Читать книгу You Can Say You Knew Me When - K.M. Soehnlein - Страница 10

Nana woke me the next morning with a hand on my shoulder, an urgent whisper in my ear. “Up, Jimmy, up!”

The sky was still dim outside the window. Nana had a sympathetic, silvery glow about her. “Mass is at eight. You’ll take me, then?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven. But the driveway’s covered in snow. It could use a good shovel.”

“Okay,” I groaned. “Will you make me coffee?”

“Of course,” she said. “A fair trade.”

Maybe not so fair—Nana’s coffee was percolator-burnt, the charcoal taste lingering on my tongue. She really was slipping; I couldn’t remember Nana cooking anything that wasn’t just right. The night before, she’d microwaved a lasagna and a freezer-pack of vegetables, all of it bland, and during the meal she’d hardly spoken. When Andy tried to draw her into the conversation by asking about her girlhood in Ireland, she responded tersely, with a gaze in my direction, “We didn’t have much, but we took care of each other.”

She was born Margaret Carey and had come to the United States as the bride of John Garner, a boy from a neighboring West Irish farm; they’d always been Nana and Papa to me. They raised my dad and his sister, my aunt Katie, in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, back then still an immigrant ghetto on Manhattan’s West Side. A few years after Papa died, Nana took a lump sum from her landlord, who was condo-converting the building, and moved to a nondescript garden apartment in Hackensack to be near her children. Three years ago, she moved again, to Greenlawn, taking charge of my father’s care. The side-by-side bedrooms that were once Deirdre’s and mine were transformed for her into a floral-print-covered sleeping area and a tchotchke-filled TV room. She’d always seemed strong enough to survive anything—her husband had died, then my mother, then Uncle Angelo, who was Aunt Katie’s husband—but perhaps this, the death of her only son, Edward, was just one blow too many.

She was already dressed for church, sitting in the kitchen, once again glued to the TV, watching one of those courtroom entertainment shows. A female judge narrowed a hawkish brow and wagged her finger. “Sir, sir, just a minute, sir. This is my court. You speak when I tell you to.”

Out the window, day was breaking, revealing the shocking brilliance of icy tree branches and white rooftops. “I haven’t woken up to snow since forever,” I said. “I forgot how beautiful it is.”

“The roads will be slippery,” she said. “Your father keeps the shovel in the garage.”

Father had a dull magnetic force to it, drawing her gaze from the TV and mine from the window. Between us vibrated some combination of bond and rift; the thing that tied us to each other was also the place where we were worlds apart. In the bitter gloom on Nana’s face I glimpsed her years as Dad’s caretaker—feeding and washing and changing him like he was an infant again. I was reminded of gay guys I’d seen survive their lovers or their best friends; death offered no real relief, no catharsis, just the cold reality of inevitable demise. Nana bore the same kind of battle fatigue.

I felt my face getting hot. “This must be hard for you,” I offered.

Something sharp flickered across her face, but all she said was, “He’s no longer suffering, thank God.”

Years ago, I had talked to Nana about the tension between my father and me, about the reasons behind it, about who I was. We were at her apartment in Hackensack, and she’d cooked me lunch and made a rhubarb pie for dessert. I remember the queasiness I felt as I ate, preparing to break a silence, unsure of what to expect. When the moment came, she listened without interrupting, and then told me, “You’ll always be my grandson.” At the time this had seemed like a great generosity, but when I asked her to talk to Dad on my behalf, she replied, “When Edward had words with his father, I kept out of it. I’ll stay out of this one, too.” I had tried not to hold this against her. She was old, even Old World; I could hardly expect her to wave my flags. But why wouldn’t she cut me any slack now? Was it so hard for her to understand my reasons for staying away? Was I really so unforgivable?

Outside, the air was so crisp my cheeks felt slapped. I used a shovel that had been in our family for as long as I could remember, its handle worn smooth, its blade gouged in two places. Each push left behind snaky parallel trails of powder on the black driveway, a sight that had the force of déjà vu: the teenage me clearing this same path with this same faulty shovel, my father examining the work and scolding me for not scooping it all up: Everything you leave behind will be ice by tonight.

I drove Nana to St. Bartholomew’s in Dad’s boxy Chrysler K-Car. Before she got out, she asked, “Will you come to mass, then?”

“I don’t go to church, Nana.”

