As a little boy nothing made me happier than to visit Dad in jail. Daniel, Mom would say every time, you haven’t forgotten your father, have you? We both sat down on the same side across from him. Who I called Dad, Mom called Daniel. He didn’t call her anything. He didn’t speak to her. He only spoke to me. Tell me how your grades are, he said. You don’t wanna end up a loser, like all these guys. Dad would look around then at the other tables with other prisoners. They were talking to their families too. I knew Dad wasn’t talking about himself. He was talking about them. We were different. I told him I was doing well. Said I’d be in Algebra next. That’s where the smart kids were. Good boy, Dad said. And your mom, he asked, even though she was sitting right next to me. She’s got 16 credits to go, right Mom? 12, she said. I took an extra class last semester so I dropped back this semester. Mom’s got 12 credits and she’ll be done, I told Dad. He put his arms behind his head and stretched. I could tell how big his muscles were. “That’s real fine,” he said, “real fine. You’ll both be lawyers, Gombaci & Gombaci.”
Duff Allen’s work appears in failbetter, Columbia Journal, The Citron Review, and other places. He has an MFA from Bard College where he teaches creative writing in the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Before foot surgery, he was running 22 miles, the whole length of the Ashokan Rail Trail and back, up in the Hudson Valley.