"Is something the matter, Daddy?" asks Audrey.

"Nothing's the matter, sweetie," he says, surprised all over again at how perceptive his daughter is for a six-year-old. "I’m just concentrating on the road so we're safe."

He'd been brooding over not buying beer prior to picking her up, strategizing just how to secure some now without her catching on. Audrey has to be kept in the dark about his beer consumption so when he drops her back at her mother's, who inevitably asks, "Did you see your dad drinking beer?" her only answer can be no.

Plan A is to stop at the grocery store, throw a bunch of random items into a shopping cart, slipping in the contraband twelver along the way. He wants to avoid the grocery store, though, for it's Saturday afternoon, which means long lines of impatient coupon clippers yelling at their children to put back the candy. He isn't up for that. So. He's now paralleling parking in front of plan B: Sammy's Liquor Mart.

"Audrey, I need to get us some soda, potato chips and stuff, okay?"

"Daddy, can we get a pumpkin?"

Audrey's excited eyes are fixed to a bright orange banner hanging atop the alleyway separating Sammy's and an automobile repair shop. The glossy banner is littered with silhouettes of jack-o-lanterns, and scarecrows, and witches straddling broomsticks; it states: CHARLIE'S GREAT PUMPKIN PATCH!

His mind flies hours ahead, to wet newspapers and sticky pumpkin innards. He'd really have to pay attention and supervise her. He pictures turning his head to cough, hearing one of those frightening child wind-up screams, and turning back around to find Audrey's tiny hand sliced open from a steak knife.

"Didn’t mommy already carve a pumpkin with you?"

"Yes. But I wanna do one with you, daddy."

He realizes the pumpkin patch is a bit of serendipity. They'll pop in the liquor store. While Audrey plays with Bacchus, Sammy's unofficial mascot cat who sleeps comatose on a shelf behind the counter, he’ll have the beer in a bag before she's the wiser. Then off to the pumpkin patch. So thrilled will Audrey be over her pumpkin, she'll probably skip right over the pit stop at Sammy's in her Sunday night debriefing to her mother.

"Sure, babe. We'll get us a pumpkin. First we need to get us some soda and chips and cookies. You like those Oreos cookies, huh?"

"Can we get a really big one?"

"You mean for a pumpkin? Is that what you want?"

"I want the biggest one ever!"

"Sure thing, Babe."

Sammy isn’t working. And so no Bacchus. He'll have to be a bit stealthier, but it can be done. "Why don’t you stay here and look at the magazines, Hun." realizing while in front of the beer fridge, in the next isle over, most if not all of the magazines represent the general reading material of Sodom and Gomorrah.

"Audrey!"

"Daddy." She is behind him.

"Are you buying beer?"

The cold shock of panic of possibly seeing Audrey holding open a smut magazine’s centerfold with a questioning look on her face dissolves into a wet, hot spot on the back of his neck. It is downright eerie how much she sounds like her mother, as if Brenda has voice-trained her: Say it with your nose up and chin sticking out, Audrey, so that you will achieve the proper tone, a tone which demeans and shames him.

"Audrey, how big of a pumpkin do you want?"

"Bigger than a bowling ball!"

"Great! Then tha'’s the one we'll get. But I’m going to have to make a deal with you. A secret deal." He realizes how pathetic he sounds, saying the word "secret" in a phony, sing-songy voice, as if it suggests something magical. He stops himself. It's nothing magical; it's the pumpkin for her promise not to rat him out to her mother. He pulls a twelve pack from the refrigerator. "Don’t tell your mother, or else she won't let you see me for a long time."

At the alley's entrance, a faded cardboard cut-out of a smiling scarecrow points the way to what becomes a picnic blanket-sized area of sparsely layered hay. Further back, against the wall where he remembers once relieving himself, a tiny trailer is anchored to a noisy portable generator. He looks at the trailer and can almost make out the hot plate, ducked-tape upholstered easy chair and hiccupping television screen that no longer responds to being beaten, through the faded pink and green fiberglass.

He wishes for other pumpkin shoppers to appear, to make himself feel better, as if he has brought Audrey to a reputable and popular, albeit, out of the way place in which to buy pumpkins, instead of a dank alleyway where a conscientious parent would never dare lead their child.

"Daddy, there’s still pumpkins left!" says Audrey breaking free of his hand to run the last few remaining steps to the display.

It’s a pitiful lot. At first glance they are all severely misshapen. He points to the least offensive of the bunch. "How about this one?"

"Daddy, that one is ugly."

"It’s not ugly. In fact, I think that it’s a very good one."

He has a vision. They will take home the malformed pumpkin and transform its imperfection into a scary Halloween half-a-skull head. So artistic is their effort that it is chosen as the headliner for her class’s show-and-tell. Maybe Audrey will get caught up in the excitement of telling her story, as children tend to do, and say it was the very last remaining pumpkin. Maybe encourage her to work in the phrase, the pumpkin nobody wanted, which has a fabulous children’s book title ring to it.

"How about it, sweetheart?" he asks, fanaticizing of Audrey’s teacher talking him up to an astonished Brenda at the next parent-teacher night. "Want to do it?"

"No, daddy," Audrey says. She is in front of a pumpkin nearly hidden amongst the group. It is large and very nearly perfect. "I want this one!" Her tone has already attached ownership to it.

"It’s all yours, sweetie. But come and stand by me."