“This is a time for prayer.”

“Say one for me while you’re at it.”

“Well, then,” she sighed, lifting herself from the car.

I drove through the slushy streets of Greenlawn, to the Athenaeum, the Greek diner where I’d spent a lot of time as a teenager. I took a seat at the counter, read the New York Times and slowly came to life over bottomless cups of strong coffee and single-serving boxes of cornflakes. Amid the red vinyl booths and faux-marble tabletops, a memory ignited from fifteen years earlier: sitting here, across from Eric Sanchez, deliberately pressing our knees together under the table, while around us our friends complained about how life majorly sucked, how totally stupid teachers and parents were, how so fucking boring it all was. Eric and I passed a cigarette back and forth, his dark bangs rising upward with the force of each exhale, our eyes stealing time with one another’s, sending wordless messages.

I returned to find Nana already waiting for me on the sidewalk, complaining about the cold. She presented me with a list of places she needed to go: a rotation of doctors, then the pharmacy, then Coiffures by Diane, where she had a standing appointment with Diane Jernigan, the older sister of a girl I went to high school with. Nana was very proud about her hair, still thick and full, and though she rarely left the house for anyone to see it, she kept it dyed a deep brown, like stout, like wet earth. It took years off her looks.

“Jimmy Garner!” Diane exclaimed when she saw me. Through Nana, Diane already knew about my father, and her sympathy commingled with reports of other dead parents, dead siblings, dead spouses, the accumulated losses of our high school peers as we left our youth behind. While Diane went to work on Nana, I listened to updates on people I hadn’t thought about in years, their marriages and divorces, the births of children, descriptions of the houses they’d bought. A remarkable number of my former classmates still lived in the area, their lives still knowable, without the mystery of departure. I thought of Deirdre among them, caught in this grind, an item of gossip for the Dianes of the world.

“Do you know what happened to Eric Sanchez?” I asked.

Diane paused above Nana’s dye-slick head. “Barbara’s brother?” she asked. “The one who went into the Navy?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“I think he’s married and living in Maryland or something.”

“Really? Married?”

“Barbara was living in Paramus for a while, but she moved a few years ago…”

As Diane continued on, I tried to imagine Eric at thirty-three, a husband, probably a father. The head of a household. Eric, who taught me how to kiss—slowly, with anticipation, with all the right pauses—in the backseat of Barbara’s Galaxie 500. Eric, who told me he loved me so fucking much a week before high school graduation, punching his fist into a wall until the skin broke, until I pulled him by the wrist into an embrace, promising him, You know I totally feel the same, asking him, How can I prove it to you (as he had to me, in blood)? Eric, who whispered, If we love each other we should try more stuff. Eric, whose swollen cock was in my mouth at the moment my father, home early from work for some unremembered, fateful reason, entered my bedroom to find me on my knees, in the midst of worship, surrender, proving it—the kind of moment, explosive and unequivocal, that separates everything into before and after.

It went like this: My father’s eyes sweeping from me on the floor, wiping my mouth, to Eric, yanking up his jeans, the clasp of his belt rattling as he turned his face away. My father shouting “What the hell are you doing?” though I could see he knew exactly what this was. I tried to throw it back at him: why did he push the door open, why didn’t he knock? “No way,” he bellowed. “No, no, no, no way,” negation repeated like a chant, disapproval and denial in equal measure. No way could this have happened, no way would it happen again, no way is my son this kind of boy. Eric was banned from our house—the official punishment—but worse than this was the scornful silence that descended like a sudden downpour.

“I love him,” I said.

“There’s no way you can,” said my father.

We didn’t talk it out; there was no way we could, or so it seemed to me.

I managed to see Eric a few more times that summer before I went to college and he to the Navy—furtive, tongue-tied encounters at the edge of group activities. Each locked gaze was more wrenching than the last, until we learned to avoid each other’s eyes, to fake indifference, as was needed, to get away from each other and the mess we’d created. At some point, Deirdre asked me, “How come you aren’t hanging out with Eric?” and what I told her was, “We were getting on each other’s nerves.”

My father never saw me the same again. Before, I’d been a problem child—one to boss around, bargain with, try to fix. After, I ceased to be a child at all. Just a problem—permanent, irreparable. Before, I’d thought it possible to fall in love with a boy. After, I lived with the knowledge that genuine love didn’t spark revulsion in others. My first month in college, I got myself a girlfriend.

