me sometimes like that when I was a kid, but his real anger was directed at my mother. She used to say that Dad didn’t yell about anything she
Dad stares. For once, the sharp eyes aren’t going away.
I glance over at my boys, who are waiting along with Dad for an explanation. Sigh. Oh, what the hell. “You met a girl, Dad. In Reno. A stripper. You took her back to the ranch in Oregon. She stole everything, your money…credit cards…everything.”
The boys, of course, have never heard this heartwarming family story. Teddy’s eyes are huge. His grandfather knew a stripper? He looks over at the old guy with new-found respect.
Dad nods: go on.
Funny-it never occurred to me to ask my father why he left Mom. If anything, I might’ve asked why he stayed all those years.
I always felt like he was buzzing with something dangerous, banging against the walls, teetering, and he could just tip over at any time and be gone. To me, it felt like we were only renting the man. All those days he put on that tie and those coveralls; I knew he’d have to leave eventually. The fact that he made it until my sisters and I were gone from home seemed like an accomplishment. He moved to a tiny house on fifteen acres along a dry riverbed in central Oregon, a place where he could smoke all the cigarettes he wanted. In four years, I only visited him there once:
Dad’s land is scabbed and pocked
river channels that forgot not to die
couleed ditches and hard veined cracks
of channeled dust in his razored cheeks
near a broken Case, stranded plow
tooth long lost in an Army row
burns on his forearms from an engine
blown in a falling corral of brown grass
spotted with implements too rusted to name
let alone use-wet nose betraying
disease in his lungs like the fresh pack
in his left breast pocket like the chipped
paint barn its corrugated roof curling
at the edges and a woodstove chimney
jutting through black shingles, fresh pack
in his left breast pocket above a
smoke-choked beater grown over
from neglect, two faint tracks in long weeds
shot up around the burned GMC
the old man still dreams he drives
big right hand on the black shifter knob
fresh pack in his left breast pocket-
And I wonder if we don’t live like water
seeking a level
a low bed
until one day we just go dry.
I wonder if a creek ever realizes
it has made its own grave.
Dad stares at me, waiting for the rest of the explanation-
“I don’t know, Dad. Maybe…you were embarrassed that this girl took advantage of you…ashamed or something. But you didn’t tell anyone. By the time I got there, it was too late.”
Mom spent a decade alone, convinced that Dad would someday return-“after he’s had his fun.” She died without ever speaking to him again, in a sunny hospital room, surrounded by her kids, mumbling in her morphine about terrorists. As far as I know she only mentioned him once, the last day, when she said that she couldn’t wait to see him in heaven. My sister said, “But Dad’s still alive,” and Mom just smiled, as if that was exactly what she meant. That day, hospice was delivering a hospital bed to her house, but she didn’t make it home. One of my sisters joked later that she couldn’t bear having that mess in her house. I left my crying sisters, went home from the hospital and climbed in bed. We’d just moved to this house. Without a word, Lisa climbed in beside me and nestled in behind my knees. We slept like that for a couple of hours and then I got up and called Dad in Oregon. He answered on one ring. I could hear the TV in the background. He listened, sighed, cleared his throat, thanked me for calling and hung up.
He didn’t come to the funeral. After that, Dad seemed to with
draw and I suppose I let him. Life was busy, and then my own collapse began and I looked up one day and realized it had been months since I’d heard from my father. When one of my sisters called to tell me that Dad’s phone was disconnected, I drove to Oregon, and that’s where I found him-like this-early-onset, post-Charity, un- showered, unshaven, unhinged, disoriented, dazed…alone.
“The doctors say you’re suffering from early-onset dementia,” I tell Dad, “which is just another word for senility.”
He leans across the dinner table, nods. Go on. The doctors said that being alone probably hastened his decline; without people to talk to synaptic paths grow over with weeds, and yet, every once in a while, he finds himself on a bare stretch of one of those old trails. Like now.
“The good news is…it’s not Alzheimer’s. Your memory is just…well…it comes and goes. In fact, I’ll probably have to tell you all of this again tomorrow. Or I won’t. I’ll just say a bunch of stupid shit. And you’ll just watch TV and forget you even asked.” I try a reassuring smile. “And hell Dad, maybe that’s just like the rest of us. Maybe we all forget everything the minute we learn it. I don’t know.”
Dad sometimes brings the remote control to the table. He always sets it next to his plate, like a fourth utensil, just to the right of his knife. It’s the same brand of universal remote that he had at his house in Oregon. Dad was terribly disoriented when he got to our house-until he saw we had a look-alike remote control.
Now, at the mention of the word TV, he picks up the remote and stares at it, as if it contains the answer to this thing he’s been trying to understand. Then he sets it down in its place…so…gently. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father be that gentle with anything.
He looks up at Teddy, at Franklin, and then at me.
And the light goes out. I can see it in his eyes. The station is gone.
“You know what, Dad…it’s okay…it’s all going to be-”
“What kind of man was I?” he rasps. And he pats his empty breast pocket.
“A good one,” I say, voice cracking. I look down at my plate; feel the boys’ eyes. These people. Are they trying to kill me?
I look up blearily. Dad has picked up his remote control again, and is staring back out the black window. He takes a deep breath, then lifts the pizza to his mouth and chews. He looks over at me like a stranger, this good man who spent forty years losing the people he loved, and then, in only a few months, managed to lose himself.
My gaping sons no longer gape at their grandfather, but at me. I guess they’ve never seen their dad cry before. I wipe my eyes, smile. I don’t know what to tell them: Boys, pay attention to your mother; mothers have a million things to teach you. But fathers? We only have two lessons, but these two things are everything you need to know:
