Bluff

him the day he crushed his hands. I went with him sometimes to the warehouse—to help, I always assumed, though by now I realized it was so my mother could have me out of her hair for a while. On that day, the day that mattered, my father wasn’t supposed to work, but another man had called in sick and we lived closest to the warehouse. It was a Saturday and a Rangers game was on TV—tied in the third period, I’d always remember, one more reason not to be pulled away from the house on his day off. By the time my father’s shoes and coat were on and we were backing down the driveway, he was in a rotten mood, and I was in a rotten mood, too, though it had nothing to do with the hockey game and everything to do with being twelve.

At the warehouse he pushed the dolly with the black baby grand piano on it toward the elevator and asked me to carry the bench. “Don’t even say it,” I said. That was the common refrain at school that year. I didn’t know where it came from, had never bothered to wonder. It was just what Lisa Morrow and Kim Duluth and Gina Kasem and all the girls were saying.

How’d you do on the test?

Don’t even say it.

What about Andrew Wasserman? You think he’s hot?

Don’t even say it.

My father shook his head. “Then carry the toolbox—you’re no weakling.”

I was already a ridiculous five feet, eight inches. The junior high basketball coach kept stopping me in the hallway to remind me about school spirit. I weighed barely a hundred pounds but could channel all of them into being a brat.

“Don’t even say it, Dad,” I said without so much as a glance in his direction.

When we reached the freight elevator, he set down the piano bench and the toolbox so he could pull open the steel doors, which opened the opposite way from most elevators—one door went up, the other down. He carried the bench into the elevator and stepped out again.

“I need both hands free to get the piano over the gap and into the elevator. So please, Natalie, my dearest”—his voice was soft, his closed-mouth smile oozing sarcasm—“pick up the goddamn toolbox.”

Here was the world’s easiest request. I was standing three feet from the man and carrying nothing.

“Don’t. Even. Say. It.”

I stepped into the elevator, leaving him to fetch his own toolbox. Again he exited, leaned into the piano, and heaved it across the gap and into the elevator.

One thing I always liked doing was pulling the canvas loop that hung from the freight elevator’s ceiling in order to shut the steel doors. I hadn’t been tall enough to reach the loop until that year, and even then it was hard to pull. But I could hang from it and slowly float to the ground like Mary Poppins with her umbrella. As I did, the two parallel, horizontal doors would close—one coming down from the ceiling, the other rising out of the floor. The two steel doors met in the middle with a satisfying clang.

As I reached up for the loop, my father snapped, “No!” as if reprimanding a dog or a small child. Evidently, my punishment for being a brat was to be deprived of this simple pleasure.

Feeling wronged and disrespected, I kicked the piano leg.

Immediately I regretted it. The piano looked expensive and belonged to someone. What if I had dented it? What if it got my dad fired?

My father glared at me. “What the—” He didn’t need to finish.

I almost said sorry. I was sorry, but I couldn’t make my mouth form the word. Feeling regret was involuntary, like a sneeze. Voicing an apology took effort and would make my shame public.

Really, though, my decision not to apologize was barely a decision at all. It was split-second and, I assumed, inconsequential. Already my father was shaking his head again, clearing it of me, and reaching up for the canvas loop. He gave it a strong pull—too strong, because the loop tore and detached from the top of the elevator.

“Son of a—” He threw the canvas strap to the ground, then reached up, gripped the bottom of the upper door with both hands, and yanked, hard, with all of his 275 pounds.

He must have ridden this elevator hundreds of times. Surely he knew that as the upper door came down, the lower door was simultaneously rising out of the floor, and that the two doors would slam together in the middle. But I had angered and distracted him. His attention was directed toward me, and not the steel doors, which slammed together with his hands, palms up, still between them.

In the weeks and months that followed there would be surgeries and pins and rods and casts and heavy narcotics. When all that was over, my mother would remain his driver and his therapist and his hands in all things mundane and intimate. Can any marriage survive that? Maybe some. But not many. Not theirs.

Besides collecting workers’ comp and disability, my father filed a lawsuit to cover medical bills and pain and suffering. By the time he received the settlement check, a whole year had passed. His crushed hands had been reconstructed but remained mostly useless—would always be mostly useless—and by then he was becoming a different man: bigger, for one thing. He had swelled to well over three hundred pounds. Once the physical therapy was over he rarely left the house during the day, and his eyes took on a permanent squint. He went out at night and started becoming familiar to the hospital ER staff and local police. Nothing major in the grand scheme: a couple of drunk and disorderlies, a couple of bar fights he had no chance of winning. But it was enough to land him in the local police blotter. And I would read the blotter and know my role in it.

It was late afternoon the day