“Jimmy?” Diane was waiting for an answer. “What about you?”

“Sorry—what?”

“Girlfriend? Someone special?”

I looked at Nana, who sat stiffly under Diane’s kneading hands. My relationship with Woody wasn’t a secret from her; still, it wasn’t something she probably cared to see dropped into the boiling vat of Diane’s gossip-stew. “Someone special,” I replied, and left it at that.

Ryan’s Funeral Home had apparently decided that mourning went down easier in pastel: mint-green cushions, rose-flocked wallpaper, a beige rug. The chairs, cream colored, had been lined up in a semicircle around the coffin, as if the deceased might rise up and recite to the crowd. Most of the guests hovered in the back, near the door, or in the hallway, conversing. The surprise was the music, all old, cool jazz, which my brother-in-law, Andy, had compiled from my father’s CD collection. “I forgot he liked this stuff,” I said to Andy as we stood side by side beneath a wall-mounted speaker amplifying a melancholy version of “My Funny Valentine.” Andy was an accountant. His suit was an accountant’s suit, his haircut an accountant’s haircut. Years ago, my friend Colleen had dubbed him Average Andy.

“It was all I ever heard him listen to. This is Chet Baker,” he said. In Andy’s voice I heard a hint of pride, as if my father’s connoisseurship had rubbed off on him.

“I think he only started listening to jazz after Mom died,” I offered.

“No, he told me he liked jazz when he was young.”

“Oh, right.” I dimly recalled my father tell of seeing Thelonious Monk play live, in San Francisco, where my father had lived for a handful of months at some point between high school and marrying my mother. We’d hardly ever spoken of his time there; what might have been something that bonded us to each other became just another point of contention. A lousy place to make a life, he’d said, writing off his entire SF experience, and by association, mine, as wasted time, a youthful lark. A dart of jealousy pricked my chest as I pictured Andy and my father together: Andy listening earnestly while Teddy’s baritone boomed out a point-by-point exegesis on early-sixties jazz.

The casket loomed up front, its glossy brown lid emphatically shut. According to Deirdre this was how my father wanted it, though I suspected it was her own choice. “Looking at a dead body is just creepy,” I heard her whisper to one of her friends as I drifted through the room, doing my best to keep conversations brief and superficial. As relatives and friends of the family, none of whom I’d seen since the barbecue for AJ’s birth, shuffled forward, one after another spoke to me in the apologetic language of grief. I’m sorry, I wish I knew what to say, I’m so sorry. My five-year withdrawal didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was the son, so I got the sympathy.

At one point Deidre pulled me into the hallway, away from the crowd. “I’m a little freaked out,” she said through clenched teeth.

I patted her on the shoulder, tentative. “You’re doing great.”

“When I got here this morning, I got a look at Dad.”

“In the coffin? Is he embalmed?”

“Of course he’s embalmed. He’s all fixed up. You can look, after everyone leaves.”

“No, I don’t want to,” I said, absolutely clear on this.

She wagged her hands, frustrated. “Why I’m freaked out is, he’s not wearing his wedding ring.” She explained to me that he never took that band off his finger. Though maybe, in the end, in his bedroom, or in the hospital, it had been removed. Or fell off. Or was taken.

“It’s probably just misplaced,” I said. “Who would steal something like that?”

We were interrupted by a gust of frigid air from the door, whisking in Aunt Katie. She paraded to the viewing room in a full-length fur coat, her frosted hair swept up dramatically, her pumps sporting heels treacherously high for an icy winter night. An entourage fanned out behind her: her son, Tommy; his wife, Amy, cradling a baby; and their three other children, all under twelve. Deirdre and I watched as Katie took the aisle and marched straight to Nana, swallowing her up in furry hugs and air kisses. I let Deidre join them before I made my way toward their conversational pantomime.

“Aunt Katie.” I was unsure if I should lean in for an air kiss of my own.

She stood stiffly, eyeing me up and down. “I was just saying to your sister, ‘Where’s your brother? He better have shown up.’”

“Here I am,” I said, bowing my head deferentially.

“I said, ‘Don’t tell me Jimmy didn’t show.’”

“I showed.”

She raised her chin. “What’s that? You don’t shave there?”

