Moviestars, Planets, and Other Things

Schrödinger's Ham

My brother Jackson was fourteen years old, and hungry.

"Dad, where's the ham?" he asked, at three-fifteen in the afternoon on the first day of school. He'd been home for five minutes.

"In the fridge." My dad didn't look up from his book.

"I can't find it."

"If you don't see any, then don't you think it's reasonable to conclude that we're out?"

"I don't think we are," said my brother.

Dad just shrugged.

Jack huffed back to the kitchen.

That's how it started: that same conversation, with minor variations and embellishments, repeated, every other day. Jackson had arrived at the time in a boy's life when the eating begins. The real eating. I mean, honestly, I don't understand how parents can manage to keep food in the house with teenage boys around. As for me, I was ten, and still a few years away from that time when my after school snack would be a box of Honey-Nut Cheerios and a half-gallon of milk in a mixing bowl. But Jack was right up in it: two bowls of Rice Crispies with table sugar on top for breakfast, a bag lunch at school, an eight-hundred-calorie "snack" after school, dinner at six with ice cream or cookies for dessert, and then a couple more bowls of cereal before bed. I think this was before he'd learned to mix peanut butter with Pillsbury chocolate fudge cake icing and eat it with a spoon.

"Hey," Jackson stuck his head in my room, a couple weeks into September. "You gotta help me find the ham."

I was on my bed, re-reading the comic book adaptation of Star Wars that I'd gotten the year before when I was in the hospital with appendicitis. "Dad says we're out," I said.

"We can't be out."

"Why?"

"I had a ham sandwich in my lunch yesterday, and there was no ham in the fridge last night. Then today, I got another ham sandwich!"

"So Mom bought some more."

"When? On Tuesday night?"

He had a point. Mom shopped on weekends, bringing at least one conscripted kid to help.

"Maybe Dad just picked some up? You know, a quick stop," I offered.

Dad was the early riser. He had the job of making sure we were all ready and out the door in the mornings. That job included packing us all lunches. Each morning there'd be a neat row of brown paper bags on the shelf in the front hall by the doorbell, above the 1968 Colliers Encyclopedia, each lunch labeled in black magic marker: EJ (that's me), Jack, Iris, GPF (that was Dad).

"I don't think so," Jack replied. "I can't find any today, either. Why would he shop in the middle of the week and only get enough for one day?"

"You think Dad's lying? I find ham in there all the time. I just had a ham sandwich on Sunday. We're just out."

"Yeah, sometimes there's like two slices in there, no more. Not enough to make eight or ten lunches a week, plus snacks, and weekend lunches. Where is it all? He's not lying, but, he never really says we're out. He just suggests that I should conclude we're out."

"Just have the turkey. There's always turkey."

"That stuff sucks. Mom won't get the good kind. She says they inject it with sugar. You go look," he said. "See if you can find the ham."

"Why me? You look."

"Mom's already yelled at me twice for holding the fridge door open."