The Kid.

He sat at the street corner, in front of a pizza shop. The morning dew dripped lazily off of the awning behind him—that’s how early it was. Some old man in a white apron came out of the pizza shop to bend over for a stretch, and smoke a doobie. He was Frank, who made the pizzas from scratch every morning. He had been doing that same old crap for fifteen years—his body ached from hunching over to kneed the bread, to stir the sauce. Frank thought making pizzas for life was like being in a bad relationship—you could bitch about it, but at the end of the day, you still get the good stuff whenever you want it.

The guy on the corner knew this, as he had sat on this corner before many times. 

Our kid here on the corner couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He had a baby-face, long hair cut shorter in the back than in the front, intense eyes that scoped the area with their blue-silver irises, and he was decked from head to toe in the kind of denim regalia that you could only find at second-hand stores. Nestled in his arms was an old acoustic guitar with a strap—no case for it or nothing, he just held it all the time.

He arched his neck.

“You got another one of those, Frank?”

Frank looked over, exhaling a bit of smoke from the corner of his mouth. He didn’t exactly reply, but he reached into the pocket of his apron anyway and pulled out another joint and a box of matches. He moseyed over to the kid on the corner, and handed them to him.

“Here, only cos’ you’re broke.” Frank muttered, looking away.

“I can’t afford to act like it.” Corner guy said, striking a match and lighting up. “I mean, I’m gonna have a kid soon and whatever…”

This got Frank’s attention, because he suddenly looked back and made eye contact with this corner guy for the first time.

Frank had seen this kid for two years. For two years, this gutter rat would come and park up on the corner with his guitar. For two years, patrons of the pizza shop bore witness to this guy’s highs and lows—pitiful strumming to melancholy blues songs about cheating women, upbeat folks tunes about being free on the road, anything and everything in between. For two whole years, Frank would come outside to smoke and this kid would be sitting here starting out his day. He never thought to say anything to him at all until today, but this revelation the corner kid just sprang up with seemed to be an entirely appropriate time for Frank to dish out what he had been thinking these two years.

“Is that what kids like you are doing these days, impregnating girls? Do you even know what that kind of responsibility takes?” Frank’s voice suddenly rose over the quiet of the entire block. “Look kid, I have four children of my own. They’re entirely ungrateful assholes, all of them. They think they can take off, come back, and live on my dime whenever they feel like it…I make nothing working here, and I only enjoy it because it’s fucking pizza. When one of my assholes decided to go to college, I had to work sixty hours a week…sixty fucking hours. And you know what he did? Do you? He decided to drop out on me!”

The guy on the corner was silent.

“Look kid…if you’re going to be a father…why are you sitting here playing for pennies and people’s time? Didn’t you have a father of your own, can’t you look at his life and whatever he did—and learn something from it?”

There was silence on the block again.

Frank put the joint back in his mouth. He slowly turned, and went back inside the pizza shop. The dew on the awning still dropped. There was a car or two that passed, but it was still too early—the shop wouldn’t open for another two hours.

The kid on the corner placed his hands on his guitar, but couldn’t strum. He glanced around at the street in front of him, but suddenly didn’t feel anything. The joint was down to the nub, so he blew out the last of the smoke and tossed it to the ground. For the first time in two years, he didn’t feel like playing anymore.

He got up, swung the guitar around his torso onto his back, and stepped out into the street.

At that very second, a forty-something mother of two in a grey suburban came speeding around the corner. She didn’t see the corner guy, because she was too busy digging for her sunglasses in her purse. When she collided with the kid, right at his hip, it was too late. It only took five seconds, and he was lying on the concrete—his left leg shattered, his guitar busted beyond use.

*          *          *

When Frank got off of work that afternoon, he headed down to the nearest hospital where he knew they were keeping the kid. He felt like a pile of shit. After all, he had told the guy all kinds of really unpleasant malarkey only moments before he got bulldozed by a vehicle ten times his size.

He still felt like a tool when he moseyed up to the nurses’ station, and was face to face with the most lethargic looking RN he’d ever seen in his life.

“So, I don’t know the name of this kid…” Frank stated, with a nervous stutter. “But he’s uh…he’s blonde, about twenty-two…he came in this morning around nine, had been hit by a car.”

