Because it is Wednesday, your parents and your older sister at choir practice, you have the house to yourself. You are nearly thirteen, old enough to spend your own household-chore money on records. You take the leftover pork chop to your room and eat it cold while you sit beside your suitcase record player and listen to “Kiss and Make Up”, your newest 45. You sing along in your head with The Crowns as you chew. You sing out loud when you pause to take a breath between bites. You are sure this will be a hit because you love it, but this week’s local Top 40 shows it climbing only one notch and still below #20, so the odds are poor.

You are so hungry that even cold the cheap cut of pork chop is wonderful, fat and all. You don’t even know that there are center cut pork chops, ones that would teach you something about how thrift might not be a necessity, that costs for simple pleasures can be ignored, but right now these cheap pork chops are one of your favorite meals. And cube steaks. Mac and cheese. Chuck roast cooked for hours with potatoes and carrots. Meat loaf. All five of those are repeated at two-week intervals, spaced around the soups: vegetable, cabbage, and bean, which is the only one you don’t loathe because it, at least, has the remnants of the shank half of ham your mother cooks with sauerkraut.

Now, for the first time, you have eaten what your father expects to eat at 10:30, laid between two slices of rye bread that he baked Tuesday morning at 2 a.m., the loaf your mother brought home at 6:15 today when it didn’t sell fresh or stale. Leftovers belong to your father. He eats them before his work begins at eleven. He washes them down with coffee. Always, he extends the meat with bread.

You lick your fingers and turn the volume up, playing the record again as if there is something besides buying it that can do make it a top-ten hit. You don’t know that some manager has fired everyone in The Drifters, another group you love. That The Crowns have replaced them. That the next time you buy a record by The Drifters, you will be listening to The Crowns.

Right now, what you know is that it’s wonderful to play it so loud, you hear every word from the kitchen as you stuff the bone deep into the garbage even though there is no way to hide your sin. You do not own a dog. You are forbidden to have weekday visitors after dark. You’re a thief now, someone who does not honor your father.

Still hungry, you sop up every hint of grease from the plate with a slice of that stale bread. You check the wall clock to figure how long remains before the disappointment in your mother’s voice and the terrible, extended silence of your father’s disgust.

Gary Fincke’s memoir-in-essays The Mayan Syndrome was published by Madhat Press in 2023. Its lead essay “After the Three-Moon Era” was reprinted in Best American Essays 2020. His previous collection The Darkness Call won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleaides Press 2018).