“A— a— all right, ch— choose something,” Frank said.
Simon walked straight to the store’s front counter, no longer a browser but a serious buyer. Suckers were his candy of choice. They were sweet from start to finish, and each had a clean, white paper stick that kept his hands from getting sticky. But what Simon liked best about suckers was his recent discovery that, when he was actively working a sucker, melting its layers of hard sugar with his tongue, people were more likely to ask him yes-or-no questions that he could answer with a nod or a shrug instead of a stuttered word. Only Connor’s presence did more than a sucker to ensure that no one asked Simon to speak. Connor could make himself sound like the cartoon characters on TV and mimic the announcers who narrated his father’s ballgames. Even when Connor spoke in his regular voice, people listened to him, and they laughed right when Connor wanted them to.
Simon stood on his toes and reached into a fish bowl filled with Dum Dums. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding two suckers—one butterscotch-flavored, the other cherry soda. He looked up at his father.
“O— Okay, get ‘em both.”
Simon set both Dum Dums on the glass top of the counter while the bespectacled man behind it rang them up on his mechanical register.
“Fifty cents.”
Frank handed the man two quarters.
“Do you need a bag?” the man asked Simon.
Simon shook his head and grabbed his suckers off the counter.
“Y— you mean, n— no— no thank you.”
Simon turned back toward the man, but did not look up at him. “N— no th— th— tha— thank you.”
“Okay,” the man said. “See you soon.”
Simon followed his father to the door, unwrapping the butterscotch sucker as he walked. Outside, lost in the task of scraping away a piece of waxed paper from the sucker’s upper hemisphere, Simon headed for the truck.
“Th— this way,” Frank said.
Simon’s father was still standing in front of the candy store, jerking his thumb in the other direction. Simon eyed the obelisk and considered asking his father if they could have a look at the inscriptions on its base.
“C— come on, now.”
Walking slowly toward his father, Simon picked the last bit of paper from the sucker and popped the tiny yellow planet into his mouth.
Lately, Simon had been thinking about going silent permanently, whether he had a sucker or not. He recognized that, at first, when he stopped speaking, his parents and teachers and schoolmates would try, with commands and demands and unkind words, to make him talk. Simon also knew that they could not make him speak, that to speak or not was his decision. Simon felt powerful in silence, but he also felt alone. And he worried that Frank would take his silence as an insinuation that he, too, would be better off shutting up than stuttering. Silence was something fun to imagine, something to enjoy with the sweetness of a sucker, but Simon understood that he could not allow himself to go silent forever unless his father went first.
Simon kept his head down, milking the sucker for a slow, steady stream of flavor and watching the backs of his father’s boots. The boots stopped in front of a single cement step.
“Pit—pit stop,” Frank said.
He held open a green door and waved Simon through it. The sign above the door read, The Four Corners.
Simon had been to the Four Corners before. It was dark inside, he remembered, and smelled clean and dirty all at once. He didn’t like this place, but Frank’s hand clamped down on his shoulder, and they were inside before he knew it.
“Hey, Frank,” someone said.
The voice came from one of the three silhouettes at a table toward the back, to the left of the bar. As their faces became visible in the low neon light thrown around them by the beer signs, Simon did not recognize the men from church or school or anywhere. He figured that they worked with his father at the factory, as many parents of his classmates did.
Frank raised one hand to the men and pushed Simon away from them, toward the bar, with the other. “F—fellas,” he said.
Frank lifted Simon up, set him on a barstool directly in front of the television, and took the stool to his son’s left. Peering behind his father’s back, Simon spied on the men at the table. He wished that they would ask his father and him to join them. He wished that the men were his father’s friends. So far as Simon knew, his father didn’t have any friends. Simon imagined that his father felt the same way about men his own age that Simon felt about the kids at school: that they knew too much about him without understanding him at all.
Afraid that his father would somehow read his thoughts, Simon turned away from the men at the back table and followed Frank’s eyes to the small television. Two gray-haired men holding microphones and wearing jackets and ties stared out from the screen, a wide expanse of green spread out behind and beneath them. The bartender stepped over and stood in front of Frank. “What can I get you?”
“W— whiskey. Double.”
The bartender looked at Simon. “How about you, little guy? Want a pop or something?”
Simon locked his lips around his sucker and shook his head.
“No? Okay.”
The bartender poured Simon’s father a double whiskey and served it neat in a cloudy glass.
“Thanks,” Frank said.
“No problem.”
Frank drank down the whiskey and stared up at the television while Simon worked the sucker. When it was roughly half its original size, Simon stashed the head of the candy scepter between his molars and his cheek, hoping to make it last a little longer.
The bartender moved toward Simon’s father, smiling. “Another whiskey?”
“Y— Y— Y—Yeah. And a p— pack of p—Pall Malls.”
Simon stared at his father. Whatever whiskey is, Simon thought, it’s worse for his stutter than beer is.
One of the three men, the one sitting with his back to the wall, spoke to Simon’s father.
“So how you been, Frank?”
Frank turned a few degrees to the left and looked at the men over his shoulder. “N—n— not bad.”
“No?” the man said. “Everything’s good?”
Frank shrugged. “C— c— c— can’t c— c— complain.”
“Sure you can,” the man said. “It just takes you a little longer.”
One of the other men laughed.
Simon felt his father summon all the eloquence he could with a deep, quiet inhalation.
“W— we’re good. Th— thanks.”
The bartender poured another whiskey into Frank’s glass and laid a pack of cigarettes and a green Four Corners matchbook in front of him. Keeping his eyes on the television, Frank unwrapped the cellophane on the pack, flipped open its cardboard lid, and fished out a cigarette. He held the cigarette between his lips, struck a match, and bowed his head to the licking orange flame. His hand was shaking as he waved out the match with more vigor than was necessary, nearly catching Simon’s ear with his elbow.
The men at the table laughed again as one of them poured liquid from a brown bottle into their glasses. Then one of the men, the first one to speak, stared hard at Simon. That’s when Simon realized he had been eyeballing the men again. He looked away as quickly as he could.
“Is