Lugo in Normal Time by Kevin Moffett

Author:Kevin Moffett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

During the winter Erica learned to walk, he brought her to the indoor playground at the mall. They went early, before the stores open, when it was just Lugo, Erica, and the mall-walkers swinging both arms in exaggerated crisscrosses to increase their heart rate. Right behind you, they would say, when approaching from behind. They said it in a singsong, drawing out the third syllable, to make it seem less repetitive.

This was before he met the woman who came to the playground with her nephew. The nephew was staying with her because his house was being tented and fumigated for termites. That morning she’d driven him by the house to look at the tent, she said, but the boy couldn’t see it. Literally could not see it. “It’s as if the tent’s not there,” she said. This was when Lugo knew she was lonely.

Erica was a happy baby, predictable, easy. When she didn’t like what was going on, she cried. When she did, she laughed. What she liked and didn’t like always made sense to Lugo.

One year, he called Popeyes corporate headquarters in Atlanta and told the customer-ser vice woman how he and his daughter had to take the long way home from preschool so they could drive past the sign. He wanted a miniature replica of it to give to her for Christmas, but the woman said they didn’t make them. Instead she sent a poster of an awestruck fat man biting into a piece of thigh meat. Beneath him, it said, “Love that chicken from Popeyes!”

By Christmas, Erica no longer cared about the sign. He drove past it a half-dozen times. “It’s your sign,” he would say. She wouldn’t even look at it! Maybe, he thought, she was just tired of that particular Popeyes sign. He drove across town to a different Popeyes, stopped in front of the sign, but she remained unmoved. What was the matter with her?

“It’s your sign,” he said. He unbuckled her from her car seat and brought her into the parking lot. “Look, there, just look at it.”

He lifted her chin a little too roughly and she began crying. He tried to console her. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll just have to find you something new to like.”

Driving home that afternoon, he felt terrible. He knew he’d meet every phase she went through—and what did he suppose her fixation on the sign was but a phase, temporary, brief, dear—with this kind of stubbornness. Better to go out of his way to avoid the sign, better to stop keeping track.

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