“A little San Francisco style,” I said, rubbing the arty triangle of auburn hair—the soul patch—growing under my lower lip.

Nana said, “You look scruffy.”

“At least he got rid of the earrings,” Aunt Katie said. “Remember that? When he came home with the earrings?”

“Haven’t had earrings for years,” I said, my face burning up.

“And that tattoo, with the snakes.” She visibly shuddered.

“Aw, leave the guy alone, Ma.” From around her side, Tommy extended a beefy paw.

I shook his hand. “How’s it going, Tommy?”

“Can’t complain. Never does any good.”

“Jamie got in a couple days ago and he’s really been helping out a lot,” Deirdre said to no one in particular.

“I’ve been helping, too, Mommy.” AJ was suddenly there, tugging on the hem of her skirt and looking shyly at his cousins.

“Yes, you have. All my boys are being very good.”

Katie sighed—so drawn out it was nearly a hum—her eyes still glued to me. She stepped closer, uncomfortably close. Maybe she’d comment on my breath, smoky from the cigarette I’d sneaked in the parking lot. “Let me tell you something,” she said, swallowing hard before continuing. “Your father deserved better.“

I sucked in air, backed away reflexively. This was the judgment I’d been dreading, though I’d started to think I would get away unscathed. My head ricocheted with response lines—everything from I’m sorry to Back off, bitch—but I held my tongue and withstood Aunt Katie’s hex, my face flushed but, I hoped, inscrutable. Finally, Deirdre, bless her, took command, helping Katie out of her coat and passing it to me. “Jamie, give this to the guy in the hall. Not you, AJ. It’s too big for you.”

Walking away, hauling fifteen pounds of raccoon fur, I averted my eyes from the crowd. Who in the room had seen what just happened?

I turned around and found Tommy behind me, passing a pile of coats to the attendant. Tommy Ficchino stood out in this room, a swarthy half-Italian in the midst of a lot of pasty Irish stock. As a kid, his hair had been light brown, like wood varnish, but it was almost black now, with little flecks of gray. He wasn’t quite as handsome as his father, Uncle Angelo, had been, but Tommy’s face had the same big, expressive features: a wide nose, dark eyes, a rosy mouth surrounded by the perpetual shadow of a beard. Angelo had died of a heart attack about six years ago. I’d come back for that funeral, too—a southern Italian affair, lavish in its grief. A wailing Nonna Ficchino had to be carried out of the church, her tight black shoes fumbling along the carpet as her grandsons bore her weight.

The Ficchinos and the Garners had been neighbors in Hell’s Kitchen. Angelo and Katie were high school sweethearts, a few years older than my father, whose nickname in those days was Rusty. I’d grown up listening to their stories of taking Rusty on dates with them, then telling him to beat it so they could have their privacy. There was the time a cop caught them necking in the back of Angelo’s car. The time Rusty got lost in Central Park for an afternoon. The time they crossed paths with Joe DiMaggio and he shook my father’s hand. The stories were so recycled, even I, who hadn’t heard them for years, could recite them in detail.

Tommy’s hands were rising in front of him, palms up. I knew this gesture, which all the men in his family shared: He was preparing to speak without quite knowing what to say. I scrambled to fill the silence. “I guess this must be tough for you, Tommy. You’ve already been through this, with your father.”

With a shrug of his shoulders, he replied, “Aw, whaddaya gonna do?”

I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile.

“Any time you got a death’s lousy,” he went on. “My dad died too young, but I got no regrets there. You and your dad—that’s another story. You being, you know, the black sheep.”

I nodded cautiously. “We had our difficulties.”

“Jesus, he was pretty tough on you, right? Pretty tough, period. Gotta be a lot of mixed emotions here.” He patted his belly.

I felt my eyes dampen—not from grief but from gratitude, like a patient receiving a diagnosis after previously being told it was all in his head. “One day at a time,” I said.

“Right. Today, tomorrow. Little here, little there, that’s how it goes. Whaddaya gonna do?”

“Hell if I know,” I said, letting the smile break through this time. He nodded with finality, and we stood together for a moment, silently perusing the crowd.

“So how’s it out there, you know, in San Fran?”

“Crazy times, lots going on. The Internet. The dot-coms.” Tommy’s accent was contagious. I heard myself saying dot-calms.

“We gonna hear you on NPR again?” he asked.

“Sure, sure. Someday.”

