the same rectangle every afternoon. I have started to believe in it.

I have done the arithmetic more than once. The deposit, a year of rent, the fridge, the sign. I know the number, I know how many skewers it is, and I know we are not close. I also know he is not asking me for it. That is the part that keeps me at the grill.

My mother says he was like this when they were young: always drawing the next thing on the back of something. A house, then a bigger house, then a well. They got the well. It took four years. She tells it as a joke, he pretends not to hear, and in the afternoon he opens the notebook to a fresh page and draws his rectangle again.

Two hundred skewers, one page

My brother wants a second cart. He has the whole argument ready: the corner near the temple road, those two hours when people queue at ours and then walk away. He is right and I know he is right, and I keep saying we will talk about it in the dry season, which is what I say when I do not want to say no.

On Sunday afternoons we stop. My father and I sit outside with tea and thread skewers for the week ahead, and he is faster than me now, and I have stopped being surprised. He does not count them. He keeps going until the basket is empty and then looks up, and the afternoon is gone, and he says, well, that's that.

I have slept five hours a day for three years. I keep telling myself I will sleep more when there is a roof. He tells me the same thing. We are both lying a little, and we both know it, and it is fine, because the charcoal is already laid out for tomorrow.