LatinosUSA

When you’re little and growing up, twenty feels like a special number. You’re cool if you can count to twenty. Cooler still if you can do it without using your fingers. Twenty seems quite a lot. Yet not too much, It’s still manageable and you’re having fun experimenting with it.

Today for example father drank fifteen cans of his favorite beer. That’s only five cans less than twenty. The calendar says there’s ten days since mother hasn’t been home. And that’s half of twenty. Ten more and there’ll be twenty. She counted to twenty again and jumped with every count.

“Did you know that I can count to twenty?” she asked father again.

“Yeah,” he said, not watching her. He was busy tying a slim rope around the bar he installed to do pull-ups on.

“Can you do twenty?” the little girl asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I ain’t man enough to manage.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Ask your mother.”

“When’s she coming home?”

He was silent for a long while, working only with his hands, making swift, jerky movements, tying knots on the rope.

“When’s mom coming home?” the little girl asked again.

“Can you count to twenty?” father asked.

“You know I can! I proved it to you. I proved it to everybody.”

“Good. Then turn around, cover your ears and close your eyes and count to twenty. But when you’re done, count again from the beginning. Count to twenty five times.”

“Five times?”

“That’s what I said. Five times counting from one to twenty. Can you do that?”

“I can. Just watch me.”

She turned around, facing the window and squinted her eyes shut and covered her ears and began counting. “One, two, three, four…”

She was at seventeen when she heard it behind her. Father dropped to the floor and the bar he’d installed for doing pull-ups dislodged itself from its holding points and fell on his head. He took it down with the rope that he tied around his neck. The room was filling with dust from the crumbled wall that held the bar.

“Wow!” said the little girl as she turned around. “Daddy, you’re more than man enough. Took the whole bar down, you did! From the wall.”

But he didn’t look too happy about it. On the contrary, he started crying and gathered himself in a sad ball on the floor among the rubble. The little girl came to his side and couldn’t comprehend why he grabbed her into his arms and squeezed her so tight as he kept crying.

The tears never stopped for the rest of the day, but despite them constantly rolling down his cheeks and into his beard, father said, “How about I teach you to count… to a hundred this time?”

“You think I could do that?”

“I know you can.”

“Wow! You’re the best, daddy! Let’s go.”