Passive

    Driving. The radio is playing a song, the words I remember but the notes I’ve forgotten. Someone is standing on the median. As we get closer, he gets larger and I can see his face. It is dirty. He looks at me. His eyes are vacant. The stoplight above him shifts from yellow to red. We stop. Always too hard. I am small, only just graduated from a booster seat, and I jump forward. 

    My mother’s hand flies over from the driver’s seat. She tells me again I’m too small for this, but it is in the resigned way that I know she doesn’t mean enough to force me not to. 

    She sees where my eyes are and she frowns. 

    “Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him. He could come walking over, and put a gun to my head. He could be crazy. A lot of times people like him are. How do you think he ended up out there like that?” 

    I am not sure how he did. When I see people like him and my dad is driving, he rolls down the window and gives them a five. They never hurt him - they were always really nice, I thought. 

    “That’s your dad for you - not even thinking about it. Wasting our money. He’s so gullible, he’ll fall for anything like that. You were lucky then.” 

    I look at him again. He has a dog tied to a lawn chair beside him. His threadbare clothes flap in the wind. I have never seen a gun, but his clothes are too thin to hide one. 

    “It doesn’t matter, you might not be able to see it. It could be in his bag. He could have a knife - Look, the point is - the point is it’s too dangerous. And did you know most of them spend it on drugs anyway? He’s out there because he blew his money on drugs. People get money just for being unemployed.” 

    The light turns green and he grows smaller, disappearing into the background of the distance. I crane my neck to see. His back is curved to the earth, as if there is something on his shoulders pushing him to the ground. 

    “That’s why you’ve got to do well in school, see, because you don’t want to end up on the streets, a druggie like him.” 

    I do well in school. I don’t know what drugs are, except for a sign I’ve read sometimes on the tops of pharmacy stores. I think that maybe his come from there. We go to the pharmacy sometimes. I suppose we never buy them. 

I am quiet, then I ask. What if he doesn’t have a gun? He won’t hurt us, probably. He just needs money to eat. What if he starves? If I grow up and I can’t do good in school then will I have to stand on the side of the street like him and hold a sign that I turn so people passing by can read but ignore anyway. 

    “You won’t. We raised you well. Anyone can graduate from school. It’s easy. If he’s out there, he did something to be there. And it’s not our job to take care of him. He wasn’t able to take care of himself. We can’t help him. He’ll just waste the money and he might hurt us.”

    I see in the set of her mouth that the subject is closed. Fading paint on the sides of buildings. Other people walking. I wonder who takes care of them. I wonder who they come home to. I wonder what happens when no one is there and there is no home. 

    I am young and I don’t remember all the times she chastises me but I cannot forget. Rocket ran away and she cried. People found him on the side of a highway near our house and they brought him home. I was so glad and then I remembered. 

    If he weren’t a dog, they would have driven by and forgotten him. As if he were a tree on the side of the road. 

    We drove by the man I saw then and we drive by him again a thousand more times and I pray every time it is not the last time that he will stand in the rain and wish. But I know, oh, I know that sometimes we drive by and that night he curls down into his cardboard sign and lawn chair and no one is there to save him.