“You got anything coming up?”

“Not right now. Things have been a little quiet.”

In fact, my career in radio had been very quiet. About six months earlier I’d lost a regular producing job for San Francisco’s public radio station, and since then I’d worked freelance. Barely. The show I’d produced, City Snapshot, a daily report on offbeat cultural events in San Francisco, was one I helped create, and I took its cancellation—its re-branding, as the station manager dubbed it—personally. Before that show, I had produced a handful of reports for National Public Radio. Tommy had heard one of my segments on All Things Considered and called to congratulate me, and since then I’d been the “NPR guy” to him and all the Ficchinos. I didn’t bother to correct this; the lack of a permanent professional affiliation always took too much effort to explain to people not in my field. There were plenty of things I couldn’t remember about Tommy’s life, too, like were he and his brothers still running the refrigeration and air-conditioning business their father had passed on to them? Judging from Tommy’s expensive-looking suit and the fat Rolex on his wrist, he had moved on to something more lucrative.

Tommy went chasing after one of his daughters, who was making a break for the front door, and I slipped back into the main room. I leaned against a wall and watched my sister in action. Deirdre carried herself with great presence, like an event planner, one of those take-charge corporate types who stands in the middle of the action, wearing a matching skirt and suit jacket (this one was black, with padded shoulders), and with precise orders keeps everyone else moving. She and Andy were both performing just fine as far as I could tell, juggling guests, accepting mass cards from well-wishers, keeping AJ out of trouble. Up at the coffin, Aunt Katie was on her knees, dabbing her eyes. On either side, in sharp black suits, knelt one of her dark-haired sons—Tommy’s older brothers, Mike and Billy—looking like Secret Service agents assigned to protect her. All around me swirled this big family, everyone performing his or her role just so, a portrait glowing with tradition: functional, ritualized, structured to endure the dark storm of death. I saw myself as they must surely see me, standing apart from the crowd with my alien facial hair and my thrift-store suit, displaying no obvious emotions, and I wondered what I was doing here, why I’d set myself up for this kind of scrutiny. Most of the trouble that comes along is trouble we cause ourselves. My father again, his voice ringing out from the past: a lecture delivered one night after I’d been picked up by the cops in the passenger seat of a parked car. At the wheel was a tipsy Eric Sanchez, whom I was trying to persuade to hand over the keys. You could have walked away, Dad had said, and he’d been right. But for all my ambivalence about my family, I had never been one to walk away from a friend.

And then, unbidden, another memory: a fishing trip we made with some of his co-workers and their sons, a cluster of men and boys on the shore of a lake in upstate New York. My father stood behind me, his arms encircling me and his hands covering mine, guiding me through the proper way to cast. My discomfort at this physical closeness melted as he helped me reel in my first catch. I couldn’t have been more than twelve, but I caught three fish that day, more than anyone else. They were small, none bigger than his outstretched hand, but that didn’t stop us from hauling them home and insisting my mother fry them for dinner. And where the memory ends is here: me recounting for her the story of each catch while he looked on, soaking up my little triumphs, taking none of the credit. The weightlessness that came from having made him proud, and the knowledge, confusing even in the moment, that the key had been to put myself in his hands, to not resist.

A rumble was building up in my stomach; I suddenly was sure I would vomit. But when I locked myself in the bathroom, what erupted from my mouth was laughter—loud, giddy, cathartic howls of laughter that I couldn’t contain and couldn’t stop. I slid down to the tiled floor, and I flushed the toilet again and again, imagining Deirdre scowling on the other side of the door. I thought of Aunt Katie’s ostentatious fur, of Tommy’s Whaddaya gonna do, of those three puny fish twenty years ago, shrinking in the frying pan until they were hardly even there, and I laughed some more, until my stomach tightened and the muscles in my face ached. The frantic laughter only mixed emotions can bring.

Back at the house, I filled a plate with food and moved toward the back porch, an enclosed room off the kitchen where I could blow cigarette smoke out the window. The room wasn’t insulated, but putting up with the winter chill was preferable to hanging out in the living room, dodging Aunt Katie. Tommy saw me heading out and quickstepped behind me. “Hurry, before Amy decides there’s something I should be doing right now,” he joked. “Let’s make a break for it.”

