together in the same room where I’d grown up. She smothered our son with so much affection that I barely felt he was mine at all. The boy was always hungry, and I woke every predawn when he cried, and watched as he fed with an urgency I could understand and recall perfectly: it was how I’d felt when I left for the city almost exactly a year before. Afterward, I could never get back to sleep, and I wondered how and when I’d become so hopelessly, so irredeemably selfish, and what, if anything, could be done about it. None of my actions belonged to me. I’d been living one kind of life when a strong, implacable hand had pulled me violently into another. I tried to remember my city routines, but I couldn’t.
The rest of the world had never seemed so distant.
By late summer the gang hit most of the towns in our province. It was then my father suggested we go out to the old farm. He would teach me how to use the pistol. I began to tell him I knew, but he wasn’t interested.
“You’ll drive,” he said.
We left town on a Saturday of endless, oppressive heat, the road nothing but a sticky band of tar humming beneath us. We arrived just before noon. There were no shadows. The rutted gravel road led right up to the house, shuttered and old and caving in on itself like a ruined cake. My father got out and leaned against the hood of the car. Behind us, a low cloud of dust snaked back to the main road, and a light breeze brushed over the grassy, overgrown fields, but provided no relief. He took out a bottle of rum, drank a little, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. The light was fierce. He was seven years old when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved the family from this farm into town. He passed me the bottle; I handed him the weapon. He loaded it with a smile, and without saying much, we took turns firing rounds at the sagging walls of my grandfather’s house.
An hour passed this way, blowing out what remained of the windows, and circling the house clockwise to try our onslaught from another angle. We aimed for the cornices just below the roof, and hit, after a few attempts, the tilting weather vane above so that it spun maniacally in the still afternoon heat. We shot the numbers off the front door and tore the rain gutter from the corner it had clung to for five decades. I spread holes all over the façade of the tired house. My father watched, and I imagined he was proud of me.
“How does it feel?” he asked when we were finished. We sat leaning against the shadowed eastern wall.
The gun was warm in my hand. “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
He took his cap off, and laid it by his side. “You’re no good with that pistol. You’ve got to shoot like you mean it.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s all right to be scared.”
“I know,” I said. “I am.”
“Your generation isn’t lucky. This never would have happened before. The old government wouldn’t have allowed it.”
I shrugged. I had a postcard of the dead general buried in a bag back home. I could show it to my father anytime, at any moment, just to make him angry or sad or both, and somehow, knowing this felt good.
“Are you enjoying it?” he asked. “Are you enjoying being a father?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s not a kind of question. It is a question. If you’re going to take everything your father says as an insult, your life will be unbearable—”
“I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “If it isn’t already.”
We sat, watching the heat rise from the baking earth. It seemed strange to have to deny this to my father—that my life was unbearable. I mentioned the bridge, its new color, but he hadn’t noticed.
He turned to face me. “You know, your mother and I are still young.”
“Sure you are.”
“Young enough, in good health, and I’ve got years of work left in me.” He flexed his bicep, and held it out for me to see. “Look,” he said. “Touch if you want. Your old man is still strong.”
He was speaking very deliberately now, and I had the feeling that he’d prepared the exact wording of what he said next. “We’re young, but you’re very young. You have an entire life to lead. And you can go, if you want, and look for that life elsewhere. Go do things, go see different places. We can take care of the child. You don’t want to be here, and we understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother agrees,” he said. “We’ve discussed it. She’ll miss you, but she says she understands.”
I stared at him. “And Malena?”
“She’ll want for nothing.”
I picked up the gun, brushed the dust off it. I checked to make sure it was unloaded and passed it back to him.
“When?” I asked.
“Whenever.”
And then we rode home and spoke only of the weather and the elections. My father didn’t care much for voting, but he supposed if the owner of the plant wanted to be mayor, he could be. It was fine with him. It was all fine with him. The sky had filled with quilted, white clouds, but the heat had not waned. Or maybe it was how I felt. Even with the windows down, I sweated clean through my shirt, my back and thighs sticking fast to the seat. I didn’t add much to the conversation, only drove and stared ahead and thought about what my father had said to me. I was still thinking about it two weeks later when we were robbed.
It was no better or worse than I’d imagined. I was asked to say something at the manager’s wake, and to my surprise, the words would not come easily. I stood before a room of grieving family and shell-shocked friends, offering a bland remembrance of the dead man and his kindness. I found it impossible to make eye contact with anyone. Malena cradled our son in her arms, and the evening passed in a blur, until the three of us made our way to the corner of the dark parlor where the young widow was receiving condolences. She thanked me for my words; she cooed at our boy. “How old?” she asked, but before Malena or I could respond, her face reddened and the tears came and there was nothing either of us could say. I excused myself, left Malena with a kiss, and escaped through a back door. It was a warm evening, the town shuttered and quiet. I could hardly breathe. I never made it home that night, and of course, this time Malena knew better than to look for me.
WE WERE TALKING, Hank and I, about how that which we love is so often destroyed by the very act of our loving it. The bar was dark, but comfortably so, and by the flittering light of the television I could make out the rough texture of his face. He was, in spite of everything, a beautiful man.
We’d lost our jobs at the call center that day, both of us, but Hank didn’t seem to care. All day strangers yelled at us, demanding we make their lost packages reappear. Hank kept a handle of bourbon in the break room, hidden behind the coffee filters, for those days when a snowstorm back East slowed deliveries and we were made to answer for the weather. After we were told the news of the firing, Hank spent the afternoon drinking liquor from a styrofoam
