Subtext
by Andrew David

“So how are things in, um...” We had only met once, six years earlier in Lake Ronkonkoma. Sharon brought him as a date to my mother’s funeral. “... things back home?” he asked, straining to sound familiar. “How’s um...” I was unemployed at the time we met. “How is...” Never married. Phil began searching through the papers on his desk, as if he might find the end of his sentence among them. He arrived at, “How’s your mother?” — vaguely making the connection.

“Still dead,” I shrugged.

“Glad to hear it,” he volleyed, triumphantly producing the object of his search. “Aha!” Phil held it in front of my face — a yellow legal pad covered with childish handwriting; pornographic doodles decorated the margins. “This is what I wanted you to see!” The awful scrawl filled my view, and my eyes crossed trying not to focus. He held it there far too long, and I began to imagine his expression behind it — it was an expression of prideful malice, as he assaulted me with his legal pad like a hero brandishing a cross before a vampire. “Well...” a voice demanded. “What do you think?”

“Gross,” I said absently.

Phil lowered the pad. He looked embarrassed. “Oh,” he whimpered, reexamining his scribbles.

“Well, it's not that it’s... um...” I retreated. "Well, I didn’t read it," I offered. Until I’d said that aloud, it hadn't occurred to me that the thing could be read.

Phil glanced up at me, then he looked back at his work and laughed with relief. He blackened the drawings with a marker. Scanning over the text, he apologized, “I didn’t have time to type it.”

“Yeah, why don’t you type it,” I replied. "My eyes aren’t...” I waited for a word that could describe the ability to read Phil's handwriting, “magic.”

“Mmhm. You should get some glasses,” Phil agreed.

I peered over my spectacles, wasting an ironic stare on Phil’s bald crown. “I’ll have this typed before supper,” he promised without looking up. “Until then, why don’t you...” he left my imagination to produce a phrase meaning “leave.” I buggered off.

Sharon was sitting at the table when I buggered into the kitchen. “Did you see it?” she asked excitedly.

“See what?” I said.

Sharon's face dropped. Whatever it was she thought I saw — if it was what she thought it was — would need no explanation of the “saw what?” sort. “Oh... nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I thought he was going to show you.”

For an instant I wondered if the doodles were of her, and that this was what she had hoped I’d seen. I grimaced.

“You did see it!” she blurted.

“Yes... no. Well, I didn't read it...”

“What?”

“Phil’s typing it, actually — right now.”

“Oh,” she chuckled knowingly. “—his handwriting.”

We sat silently for several minutes. “How’s Aunt Janice?” Sharon asked. Janice was my mother.

Sharon waited for a reply. She finally answered herself. “Oh! Duhh...”

The grind of an old dot-matrix printer rescued Sharon from the silence. I counted the pages as it printed. Nine. Silence again. Sharon and I were both looking in the direction of the study. She glanced back at me. “Nine pages,” she noted.

“Yes,” I said. We waited. “What’s for supper?” I asked.

“Huh?” she said.

Phil bounded into the kitchen and slammed a stack of faintly printed computer paper in front of me. There were pornographic doodles in the margins. I looked up at him. “I had to review it one last time,” he explained.

Phil and Sharon were holding hands as they stared across the table at me. I read it.

“Wow,” I said.