Tommy and I were the same age, and as kids we liked to slip away from his bullying brothers and go off on our own, coming up with gentler alternatives to the older boys’ games: bike riding instead of ball playing, gin rummy instead of “I Dare You!” Over the years, on those rare occasions when we were both at a family gathering, we usually found ourselves, without quite planning it, one on one. That day, I had a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tonic at my feet, and Tommy was soon matching me drink for drink and cigarette for cigarette. We made small talk—real estate on Long Island, where he lived, versus in San Francisco—and caught up on each other’s lives—the refrigeration business had indeed been sold, and Tommy was working for a venture capital firm in Manhattan. We even talked a little about the wake. “Don’t pay no mind to my mom,” he said, lowering his voice. “She’s just broken up about it, is all.”

“She’s pretty hard to ignore,” I said. “If looks could kill—”

“If it was you in that coffin, Deirdre would be lookin’ for someone to take it out on, too. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” It was true, my sister was loyal. Wasn’t that why she had done the hard work of caring for our difficult, declining father, and why she was so frosty with me now—because I’d stayed away? We weren’t always like this. We were allies through high school, hanging out with some of the same kids, bitching about the same teachers, helping each other with homework (she had a head for math, I was better at English). Then Mom died, and Dad sued the hospital, and Dad found me with Eric, and I went off to college, freaked out and heartbroken—and I couldn’t tell you what Deirdre was doing during any of this. In most families, a mother’s death draws the survivors closer, but when we looked at each other, we saw our wounded selves reflected back, and we kept our distance. Years later I finally told Deirdre about Eric. About me. She was more accepting than anyone in the family had been, but I was already living a separate life in New York, while she was dating Andy in New Jersey, pitching her tent in the camp I had fled. I no longer saw her as my ally but as my father’s; her proximity to him seemed a judgment against me. You and your sister push each other’s buttons, Woody would say, listening in on my end of a phone call with Dee that had gone suddenly brittle. I knew I shared the blame; I knew she wasn’t blameless. What I didn’t know was what was left between us.

My conversation with Tommy was interrupted by Amy, poking her head through the back door to complain about his absence. “I’ll be in when I’m in,” Tommy told her.

A few minutes later their eleven-year-old, Brian, showed up at Tommy’s elbow. “Mom wants to know if you’re still smoking.”

Tommy looked at the cigarette in his hand. “Whaddaya gonna tell her?”

“I don’t know.” Brian looked to me for help. I just shrugged.

Tommy roped his arm across Brian’s shoulders. “Let me ask you something. Who took you to see the Islanders last weekend?”

“You.”

“Right. And who picks you up after basketball?”

“You.”

“And who took you and your friends to see The Matrix?”

“Yeah, okay, Dad—you.”

“So next time your mom tells you to go do her dirty work, to bug your dad, your pal, whaddaya gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re gonna ignore her.” Ignaw huh.

“OKay,” Brian said agreeably. “So, can I try your cigarette?”

“I ever catch you smoking I’ll smack your mouth,” Tommy said with a quick swat at the air. Brian darted back inside.

“Wow,” I marveled. “You rule the roost, don’t you?”

“It takes everything I got, lemme tell ya,” Tommy said through a weary exhalation of smoke. “I work hard. I pitch in around the house. I keep Brian and Lorrie out of the way when Amy’s taking care of the babies. She plays this game, though. Gets them to side with her. She can be a real ballbuster.”

“Maybe you should stop having kids?” I offered tentatively.

“It’s Amy who wants ’em. She wants five. But I’m through. The only times I’ve had sex in the last five years, out pops a kid.” He took a big swig, burped faintly and whispered, “Only time I had sex with her.”

“Whoa, Tommy.” I peered around to see if anyone had been in earshot.

“Oh, come on. You understand. You’re a gay guy. You know what it’s like to mess around.”

“You think so?”

“Look, I work in Manhattan. I know about this stuff. The fags at work—sorry, gay guys—they get a lot of sex. Even the ones in relationships.”

“It’s a testosterone thing. No female hormones to balance things out.”

He looked over his shoulder to see if the coast was still clear. “I use an escort service. A call girl. Classy. Clean. She meets me at a gentlemen’s club, I buy some drinks, go back to a hotel. I’m home by one a.m., a satisfied customer. I’ll tell you the truth, Amy’s better off with me blowing off a little steam.”

“So she doesn’t know.”

“I deny it when she asks. You understand.”

