Staff Picks by George Singleton

Author:George Singleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Resisting Separation

I never thought about adhesives. Who knew there were so many types? Me, I grew up with Elmer’s Glue, and that’s what I used if a nail or duct tape wasn’t available. My father, years ago, used to talk about glue made out of horse hooves, and rabbit skin. Not that I felt an ethical urge back then to stop the slaughter of animals, even though it might mean I would never fix a broken vase, lamp, or plate, but I tried my best not to use any kind of glue—Elmer’s probably had something undesirable in it, or got tested on rats and monkeys. I doubt that I ever made a statement about all this, though. It’s not like I took a stand in the same way I did, say, against dope smokers getting sent off to prison, or automatic weapons being readily available because of Second Amendment “rights,” or people signing up for snake hunts down in the Everglades. I’d used some nice yellow wood glue at some point, I think when I accidentally pulled two or three kitchen drawers off-­track that crashed to the floor, and I needed to clamp dovetails back together. I’d squirted out some useless linoleum adhesive one time in that same kitchen, and it lasted about a year before the single piece of vinyl curled up on a particularly humid day. I should’ve bought those self-­stick tiles. I should’ve floated some of that laminate. Fuck glue.

“Hey, you remember that time against Greer when I scored a goal with a header? Only goal we scored against them, but it was me,” this old high school acquaintance Timbo said to me before I even sat down at the booth there at the back of Simple Simon’s diner. I’d not seen him in thirty-­plus years until two days earlier. I’d gone off to college in another state, got married, worked until the age of fifty, and lost my job. I’d sent two kids through college for the most part, had my wife Val come down with blood cancer; she died, I got laid off, and I had to tell a Mexican man that I couldn’t be his family’s landlord anymore after the lease ended. This was a three-­bedroom brick where I’d been brought up. I don’t want to say that I had foreseen a son and daughter who required full tuition payments, a dead spouse, and unemployment, but after my mother moved to a nursing home I had chosen to rent the place instead of selling it.

I said, “I didn’t play soccer, Timbo. I wasn’t on the team,” and sat down across from him. Simple Simon’s looked like a Waffle House, though it had never been one. It had been a Tuddle House Drive-­Inn when I was a kid, and then a Sambo’s, then something else. The mascot on the sign and menu appeared to be a bucktoothed hillbilly. They seemed to take pride in salmon patties. The waitress came up and asked if I wanted coffee.

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