Getting married was his idea. That they barely knew each other didn’t seem important. Marriage would fix that. It had worked for his parents （or maybe it hadn’t）。 Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do.
His son was born in July, a seething Florida summer. Timmy was present for the birth, a moist and surprisingly violent spectacle that would have traumatized him if he hadn’t been stoned out of his mind. Afterward he stepped out to meet a customer. When he got back to the hospital, the birth certificate was already filled in with the name Tess had chosen, Dakota Blue.
You’re fuckin kidding me, Timmy said.
Dakota was bad enough. Dakota was some faggot on a soap opera. Dakota Blue was worse, a stripper or a hooker. A transvestite hooker. That’s what she’d named his son.
Dakota Blue Flynn, he said aloud, but what he heard was bluefin. And from that day on, he called his kid the Tuna.
Those first months were like a dream to him, the exhilaration and the exhaustion feeding each other so that weed was superfluous. Without smoking anything, he woke up stoned. He watched the Tuna while Tess went rollerblading to regain her figure, which took no time at all. You look great, he told her, but secretly he missed the big tits and belly, the sexy fat chick carrying his son.
The crazy part, the completely inexplicable part? All these years later, he still missed her. Not the shrieking bitch who blew up his phone every month, but Tess as she once was, the dazed, horny hippie girl. Remember how her hair smelled? Smoky sweet, like sandalwood incense. It gave him an instant hard-on. No other woman had ever affected him that way.
TIMMY SMOKED A BOWL TO FORTIFY HIMSELF. THEN HE MUTED the TV and called his son’s cell phone.
“Tuna, my man. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he said in his new deep voice.
There was an unusual silence. Normally their calls had a soundtrack, an unending loop of electronic noises.
“Pretty quiet there. No Xbox?”
“Nope.” The P landed with an aggressive pop, a tidal wave of adolescent anger packed into a single consonant. “Mom took it away.”
“Why’d she do that?”
Another silence. Timmy eyed the water pipe on the coffee table, contemplating another hit.
“I know she told you,” said the Tuna. “Why ask me, if you already know?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“I got suspended.” The voice was a little shocking. Just a few weeks ago, he’d sounded like a little kid.
“What for?” Timmy said.
The Tuna didn’t answer, which wasn’t surprising. He was a brick wall when confronted. At fourteen, Timmy had been the same way.
“Mom said you cut class.”
The kid inhaled loudly, a moist snotty sound. “It wasn’t a class. It was a fucking pep rally. Did she tell you that?”
“No,” said Timmy. Fucking Tess! It was a lesson he’d learned a hundred times: her version of events, any events, was not to be trusted.
“I mean, why do I have to sit there and clap for some asswipe with a basketball?”
“That is some bullshit,” Timmy agreed.
Another silence.
Timmy said, “Well, at least you get a couple days off school.”
“And sit here all day with Rudy? No thanks. I’d rather go to school.”
Rudy was Tess’s Cuban boyfriend, a Lexus-driving douchebag.
“Doesn’t he have his own place?” Timmy knew, had been repeatedly told, that the answer was none of his business. He felt it was entirely his business if some random guy was living under the same roof as his kid.