Bullets and Blood: How a Convenience Store Robbery Shattered My Teenage Dreams (Part 1)
Musings
The Time My Father Was Shot
I was seventeen the day before. Something older walked behind the counter the next morning.
I was seventeen, home on a rare day off, when my uncle called. His voice was already breaking. Your father is on the news. The store got robbed. He has been shot.
I do not remember getting in the car. I remember the highway, and the number on the speedometer, and telling myself that as long as I kept driving, nothing had been decided yet.
There was tape across the entrance when I got there. Yellow, moving a little in the wind. An officer put his arm out. I told him I was the son, this was my father's store, where is he. He told me my father had already been taken to the hospital. I was back in the car before he finished the sentence.
My mother was already in the waiting room when I arrived. Standing, not sitting. I told her this was my fault, that I should have been at the store that morning instead of him.
She held my shoulders and said, how were you supposed to know. She did not cry in front of me. Not once, that whole day.
We waited. Nobody would tell us anything definite, only that he was in surgery, that it would be a while. Then the police called. They were finished with the scene. Someone needed to go lock up the store.
I drove back alone. The television inside was still on, playing to an empty room. Two cups of coffee sat on the counter, gone cold. Two packets of cookies, barely touched. I never found out who had been sitting there with my father before it happened.
The blood was everywhere. On the tile, the fridge handles, the wall by the register. I got down on my knees with a sponge and started cleaning, because someone had to, and there was no one else there to do it. At some point I noticed small holes in the wall I had missed the first time I looked. I understood what they were before I let myself think the word.
While I cleaned, the television started running the story live from right outside the glass. I could hear the reporter's voice come through the speaker, and a half second later, through the window behind her. Two versions of the same sentence, arriving out of sync.
Thirteen hours after he was brought in, they let us see him. He was on a ventilator. His neck and shoulder were bandaged. His arm had metal rods and pins holding it together where the bullets had gone through. I held his hand and did not know what to say to a hand that could not yet say anything back.
The gun was a nine millimeter, loaded with the kind of bullets built to open on impact instead of pass through clean. I learned that later, the way you learn facts about a thing after the thing has already happened to someone you love.
The next morning I opened the store. I do not fully know why. Nobody told me to. I just did what needed doing, the way you do when a decision has already been made somewhere you were not consulted. The newspaper on the rack that morning had a photo of the store on the front page. Our store. My father's blood, on the front page of a stranger's paper.
I was seventeen the day before. Something older than that walked behind the counter the next morning and started ringing up the first customer.