Games by Lou Freshwater

My daddy would knock-down about half of his case of Bud before the first game started. Me and him lived in a one bedroom house on a county road. I slept on the pea-green sofa bed, and on game days we put it back into a couch and we sat and watched whatever we could get with the rabbit ears, I picked a team with pretty colors, pretty to me anyways, and I tried to root for them. I tried to like the game best I could, better than most girls I’d say. I also learned to figure on how drunk Daddy was by the way he moved, by how slow or fast he talked, by how many times an hour he told me to get him another beer, by the way he crinkled the can in his big hand and how far he threw it when he was done. I was always careful not to make him mad cause by the second game he would usually be telling me I wasn’t going to amount to nothing. I was going to scrub rich people’s toilets for a living. But I was always proving how wrong he was, and sometimes he thought the plays I said they should do were the ones they should do. I don’t remember exactly all Daddy’s favorite teams, I just remember I always wanted him to win.

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