“Hey, I’m in a monogamous relationship.”

“Yeah? You make some kinda vow?”

“Not quite,” I said, wondering what that would be like—taking a vow, making public expression of what had previously been a private arrangement. The forever of it, the weight. “Woody’s a great guy, but he’s one-hundred-percent opposed to cheating. I don’t want to screw it up. Based on the way I’ve played around in the past, it hasn’t always been easy.”

“Trust me, you got it easy,” Tommy said. “Being married to the opposite sex is work.”

A moment later, Amy reappeared, flashing him a look that said enough already, and this time Tommy extinguished his cigarette and headed back into the living room. I lingered in the cold air until my fingers started to feel numb, and then I, too, went back inside, a little tipsy now, a little less anxious facing the gathered clan.

The next day, after the funeral mass had come and gone, after a trip to the cemetery and another round of food and drink and sneaked cigarettes, Tommy reached past my hand, extended for a farewell shake, to pull me in for a hug. “Don’t be a stranger,” he whispered in my ear. “Family is family.” And for the second time in two days he moved me right to the edge of tears.

“You ever come to San Francisco, Tommy?”

“I’m working on a couple of West Coast accounts, so who knows.”

I smiled at the idea, imagining Tommy making a little time for his black sheep cousin before heading out for a lap dance. “Sure, come for a visit,” I told him. “We’ve got plenty of places to blow off steam.” He gave me a knowing wink and headed down the shoveled walkway to the street, where Amy had their minivan warming up and the kids corralled, all of it waiting for him.

But first: The night of the wake, drunk on vodka after everyone had left, I was enlisted by Deirdre to find my father’s wedding ring. “Find it where?” I asked.

“Search the house. The hospital doesn’t have it. The mortician doesn’t have it.”

AJ was asleep in her arms. He was too big to be carried, I could see that in the strain of her muscles. Or maybe not. Maybe five isn’t too big to be lifted into bed by your mother. What did I know? There were no children in my life. “Will you promise me you’ll look?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean it, Jamie. We need it in the morning, before the funeral mass.”

“I’ll look, I’ll look.”

I did look. I went back upstairs into his bedroom, which still smelled medicinal, the antiseptic fumes a kind of ghostly presence, a reminder of the failure to hold back death. I moved furniture, and pushed aside clothes on hangers, and got on my hands and knees to root through my father’s closet. I found a jar filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. A few boxes of receipts that went back years. Some old hats. A years-old, dusty plaque from his employer—an office furniture company for which he spent the last twenty years writing marketing brochures, catalog copy and annual reports—commending him for perfect attendance. No sick days for Teddy Garner.

Then, buried deep on a shelf, I found a short stack of Penthouse magazines, five or six in all, dated from the 1980s. I glanced over my shoulder, worried that Nana might be standing in the doorway, catching me with this pornographic contraband. I tucked them under my shirt and tiptoed back to my tiny bedroom. Penthouse had been my porn of choice as a teenager because the “Forum” section, made up of supposedly true stories from readers, was good for at least one bisexual story per issue—my first exposure to man-on-man sex. Sure enough, I opened one of my father’s and immediately found a “letter” from a big-breasted woman recounting the day the pool guy seduced both her and her home-early-from-work husband. The money shot: The stud fucks her husband as he’s ramming his wife. Everyone orgasms together. Crude, but very sexy. Did my father, so revolted by gay sex, actually read this story? He must have, at least once. But it was nearly impossible to imagine: Teddy, in his bedroom, the very room where he told me to keep my private life private, letting his own private thoughts unfold, taboo story in one hand, family jewels in the other.

The next morning I woke and shaved my face clean, watching the brown and orange bristles, my scruffy soul patch, slide down the drain. In the mirror, to my own eyes, I looked not so much like a new man as an impostor, trying to pass myself off as the son I was supposed to be. The day was as glacial as any since I’d been back, and the newly shorn spot under my lip seemed to attract the cold the way an open window draws in a draft. All day long, at every step along the ritual path from funeral parlor to church to cemetery, the damp air was an icy kiss pressed to my face, a mark only I knew was there.