Suddenly the trailer slumps and a hairy bear of a man wearing a ridiculously bulky winter jacket emerges sideways from out of the tiny door. The man is nothing like the cheerful and welcoming banner. He looks as if he has been taken from a nap in which he was a million miles away from his minuscule trailer camped in a gloomy alley. One giant paw strokes his long, untamed beard in the manner of wringing out a dishtowel. The other holds a weathered Styrofoam cup. He brings the cup to his chin and deposits a buckshot of chewing tobacco into it. "What can I do for you?"

"You must be Charlie." This is met with a blank stare. "We’re looking for a pumpkin."

"This is what I got left," the man says, sounding bored.

He knows how the game is played. These fly-by-night pumpkin patches and Christmas tree lots are all alike; prices rise and fall like commodities on the stock exchange. He can’t be certain that the hairy man has overheard Audrey’s enthusiasm for the large pumpkin, and doesn’t want to tip his hand on exactly which one they are eyeing.

"How much for that one?" he motions to a pumpkin that looks as if it has been tossed from an airplane

"Six bucks."

He pretends to contemplate the price. He then casually points to Audrey's find. "How much for this one?"

"The big one is twenty."

Clearly the trailer has thin walls.

"You must kidding, right?"

"Nope."

"How about ten?"

"Twenty."

"Twelve."

"The pumpkin is twenty bucks."

"I find that price a bit out of line."

"Take it or leave it," he says, looking out towards the empty street. "One lost sale don't mean nothing to me."

He wants to answer the hairy man back with, "I guess that fancy trailer of yours is paid for, huh?" but instead, he decides to take one final stab at the art of negotiation. He smiles. He chuckles. "How about fifteen? I mean, seeing as how Halloween is just a couple days away, I’m sure that you don’t want to be stuck with all these pumpkins?"

"After the 31st, I donate my remaining inventory to a ladies pie-making club."

He thinks of stuffing a twenty into the hairy man's cup of tobacco excrement. Then in one deft, Herculean-like movement, raise the bought pumpkin over his head to smash it to the ground at such an angle so as pumpkin shrapnel becomes hopelessly tangled in Charlie's beard.

Charlie. He'd put up any amount of money against the hairy man's name actually being Charlie. Obviously, he's using it for its implied association with a certain beloved cartoon character. Well, the Shultz estate might just have something to say about his liberal use of their intellectual property. He imagines the Schultz estate's army of lawyers slapping an injunction on "Charlie's Great Pumpkin Patch" so fast it’d make this Charlie fraud’s head spin. He fantasizes the Schultz legal team rewarding his dutiful whistle-blowing with a sizable check, while presenting Audrey a signed cartoon cell that doubles in worth every year seeing as Mr. Schultz is dead.

"So, what'll it be, huh?" The hairy man asks, making another deposit into his cup.

"Daddy, that's not a lot for a pumpkin.”

The hairy man smiles down at him. "Now you see there. She's got it right. And you don't wanna go disappointing the little one."

"Go to hell."

He takes Audrey’s hand to take her out of the alley.

"But daddy, you said we could!"

"We’ll go somewhere else. Somewhere better."

"But I want this pumpkin!"

"I know what I said, but that’s too much for a pumpkin."

"If you didn't buy beer...." Tears and screams, and then she drops to the ground and makes her body go limp and heavy. He yells at Audrey to get up. He looks back up at the hairy man, who is laughing at witnessing a division within the ranks.

The fight scene in his head is a single, paralyzing punch to the hairy man's temple. One and done. But this isn't the movies. He knows without a weapon or cheap shot to the groin, he will lose to the hulking hairy man in the time it takes to make a fist. He can only think now of when he was nine. His dad got into an argument with a man wearing a cowboy hat at a gas station. The cowboy had cut in front of them to reach the fuel pump first. He watched his father gallantly spring from the car to confront the rogue line jumper. After a few minutes of exchanged finger points and escalating shouts, the cowboy abruptly ended things by slugging his father in the stomach. The blow effectively dropped his father to his knees. The cowboy stood over his victim wearing an incredulous smirk, watching a boy helplessly cry at his father’s humiliation.

During the ride home—the gas needle still floating precariously on empty—his dad failed to reconcile what had happened. He didn't say a word. Had he merely said something reassuring, something to the effect of you win some; you lose some, had explained that the world isn't always fair even when you're in the right, maybe then the imprint might have been different. The incident seemed to cement the fate of a man who had tried, and failed, and was left feeling sorry for himself to the point that he simply gave up, leaving behind the idea of serving as any kind of role model of a father or husband for the no-strings camaraderie he found in his nightly bowling leagues, or more aptly, in the bowling alley's bar.

He remembers the day of Audrey's birth, holding her in his trembling arms, convinced he would not be his father. She was motivation enough. But less than five years later, he had developed his own set of reasons for staying away from what should matter most. The exception being Brenda was the family breadwinner and didn't have to suffer through a bad marriage.

And so, he can't begin a fight he can't possibly win; He knows all too well of its haunting consequences.

He walks back to the man, wallet in hand, and takes out a twenty.

"Twenty-five now."

He knows the hairy man, despite his gloating smile, is miserable. He'll return to his broom closet of a trailer, eating cold chili con carne out of its can, allowing television to distract him from his wretched lonely life, weighing suicide each Christmas Eve, and birthday when he takes what little remaining inventory he has of his life. So it's moments like this one that bring him his joy: the occasional-but-glorious victory over someone more miserable than himself, who caves to a tantruming daughter who can very well tell her mother about his drinking, and lose an already shrunken visitation, and knowing this, it doesn’t stop him from denying himself, even if it's just for one lousy weekend a month. Because that's something he cannot do.

"Not a problem!" He doesn’t care if the hairy man gets the sarcasm. "Let’s do business. Here's thirty. Keep the change. You're right. It's well worth the price of happiness."