Four Corners draft part 1

It wasn’t nostalgia that brought Maynard back home. His mother said she’d found some of things of his and she wanted to give him a chance to go through them before they got tossed out. Maynard could have sworn he took everything of value when he moved out, but what the hell, he came anyway. His parents were selling the house and it couldn’t hurt to take one last look.
He parked his Grand Am on the street and walked across the ill-kept lawn to the front door. Dad must be slipping, he thought. When he was a boy, the lawn – along with the little garden out back – was a point of pride. One time he and was playing football with his brother in the back yard and an overthrown pass sent Augie reeling ass-backwards into some tomato plants. What followed didn’t hurt Augie so much because his backside was already numb from the fall, but Maynard wasn’t quite as fortunate.
The door opened before he had a chance to open it and he nearly ran smack into his mother. Mom had let her hair go all the way gray and wore it short. That and the glasses and the double chin made her a stranger to him. She looked more like an aunt he saw once in a blue moon than the woman who raised him.
“Maynard,” she said, giving him a perfunctory peck on the cheek. “Your things are in your room. I was just going to get the mail.”
He reached behind him and snagged a handful of magazines and envelopes from the mailbox.
“Here,” he said, passing them along.
The inside of the house had a ghostly feel to it. So much had been moved around, replaced or otherwise altered. Yet Maynard could look at any given spot and remember exactly what it used to look like. The blue recliner in the family room, for instance, had supplanted an older beige model that Maynard nearly broke when he tried to find out how far back it would go. Likewise, the book case in the dining room that now lay almost bare had once held volumes of baseball almanacs that Dad purchased and the males of the house read to tatters. But with two of the three males gone and so much information available online, the case had outlived its usefulness.
Remembrance was hard work and Maynard ducked into the kitchen to find a snack. He’d made it all the way into the fridge before he realized the old man was standing behind him, staring.
“Grab me a Coke while you’re in there,” he said.
A spiteful flair compelled him to tell Dad to get his own fucking Coke, but Maynard controlled himself and silently passed a can into the old man’s hand. He grabbed another for himself and shut the door. Dad was shorter than him, practically blind and cursed with a bad back and stubby fingers. Still, Maynard couldn’t shake the sense that he was sizing him up.
“Everything going OK?” he asked.
Maynard shrugged and reached for the cookie jar. “Can’t complain.”
“You seen your mother yet?”
Maynard nodded. His mouth was full of chocolate chip.
“She looks tired,” he said after he’d swallowed.
“We both are,” Dad said. “The move…well, I don’t think she expected it. I think she figured we’d be here long enough to see grandchildren running around this house. I figured the same thing too, for a time. ‘Course now I know better.”
The last sentence was delivered with a snicker that made Maynard ball his hands into fists and grunt. He looked again at his father, searching for some sign of provocation in those cool blue eyes. But the hate wasn’t there anymore. The old man was just going through the old motions.
“I’ll be in my room,” Maynard grumbled. He was glad their new place was even further away. It gave him an excuse not to visit.
Maynard’s room was much as it had been the last time he came back. The bed was neatly made, the walls were bare and the floor was free of clutter. It was a far cry from his teenage years, when vulgar posters and dirty dishes and wayward clumps of clothes made his parents afraid to venture inside. If he wanted to, he could pick a spot and a memory would come, just like it did downstairs. But that wasn’t a game that Maynard wanted to play, not with these four corners.
Unfortunately, he might not have a choice. A stack of erstwhile belongings sat on his bed, beckoning him like a misshapen siren. Maynard approached with caution. He felt the bedsprings groan as he parked himself – another reminder of all that had changed since he lived there. With a curious eye, he went about rediscovering what his mother had saved from permanent destruction.
At the top of the pile was an issue of Playboy. It surprised Maynard for two reasons, the first being that he did a pretty good job to get rid of all his porn when he cleared out and the second being that it seemed like exactly the kind of thing Mom would throw away. It didn’t make any sense, unless…
Maynard checked the date and scoped out the old-school hairstyles. Yup, he thought, this was the one. This was the very first adult magazine he could lay claim to, given to him by his very own father when he was 13. The old man laid it on him like it was a rite of passage, which Maynard supposed it was. He was going through puberty at the time and skin mags were valuable guides to the carnal world that awaited his future self. Dated or not, Maynard was glad to have it.
“Use it in good health,” Dad had told him. “And don’t tell your mother I gave you that.”
Maynard heeded the warning at first, but foolishly ended up showing it to his pre-pubescent brother. Actually, he didn’t show it to Augie as much as Augie caught him looking at it and wanted to know what it was. Maynard, feeling like a big shot, told him it what it was and that Dad had given it to him because he was practically a man now anyway. Envious, Augie wanted to look too.
“Fat chance,” Maynard told him. “Look at you. You’re still a little kid.”
“Aw, come on,” Augie insisted.
Maynard decided to be magnanimous and relented. Unfortunately, Augie’s exclamation of “wow, neat!” drew the attention of their mother. Mom snatched the magazine and tore into Maynard without mercy. After laying into Maynard for exposing his brother to “such filth,” she demanded to know where he got it from. He waffled and dodged and equivocated, but in the end, she broke him. What followed nearly touched off World War III.
“How could you?!” Mom shrieked. “What was going through your mind, giving him that?”
“He’s a growing boy!” Dad snapped. “He needs to learn!”