Read Like Son for Free Online Page B

hanging down from the ignition each time I shifted. Keys rattled. My apartment keys. Deadbolt and lower lock. Car keys. Door and ignition. Keys to my dad’s house. Front and back door. And the one strange saw-tooth key with the paper label. That key was extra long and kept jabbing my leg.
    Morning rush-hour traffic was at its worst. At one point on the 405 south, where the stinking asparagus fields fill the air with noxious fumes, each lane came to a near-complete stop for almost half an hour. Ready to jump out of my skin, tempted to open my door and run into the fields in search of sprinklers—I swear, if I’d gone in the fields and found a source of cold water, I would have stripped down to my Skivvies and lay in the cold mud and just given up and died—I read the label attached to the safe deposit key my dad had given me for my birthday.
    Wells Fargo Bank. City of Orange. Old Towne Circle.
    The paper label turned limp from my humid touch, and the ink smeared. Just looking at my dad’s shaky handwriting on that label, I knew there was no chance in hell the safe deposit box would contain a storybook happy ending.
    An hour later, entirely unfamiliar with protocol, I stood in line at Wells Fargo and waited for a teller. When I was finally called to a window, I said, “I have a safe deposit box.”
    Shit, I sounded slow.
    “And do you have a key?” the teller asked.
    I pried it off my keychain and handed it to him.
    “I’ll also need photo identification,” he said.
    Great. There was nothing more fun than some O.C. conservative dude in a cheap tie and Dockers asking to see my driver’s license. Trying to play it cool, like nothing out of the ordinary was about to hit, I reached for my wallet and handed him my license.
    As he stared at it, his thick face pinched into a confused mess of wrinkles. He looked up at me. Then back at my license. The photo had been taken when I was sixteen and far less of a man. The name on that little laminated plastic card read: Francisca Guerrero. Sex: F.
    “Excuse me a minute,” the teller said.
    He came back with, guessing from the stuffy polyester suit, a manager.
    “Social security, please.”
    I gave the numbers. Boss man checked it against something in a manila file folder. He shrugged his shoulders and handed me my license, but not the key.
    “Meet me over there,” he said, and pointed to a smokedglass door at the other end of the room.
    I did as told, and he led me past the locked door and to a row of closetlike rooms. He opened the door closest to us and waved his hand into the small room like some sort of valet.
    “Have a seat,” he said.
    It felt like 1910 in there. Everything—the walls, the heavy desk chair, the low narrow shelf, the square cups filled with pencils and rubber bands—was carpentered out of expensive and antique-looking dark wood. The size of the space was somewhere between a phone booth and a handicap-accessible public bathroom stall. You’d think with all the nice wood furnishings that it would have been a pleasant place to chill. But it wasn’t. In fact, I think the air in there had been preserved from the same early–twentieth century period when the room was constructed. Unable to sit there any longer than I had to, I stood in the doorway and waited for the manager to come back.
    Several minutes later, he returned with a small metal safe deposit box. He handed me the box, sniffed toward the shelf inside the room to indicate that—although who knew what I might want to do—that’s where normal people put such things. Then he gave me my key.
    “Close the door for privacy,” he said and left.
    I stepped back into the room and pulled the door shut behind me. That part was easy enough. Metal box on the wood shelf in front of me, I tried to take a deep breath. I felt like I might start hyperventilating. I hadn’t ever really considered myself claustrophobic, but I was starting to think maybe I was. Sitting in that dimly lit and narrow