“Oh.” The girl shuffled through some papers. “Ezra Pritchard. Room 104—down this hall, take a right, first door on the left.”

As Frank slowly made his way down the neon white hallway, passing old and young, people in wheelchairs hooked up to cables, and open doors with sick people in beds—he felt weirder and weirder. There was something like rage in him, the residue from the conversation that morning when he had mentioned his own children. He had meant every word he had said about them. But on the flip side, there was this little odd hole in his stomach—it seems he couldn’t really relax unless he knew this corner kid was okay.

So when he came up to the closed door of Room 104, he took a haggard breath, and knocked stiffly.

It took a few seconds, but he only had to knock once. The door creaked open, and a girl of twenty-something with long dark hair and brown eyes stuck her head out. She had bags under her eyes, and little makeup on.

“Can I help you?” She asked in a calm, quiet voice.

“Yeah, uh…I’m Frank Stilano…I pulled him off the street after the accident.”

It was blunt, and the girl stared at him for a second without reply. Then, stepping out of the door, she stood in front of him with wide eyes. She was incredibly small for being pregnant, which she was—a small bump was forming under her sundress. Her arms were thin, and so were her legs. Frank assessed that she just couldn’t be Italian.

“Thank you, so much…you don’t know what this means to me.” She spoke sincerely, her voice still soft and quiet. “I mean, I don’t know what I would have done if he…”

“I guess you’re his girlfriend or something?”

“Yes, I am.” She raised her eyebrow slightly. “Do you know Ezra?”

“He just sits outside of the shop in the mornings. He was crossing the street to the corner when he was hit. I’m out there around the same time he gets there.”

“I’m glad you were. I’m really glad.”

“I know this is a bit of a shit question, but…are they going to throw him out of the hospital when he wakes up?”

“Oh, no…my parents are helping us. They say he’s going to be out of here in a day or two, so…they really love Ezra, they just want him to get better. When he wakes up, we’ll go to my parents’. He can rest there until his hip is healed up.” 

Frank dug into his pocket, and took out his wallet. He sorted through a few bills, and pulled one out. He handed the hundred dollar bill to her.

“Here, just…just give him this when he wakes up. Don’t tell him it’s from me.”

“I will.”

“It’s for you both, I guess. I don’t want the kid to have nothing when he gets out of here. Put it towards the baby, or something.”

“That’s really nice of you…you really didn’t have to—”

“Who is his father anyway? Some gutter-punk lowlife?” Frank inquired, angrily. “Why’s it just you here all alone? Shouldn’t his parents be here?”  

“My mom and dad are coming back tonight with some food, they went home to change.”

“And his parents? Huh? Drugs? In and out of shelters?”

“Ezra’s mom was a dental hygienist who ran off with her boss when he was really young, his dad’s a doctor…" She stopped for a moment, and bit her bottom lip. "He threw him out when he was fifteen because he applied to an arts academy for music and got in…”

“He got in?”

“Yeah...Interlochen Arts Academy. He can play five instruments. He wanted to be a musician, and his dad told him he was shit, and threw him out. When we met, he was doing what he’s still doing—”

“Just playing on the corner?”

“He wakes up at five in the morning every morning, and goes play in front of the pizza shop until noon. Then he comes home, takes a shower, and sleeps until about two—then he gets up, and goes work at the chemical plant until midnight. Then he comes home…He lives with me for now, at my parent’s house. When I met him a year ago, he was living at the homeless shelter on Crook Street.”

Frank glanced down at the ground.

“Look, uh…” He muttered, digging his hands in his pockets. “When he heals up, tell him we’d like to have him back on the corner…if he wants, I can even talk to the boss and see if he can get a job as a busboy or something. He knows where to find me.”

The corner of her mouth twitched for a second, and slowly crept into a smile. Without warning, she put her arms around Frank, and gave him the first hug he’d had in about six years. He was so stunned from the feeling of it, he didn’t really know what to do. So he just let her hug him, and when she pulled away, the warmth stayed.

When she smiled at him, nodded, and went back in the room—the warmth stayed.

It stayed.