Joey never really understood why his mother hadn't just aborted him.

It wasn’t that she needed companionship. Theresa enjoyed being alone. She had been delighted when Joey’s father abandoned them, and she had never made any effort to find a replacement. Not one that lasted longer than a few nights, at least.

Was it societal pressure that compelled her to give birth to him? Certainly not. The few friends she had would routinely abort at least one child each year. For them, the scandalous behavior would have been to carry the baby to term.

He could only guess that the reason she let him live was so that, in the future, he might provide her with physical and financial support. Theresa had always been good at thinking in the long term. You wouldn’t believe that from knowing her, but only because she had never possessed the initiative needed to change the futures that she foresaw. But she knew that she had only a little less than a decade before her body would begin rotting. When that time came, she would need a strong pair of legs to go to the grocery store and she would need a set of able hands to pick up her check from the Department of Social Services. She would need somebody to help her out of bed in the morning, cook her breakfast, make her lunch, make her dinner, and then help her back to bed after disposing of the empty bottles. And she was willing to provide the minimal effort needed to assure that this would all come about.

And she was right. Although not much of an earner, Joey eventually became an irreplaceable asset to her home. This never earned him any warmth or gratitude from her, of course. He was given no more attention or affection than would be given to an average cook or delivery man. The only time she spoke to him at any length would be right before passing out each evening. And what she had to say were certainly not the words of a loving mother.

His father was different. Despite having left his son for ten years, Murray McClintiach was not a bad man. He had come back to their home after Theresa finally died. Joey hadn’t known that she was dying until her final week. And, when she told him, it was said with all the concern of a person telling you that they were going out to take a piss. Fortunately, Joey was at an age where he was able to give the one situation the same amount of concern as he would the other. Once she was placed in her pauper’s grave, he was free to move forward with his life. 

It was very easy for him to dislike his mother. She had never given him any incentive to do otherwise.  His feelings towards his father would be more complicated. Joey could not condemn the man for abandoning him, because he could not condemn anyone for leaving his mother if they were able to do so. What he would learn, though, is that Murray’s desertion had nothing to do with Theresa, and Murray never used that convenient excuse to condone his actions. He openly told Joey that he would have likely left any woman in this situation. Murray just didn’t have it in him to be a father. He knew that it was bad to leave, and he knew that he was a bad man for leaving. He knew that his desertion would damage Joey, but that it would not end him. It might result in Joey becoming a drunk, but it might also drive him to become a great man. It could lead to him becoming a brilliant artist, or it could lead to him dying in prison. The odds were even. However, Murray was certain that Joey's life would have been destroyed if he had stayed. There was still too much still to do, and he didn’t believe that it should all be over now just because of a single bad mistake. If he had stayed, he would have hated his son.

And that would have been a much more difficult thing for Joey to recover from than his mother’s drunken indifference.

So Murray returned to Joey's life a week after Theresa died from whatever pathetic thing she had died from. Their reconciliation was a quick one. Murray made no apologies. Joey did not ask for any. At eleven years old, he was able to understand what his father had done, and to even be somewhat grateful. He could imagine another reality in which his father had stayed with them. He imagined nightly beers drunk on the back porch. A television that never turned off. There would be no fights between the married couple. There would just be a quiet draining hopelessness - an infectious quality of Theresa's that would have molded Murray into a living chasm. This wouldn’t have been much different from the childhood that Joey had lived. But there would not have been an absentee parent for him to imagine and to idealize. Instead, there would have been the reality of two miserable parents living in a miserable house filled with the miserable certainty that there would never be anything better.

It would have also prevented Murray from becoming the father that he became. And the Joey of that other world would have never known what a wonderful thing he had lost.

Murray had dreamed of being a writer. He would never be a successful one. Not remotely. He never had anything published, and it was extremely rare that he ever finished anything. By the time that he returned to Joey's life, he was about ready to give up on this dream. Within a month, he had. There was an endearing reason for this, though.  Murray had found in his son the only audience that he would ever need. Every Sunday evening at eight o’clock, Murray and Joey would gather together in their hotel room so that Murray could read that week’s story. In all the days leading up to this event, the story’s scrambled pieces of paper were given a divine reverence – Joey was not to touch, look at, or even ask about them. 

These weekly tales weren’t all that Murray had to offer his son, of course. The other six days would close with improvised bedtime stories. These were rambling fairy tales that would often require Joey's assistance in their telling – he’d have to remind his father from where the garbageman had started his journey or at which type of store the kangaroo had applied for a job. And then there were the stories that his father would scrabble together and tell Joey during lunch. They would be about a statue that they had seen in a town square or about a strange man who they had met in the park.

Murray knew that travel stories were his son’s favorite and so he did his best to keep them in that genre. These were stories of ships that hadn’t existed in centuries. Tales of nonsensical gods with absurd origins who helped helpless travelers. Stories about people and places and magnificent things that allowed Joey to believe that the world was not the drab and awful place in which his mother had lived, but that it was a wonderful land that had to be seen and explored to its absolute fullest.

            That's likely what led Joey to hop trains. In the beginning, he would jump on the slow-moving ones and ride them until their speed was right at the precipice of making it dangerous to jump off. And each time, he would consider staying on the ladder. But he never did. Not until his sixteenth birthday. He had a bag at home that was filled with the bare necessities that he believed he would need if he were to ever ride the rails. But, whenever he was carrying that bag, there were never any trains moving slowly enough to hop. And, whenever there were slow trains, he did not have his bag.

On one day, he just went without the bag.

And he never saw his father again.

Murray completely understood.