a big aluminum pot with water, shook salt into it, and put the flame on full blast under it. He began opening a can of tomato paste.
“We’re having spaghetti,” he said as he cranked the can opener. I started to cry because I knew she was dead.
They buried my mother without a wake the day after she died. The only ones present at the cemetery were my father and me and a priest from a nearby Catholic church we’d never attended. My father was alternately sharp and polite with the priest, who didn’t dare to ask my father why he’d never seen us in church.
We lived an awkward month in the house before my father put it on the market. He hired a stranger to run a garage sale and sell every stick of furniture we had.
All my mother’s clothing and all his dress clothes went into a big Salvation Army hopper at a nearby shopping center. My father held me by the hips as I dropped three big bundles down the dark chute. For an instant I had a vision of him pushing me in after them.
Everything that could possibly tie him down was now gone. We lived those final June days in Roslyn like raccoons that break into summer homes through the eaves. With the rugs gone the aged oak floors groaned at every step, and even with the windows down little currents of air puffed in crazy directions.
The only thing we couldn’t get rid of was the four-bladed push mower, which my father left behind in the barren garage.
He didn’t let me in on his plan until our final night together in the house. We slept on a pair of cots dragged close together in the living room, a courtesy of the moving company that was to bring the new owner’s stuff in the morning.
I hadn’t asked a single question about where we were going during the scuttling of our possessions. I just sat up in my cot, waiting for him to start volunteering information.
He swallowed. He was hesitating, like a kid reluctant to tell a parent about a broken vase. “I quit my job,” he said through a dry throat.
“I figured that out,” I said, irritated. He hadn’t been to work for two weeks. “So where are we going tomorrow?”
He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t startled by his announcement. “I have to take off for a while.”
I felt my heart plummet. I was being disposed of, too — he’d only been saving me for last!
“What do you mean? Where am I gonna go?”
“You’re staying with my parents in Brooklyn.”
I was stunned. “I thought we hated them,” I said. “How can we stay there if we don’t even visit?”
“We don’t hate them!” my father boomed. “There have just been years and years of misunderstanding.”
I was disgusted. “Yeah, sure, Dad.”
He said weakly, “My parents are good people.”
“I don’t even know them!” I rolled over on the cot so I wouldn’t have to look at him. Not even sure I wanted to be with him anymore I said, “Why can’t I go with you?”
“Because you can’t, Joseph.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody can,” he said in a way that made it clear the matter was beyond his control, as if a demon inside him were calling the shots.
Puzzled, I rolled onto my back. Oddly, I felt my anger melting. I started thinking about how miserable this past month with my father had been. Maybe we both needed a break from each other. Somehow, I sensed that losing both parents might be easier than losing one.
“For how long?” I asked roughly.
The fact that I was talking inspired my father. “A few weeks, no more.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Where are you going?”
“Across the country in the car.”
We were silent. The wind picked up, making the ancient window panes jiggle and creak in their loose putty jackets.
I felt him grasp my elbow. “Joey, don’t hate me,” he begged in a voice I’d never heard him use. Desperate.
“I won’t,” I said. I didn’t take his hand but let him hold me for a few minutes before rolling onto my side and falling asleep.
Almost everything we loaded into our Comet station wagon the next morning belonged to me. My father packed one bulging canvas sack for himself, filled with shirts, pants, and underwear. That and his shaving kit were all he’d take across the United States.
When we were on the road I said, “You have to sign my report card.” I dug it out of my pile of stuff. “We’re supposed to mail it back to school. Maybe you don’t have to if I’m not going back.”
“Give it to me,” he mumbled. At a red light near the Long Island Expressway he glanced at the card, hastily scrawled on it, and handed it back to me.
“Take care of it,” he said, knowing I had a stamped, addressed envelope the school had provided.
I looked at the card. Through the first three marking periods Mrs. Olsen, my fifth-grade teacher, had written tiny but stinging notes in the space provided for comments: “Joseph should participate in class more often … Joseph needs to be more outgoing … Joseph holds back during sports.”
And beneath each comment was my mother’s light-handed, almost fluffy signature, “Mrs. Salvatore Ambrosio.” She barely pressed a pen when she wrote.
I looked at the space for the last marking period.
“I suspect he can do better,” Mrs. Olsen had written of my straight-B performance.
“I suspect we all can,” my father wrote back before scrawling his fierce signature. It violated the boundaries of the dainty white box, and I could feel his lettering through the back side of the card, like Braille.
“There’s a mailbox,” I said just before we reached the entry ramp to the expressway. He braked the car. I got out and mailed the report card, sort of surprised that he’d waited instead of roaring away.
“Put your seat belt on,” he said, and that was the extent of our conversation for the rest of the trip to the East New York section of Brooklyn.
He slowed the car to a crawl when we made the turn down Shepherd Avenue. We drove beneath an elevated train track structure that left a ladder-shaped shadow in the late afternoon light. Rows of sooty red brick houses, fronted with droopy maple trees that seemed to have given up trying to grow taller.
My grandmother and Uncle Victor were waiting for us on the porch. I knew them only from photographs.
Clumsy introductions outside the car door: your grandmother, your uncle. No kisses. My father clasped his mother’s hand.
“Long time,” he said in a neutral voice. She nodded. Victor, after a moment’s
