Chapter 9 - The Smell
After case became public, people fixated on the meatpacking smell.
Local news quoted Brenda from video.
“You smell like garbage.”
I hated that more than coverage of money.
My work had always left odors.
Raw meat.
Sanitizer.
Steam.
Industrial soap.
When Brian was little, he would hug me at door anyway.
Marie teased:
“Your dad smells like paycheck.”
Brian used to laugh.
At thirteen, he stopped.
He began spraying air freshener after I came home.
Teenagers are cruel.
I did not hold it.
But Brenda turned old shame into weapon.
During civil discovery, text messages showed:
BRENDA:
Your dad stinks.
BRIAN:
He showers.
BRENDA:
It’s in his skin.
BRIAN:
I don’t smell it.
That line stopped me.
He had told me to shower twice daily even though he did not smell anything.
Why?
Next text:
BRENDA:
My friends ask why old guy is always around.
BRIAN:
It’s his house technically.
BRENDA:
Then fix technically.
BRIAN:
I’m working on it.
There.
Not a sensory problem.
A status problem.
I represented labor.
Brenda wanted the house to look inherited from success, not financed by retired meatpacking worker.
She once posted photograph of kitchen captioned:
Built this life from the ground up.
I had paid the ground.
Brian financed countertops after move-in.
I almost laughed reading.
Then anger dissolved into something sadder.
My son had spent adulthood trying to prove he came from somewhere better than he did.
But there was nothing shameful about where he came from.
His mother worked school cafeteria for eighteen years before cancer.
I worked plant.
We bought modest ranch home.
We paid taxes.
We sent him to college.
He had rewritten us as obstacles to sophistication.
May you like
That was his poverty.
Not mine.
