Hero by Perry Moore

something nice for a good job interview, and my sport coat and tie didn't fold up nicely in the bag. I folded the jacket seven different ways from Sunday before I just wadded it up beside my sweatpants in a corner of the bag. In the bathroom I threw my toothbrush in my dop kit and stopped at my reflection in the mirror. I grabbed some tweezers and plucked at a stray hair growing in the middle of my eyebrows. I'd never seen a hair there before, which could only mean there'd be more, so I tossed the tweezers in, too.
    By the time the moon had drifted above the window's line of sight, I decided my food choices hadn't been wise. I could drink water for free anywhere and therefore should ditch the drinks and pack more food, maybe some canned goods, maybe some peanut butter.
    I headed downstairs back to the kitchen, but stopped by the shelves with the photo albums. I reached up high and dragged one of the albums off the dusty top shelf.
    I opened to a page of me at eleven months drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The tradition continued through my childhood. My dad used to cook out on the grill, when it began to get nice outside in late May, when the gardenia bush began to bloom. He'd come home from work, sometimes whistling a Johnny Cash song, and you'd never know he had any troubles while he dragged out the industrial-size sack of charcoal and filled up the grill, lighting it just so, because only amateurs used lighter fluid. Then we'd wait at least an hour to get the coals perfect, a radiating core of molten light in the middle, before we could actually put the burgers on. It drove Mom crazy.
    Mom would pass the long wait by shooing away flies from the cheap meat patties and slicing onions and looking out on the horizon for something that never seemed to come. While he waited for the embers to light in that perfect configuration, Dad would enjoy a beer (or two) on the deck he'd built with his own two hands. And he'd ask yours truly, each time, to go inside and grab the beer he'd put in the freezer. And each time I'd shake it up as much as possible before I brought it out to him.
    Sometimes I'd toss the can up in the air and spin it like a baton, sometimes I'd jump up and down with it, sometimes I'd roll it down the kitchen floor like I was bowling. I'd walk out onto the deck slowly, as if there was nothing to hide, and I could always tell he knew what I was up to. That was part of the ritual, part of the game. I'm sure he could read my smirk when he took the beer out of my tiny hands, but he played along anyway. Sometimes he'd hold it over the grill and pretend like he was going to explode it over my burger, sometimes he'd ask me to open it. Sometimes he'd chase me around the deck threatening to spray it in my direction, and sometimes he'd open it up and act surprised when the spray caught him in the eye. He was consistent about one thing, however: he always let me take a sip, safely out of Mom's line of vision, before he set the hot dogs on the grill.
    I came across a picture my mom's sister had taken of us at a cookout where I'd accidentally given Mom the can of Dad's shaken beer. Aunt Mary Sue snapped the shot the instant Mom opened the beer, and the entire picture exploded with a foamy spray on top of elated, surprised faces. That had always been my mother's favorite picture, and I stared at a chocolate smudged thumbprint in the corner that proved it.
    I leafed through the rest of the album and pulled down another one. This one had a series of shots Dad took on one of our frequent train-watching trips. Dad loved to follow trains, take pictures of the engines, wait at crossroads in deserted towns for some old, rarely seen engine to whirr past us. Mom would pack a picnic lunch, and we'd pile into the car and bounce along a deserted main street in some choked-out old town, with me crawling around the weeds near the tracks looking for June bugs and railroad spikes while Mom and Dad drank beer and munched deviled eggs until