I served as a pallbearer, feeling the tremendous weight of the coffin in every muscle as I joined my cousins lifting the heavy box into the hearse, working hard to keep my balance on the ice-streaked sidewalk. No eulogy was delivered at St. Bart’s, but the priest gave a homily in which my father was referred to as a fighter, a family man, and a son of a bitch. I mean, a son of God. “Son of a bitch” was what I wrote in my journal that night, scribbling furiously, without remorse, trying to fill up the pit in my guts, a throbbing hollow that had grown since I’d gotten here and that now threatened to subsume me.

I never did find his wedding ring. He was buried without it.

In the days after the guests were long gone, the last of Nana’s roast eaten and the last can of carbonated soda guzzled, the folding chairs stowed and the ashtrays emptied, Deirdre kept buzzing with projects. “Take a break,” I urged, but she insisted she was better off.

“Know your strengths and work with them,” she told me. “That’s my motto.”

“You’re too young to have a motto,” I said.

“Jamie, we’re not kids anymore. I have a child of my own.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

I hadn’t spent much time with AJ, so one morning I drove to Deirdre’s house with the plan to take him to kindergarten. I found him alone in the kitchen. The microwave was beeping four high-pitched signals, and AJ was climbing up on a chair to retrieve some kind of plastic-encased breakfast food. “I have to split it open and let the steam out,” he explained to me. “I can wait three minutes for it to cool down.”

Three minutes. The kind of precise instruction Deirdre had no doubt been giving him all his life.

“So, where’s your mom?”

“Having her morning time.”

“What’s that?”

“In the morning she closes her door and I don’t bother her for five minutes.”

Five minutes went by, then six, then seven. AJ kept count. I went upstairs to her bedroom to let her know I was here. From behind the door, I heard her crying and talking to herself, though I couldn’t decipher the words. I imagined her crying over that never-found wedding ring, but of course it was more than that. Mourning in the morning.

Quietly, I retreated to the top of the stairs, then called out, “I stopped by to take AJ to school.”

She yelled out a strangled, “Oh, hi. Okay, just a minute.”

I microwaved myself a bowl of instant oatmeal—the cinnamon scent brought me right back to long-ago winter mornings in Greenlawn. AJ was pouring himself orange juice from a container, the glug-glug of it sending splashes all over the table.

“Here, let me show you a trick,” I said. I grabbed a knife, poked an air slit in the top, then poured a glug-free stream into my glass. “Ta-da!” I swept my arm wide, clumsily backhanding my oatmeal, which went flying to the floor.

The crash echoed. My eyes met AJ’s worried stare. “So you see, AJ, that’s how you keep from spilling orange juice. You throw your oatmeal on the floor!”

He melted into giggles. We cleaned up the mess together, making a promise not to tell Deirdre.

After dropping him off, I returned to find Deidre leaning over her clipboard, snapping her pen. The radio was on, and she was singing along to a pop song I’d never heard. She’d emerged from her crying jag looking as pulled-together as ever.

“You think it’s okay for me to take Dad’s car to the city?” I asked.

“When?”

“Today. I figured I’d look up some old friends.”

“Well, actually—” She presented me with the clipboard. “Here’s your do-list.”

“Not to do? Just do?”

“Yes, as in will be done,” she said firmly.

Beneath my name, she’d written a list: “Attic. Garage. Dad’s closet.” I felt myself wilting. “I need to get out of here, Dee. I’m going stir-crazy.”

“Come on, Jamie. There’s so much.”

“Not today. I’m not in the right headspace.”

“Well, excuse me, but you’re going back to California in a couple days, and then what? We have to sell Dad’s house. If you want anything at all, you better call it, or it’s going to wind up in the dump.”

I looked at the list again. I considered mentioning the porn in the bedroom, but I held back; let it be a secret between him and me. “I don’t have anything in the attic anymore. I cleared out all my stuff when I left for San Francisco. And I don’t want any furniture. I live in a tiny one-bedroom. Plus, I don’t have money to ship anything.”

“Fine. I’ll just throw everything away. Our whole family history. What do you care, anyway?” Her voice cracked and dropped off.

“Okay, okay.” I lowered my head into my hands, willing myself to do the right thing. “I can go to New York another time. No biggie. Really.”

“It would be a huge help,” she said. “So, you’ll start with the attic?”

“Sure. Just tell me one thing: Who died and left you in charge?”

She froze, and then, catching my smile, shook her head. “You know, you’re an asshole.”

“It’s the most reliable part of me,” I said. “I know my strengths. I work with them.”