The Daddy Factory

I was good and patient during Mama’s appointment at The Daddy Factory, so afterward she took me to the confectionery to buy candy Lego bricks and black licorice. Airplanes kept swooping in low over the factory parking lot where I waited in the back seat, making finger drawings in window steam while Mama met our latest daddy in suite 207. There were other mommies waiting in the parking lot. They had candy-apple lips like Mama’s and pants that looked like jungle cats. They were waiting for their turn to go in and meet with the daddies too.

Turns out the factory didn’t put this one together right, so he wasn’t gonna be my daddy, like all the other daddies they’d messed up, but at least the factory people gave Mama a hundred bucks because she had to practice the mommy job, the cooking and the cleaning and the kissing all mommies do.

Her nose ran down into her chapped lips, thick and translucent ’cause it was cold and fierce out, undressed trees boogying along the turnpike as we sped back toward our little strip mall suburb. She drove with two fingers on the wheel while her other hand danced through the car, making frantic sparrow spirals as she opened the glove box, the center console, getting her medicine syringes and the glass bottle of headache water.

“Things are gonna be good good, baby. You’ll see. One of these daddies is gonna be put together nice and handsome, a king or a car dealer or a tech wizard. Pieces put in their proper place. Like that medieval castle jigsaw I got you for Christmas. You remember, right? Big and strong and safe.” Mama was wearing jean shorts even though the streets were sleeted over crew-sock white and she kept scratching at that ugly ooze behind her knee. Said she got poison ivy, something nasty, but she had her shots from the doctor and she was gonna be OK.

Mama stretched the hundred-dollar bill in her hands like a pair of wings. “You can buy whatever you want, baby. When The Daddy Factory gets the model just right, he’ll take you to the confectionery every day. You can buy a gobstopper as big as your belly. They’re gonna get him right soon, I just know it. Just be patient for me, baby.”

The guy Joey who worked the counter at the candy store could only work at the candy store because his Mama owned the shop and there was something wrong with him. He had fishbowl glasses that gave him bug eyes and a head shaped like a watermelon squeezed by a rubber band. Mama said when he was a teen he ate so many sweets they made him loopy while driving and he ran into a guardrail and all the good daddies, firemen and cops and paramedics, had to collect up the pieces of his head and put them back together there on the road like Humpty Dumpty but they couldn’t get the shape quite right.

Joey had a powdered sugar sheen of spit and sweat cuffing his mouth. He licked his lips lots when Mama came in, pupils wide at her in his googly-eyed glasses. I got two boxes of Good and Plentys, and a plastic bag of candy Lego Bricks.

Joey fumbled on his words, “Pl-pleasure, Cara. And your li-little boy, he’s getting so big now.” His Mama, a rotund munchkin of a woman, hit the back of his lumpy head with a newspaper. Mama touched his wrist while she paid. He gave her a paper bag, even though I didn’t hear what she ordered. Probably fudge, because Mama loved fudge.

The next Daddy Factory didn’t seem the least bit promising. The whole building looked like a piece of stinky cheese on a mousetrap, each room a little hole in its walls, the plaster outside moldy. Mama candy-appled her lips in the mirror and gave herself a dose of medicine in the ooze behind her knee. Medicine is anything that makes you feel real good, she told me. Candy can be medicine, and you’ve got plenty to eat up while Mama gets to her appointment.

I alternated Lego, licorice, Lego, licorice. I didn’t really like the licorice but I always got it because I knew Mama did, that some of the daddies were bad kissers and she needed something that would make her mouth go numb, their bad breath medicated out from her taste buds.

Once, Mama told me in The Daddy Factories, daddy parts come on pallets by the truckload, but there’s so many pieces to put together it can be really hard to get right. An arm that can throw a fastball. Scruff that feels like sandpaper. A voice box that can sing to acoustic guitar and scold and say “I love you” all at once. Hands that hold mine so tight I can’t run into the road, get loopy off candy, crack my head into a million pieces on the concrete even if I wanted to so bad sometimes. So many pieces they wouldn’t be able to put it back together again.

Once, I’d told Mama I got the candy Lego Bricks so if the next Daddy Factory didn’t work, I could build her one myself. One where they make ’em right on the first try, and she wouldn’t have to kiss any more daddies except my daddy. He’d be made perfect. She held a hand to my cheek, smiled wide, and said “You be patient now, I can’t be late to my appointment.”