“You should have everything you need in there. There is money. Bank records, paperwork.”
I open the box and there is all kinds of blah-blah-blah a person needs when a person has to be running his own life. Some of it I recognize, some I don’t.
“Some of this is Da’s,” I say.
“D. Cameron. If it is D. Cameron, it is for you. There are notes to that effect, which you can read at your leisure. If you need anything else, you know how to reach us.”
“I’m not sure I do, actually,” I say. Little joke there. Goes over well.
“Call me, Dan,” Lucy says. “Okay?”
“Of course,” I say.
We stand there, me, my parents, my sister, my belongings, playing out the grand mal seizure of awkward silences. The weight of it all threatens to pull the porch right underground.
“Dad, college doesn’t start for another-”
“Best of luck, son.”
Pretty unambiguous there, my dad. I pick up my suitcase. Lucy rushes up and breathlessly squeezes me in the hug that I have been seeking, missing, dying for, and I feel myself well up at just the moment when I need to be made of much tougher stuff than that.
This is why love is for chumps.
I suck up my tears the way a little kid sniffles up snot. That’s that.
I walk backward down the front steps of my house.
“Is this because I released the old man, Dad?” I ask, in motion.
He nods. “And because I suspect he has released you. I know what he was, Daniel. I won’t live with it again.”
I stop dead in my backward tracks.
This does not please them. My parents turn and go into their home. Lucy stands there, quivering, waving, blowing me kisses, and staying planted right where she is until I am gone.
“You look like a man who could use a lift,” comes a voice from the car that is crawling alongside me.
“I never liked you,” I say to Da’s old workmate Largs.
“Fair enough, and mutual, Young Man.”
“That is not my name.”
“Hop in, Daniel. I will drop you where you are going.”
“It’s just up ahead,” I say, “about twelve hundred miles.”
“I was thinking more bus station.”
I get in, and he goes quiet for a bit, tooling along the streets toward the bus terminal. When he has given me enough adjustment time, he talks.
“Horrible shame, about old Zeke,” he says.
“Horrible,” I say crisply.
“But that’s old men for you. They fall down and die. Happens all the time, they fall down and they die.”
“You’re not that much younger.”
“Ouch.” He laughs, a laugh that sounds like train wheels squealing on a bend of track. “I guess I’d better be careful, then, huh? But that’s what retirement villages are for, huh? So they can be safe and not hurt themselves or anybody else. Right?”
“I suppose.”
“That is a nice one you found for your grandfather. Perfect, I think.”
I snap my head in his direction and all his chummy nonsense bleeds right out.
“You are good, Daniel. But you are not that good. Don’t get all worked up, anyway. I meant what I said. It is a perfect retirement village for him. He’s safe there, I think. You did damn well there. He’s safe and god knows we don’t need any more old men falling down and hurting themselves right now. That doesn’t do anybody any good, does it?”
To think, I merely hated him up until now.
“No, it doesn’t,” I say.
He pulls up in front of the manky, desolate bus station, stops the car, reaches into his blazer pocket.
“Why do I want your card?”
“In case you need anything. Just give me a call. And maybe after you graduate, who knows, maybe I can find something for you. There is always a place for a bright young philosopher with hard-world experience, you know.”
I give Largs as cockeyed a look as I can manage. Then I tuck the card in my pocket once me and my belongings are out of his car.
18
Don’t forget me, will you? Da said.
How could I? I said. How could anyone forget you?
Ah, but you will, though. It’ll happen, probably quicker than you could know.
Not happening, Old Boy.
Don’t be stupid, Young Man. Be anything else but stupid. And it’s stupid to think you won’t forget. And it will happen to you, as well. Probably sooner than you could imagine. We all get forgotten. Don’t forget that.
He was right. By the time I got to school, all this was forgotten.
I made it. To the university, to freshmen week, which I remember almost nothing of, to philosophy.
I made it.
I got a roommate who is also philosophy and who smokes so much dope my computer giggles for ten minutes every time I open it up. He tells me all about his background on the sugar beet farm and I tell him all about mine, the summer camps and the horses and the high school archery team and my six-foot-two girlfriend, and he says “wow” a lot, and “cool,” and all the other stuff, the bumpy, prickly, complicated stuff is just lost in the fabulosity of my storytelling.
“What’s that bracelet thingy, dude?” he asks, taking my wrist and reading the inscription in the copper.
“It was a gift from my grandfather.”
“Wow. Cool. That’s deep, man.”
“That was him all right. Wow, cool, and deep.”
“Is there a story attached?”
“Nope.”
See that?
Right again, Old Boy.
All is forgotten.
Chris Lynch
