The curé took great pride in telling us that, after years of listening to my father whisper prayers, his mustache had packed up and set out to become a man of the cloth. The curé believed that, under his tutelage, this mustache would become the holiest of all mustaches since Sa Sainteté le Pape Innocent XII and perhaps even surpass its holiness, since, in the curé’s opinion, that mustache had always been a bit thin.
The doctor, after five years of battling my father’s cholesterol and blood pressure, claimed my mother had over-spiced the chili, causing him to sneeze his mustache straight into his bowl, and, the glutton that he was, he hadn’t noticed until his bowl was empty, leaving behind only a few scattered hairs stuck in the tomato sauce.
My grandfather called the curé and the doctor bald-faced men and insisted that his mustache had never been a mustache at all but had always been a red squirrel sitting above my father’s mouth, fluttering its tail, taunting him, but had grown tired of the game and gone back to live out its years collecting acorns and storing them in the log pile behind my grandfather’s shed.
My mother rolled her eyes at what men would believe. Obviously, she told us, a woman at the tannery had kissed him so hard she sucked the mustache right off his lip, and it devoured everything in her stomach, leaving her as thin as a nightmare, and had been found next to her bed, all stacked up like a pile of dry sticks.
The curé bowed before a crucifix hung above the dining room table and beseeched heaven to guide him, seizing the chance to convert every mustache in New England.
The doctor rifled through the refrigerator, tossing a pound of thawing ground beef and a stick of butter into the trash can, cursing my mother for besmirching his reputation with her culinary recklessness.
My grandfather and uncles stomped around the yard, their mustaches bristling like badgers on the hunt, firing their rifles into the red leaf piles and into the black holes of the woodpile.
My mother stirred pork belly and clotted cream in a bubbling pot.
And while the house buzzed with frantic energy, my father and I sat quietly in the corner, smirking over our freshly smoothed upper lips, a hint of aftershave lingering between us.
Bio: Nick Castine
