Tamar Jacobs
GOOD WHOLESOME AMERICAN THING
I sat away from the street on a curb
mostly hidden behind a bush to allow them
the illusion of independence and I heard
people tell them, my sons, 7 and 9, so many things.
People asked what they planned to do
with the money they made and some tested their math
as they asked for change, and some
asked if they’d done their homework and one
told one of them he could take off his mask because it was safe,
we’re outside, and one asked my other son if he had a mask, because if he did,
he should put it on, at close contact with all these people and their money,
because bills are really dirty from all the hands that have touched them,
and one said they could give the money they made to the church
around the corner which holds a food bank on Saturday mornings,
and one woman told them to keep the change, that it was
a good wholesome American thing they were doing.
And the man who works at the deli down the street
with all the tattoos and the big black discs stretching
the skin of his ears to what looks like its limit, the one
I once saw crying into his phone on his morning
walk to the deli, he was on his way to work again,
and he didn’t want any lemonade, but
he slipped my son a 20, squeezed his hand around it
to really fix it in there and said, quietly,
Here man, this is all for you.
You don’t got to share it with anyone.
Tamar Jacobs is a writer, editor, and educator. She was a finalist for the Janus Prize awarded by the Chautauqua Institute, and is a Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize winner. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, A Man Named Thaddeus Williams, won the 2023 Outwrite Chapbook Competition, and is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press