After Hours

After Hours
36in×48in. Oil on Newspaper Covered Canvas.

My parents bought a house on Bardin Street in Rochester’s 10th ward when I was 5 and my sister was new.

It was a standard looking house. Baby blue siding. With a view of Kodak Park’s smoke stacks.

They bought it instead of the house on the dead end street with a pool that we toured while I chomped on banana chips in a paper thin plastic bag that the realtor gave me to keep me occupied.

My dad liked that it had a three car garage.

He set up his workshop out there, and he used it to tinker.

He tinkered, and tinkered, and tinkered.

He tinkered so much that he set up an intercom between the house and the garage that me, my sisters, and my mom could use to talk to him in the evenings.

In my pajamas with wet hair ringlets soaking my shoulders, I would press a magical metal button the size of a spacebar and let him know it was time to come in for his dinner.

Which was always after us kids ate, just before our bedtime.

And it was usually something gross like lima beans covered with a heavy dose of pepper in a bowl next to some kind of meat.

The intercom was stationed in the very small and too cold back room, which had a window looking out to the garage in the back yard.

Warm buttery light seeped out of the windows and fell onto the driveway.

I’d see my dad’s head move toward his beeping end of the intercom stationed in the center bay. 

Moving past the jars filled with nuts and bolts, and his big red tool chest that we were not allowed to touch…and you better believe he knew if we did.

And he’d say, through thick crackling white noise, “Okey dokey. I’ll been in soon.”