learned that one when you and Mom split.”
My heart drops. Jake never, ever talks about this. He doesn’t expect me to comment on it, or respond to it. But I do, and I surprise myself in the way I do it.
“I learned it when my mother died,” I say softly.
“How old were you?”
“Your age.”
Jake stops walking, sets the sack down, and stares at me. “Dad. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about? You knew my mother was dead.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know you were so young when she died.”
“I was young, all right. So was she. It was tough.”
At last, we are talking about my childhood. It’s a hell of a conversation to be having in broad daylight, in the middle of Broadway. This is the sort of thing people talk about in soft voices in the wee hours of the morning, just before the sun comes up. Jake is practically shouting at me, to be heard over the beeping alerts from a pastry delivery truck that’s backing up.
“What did she die of?”
“Heart attack. I’ve told you this, haven’t I?”
“Never! We’ve never talked about it!”
The beeping stops as the truck settles into a delivery bay. My heart is pounding. On top of everything else that’s happening today, it seems ridiculous to be talking about a woman who died more than thirty years ago, but that’s what we’re doing, and I know that my son won’t let it go.
“I thought you knew about my mother,” I manage to say. Jake shakes his head.
“Dad,” he says, “the truth is, you’ve hardly told me anything about your life. You don’t like to leave many footprints, do you?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You travel light. You don’t even have anything to pack up at work. One lousy notebook, after twenty-nine years! Look at all this crap I’m carrying, from just a few weeks in school!”
“Pick it up and let’s get going.”
This isn’t going to be easy. Jake wants to know things, and I want to know things. Right now we’re both holding our cards close to our chests, but it’s early. Very early. We’ve got a whole weekend to get through, and anything can happen.
He manages to get the sack on his shoulder. It’s obviously heavy and unwieldy.
“You need help with that?”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“Forget it. I just thought we were going to talk to each other, for once, and not be afraid of anything.”
“We will, I swear. But let’s get home first, okay?”
Jake doesn’t want to take a cab, and he doesn’t want to take turns carrying the sack. It’s nearly a mile to my place and he carries it every step of the way, including the four rickety flights of stairs to my three-hundred-square-foot studio apartment.
CHAPTER FIVE
I’m hardly ever home at this hour, and for a moment I’m startled by the light. The rays of the sun are lasering through a narrow gap between two buildings across the street, splashing the place with a brightness I’ve never seen here. If the place were to go up for rent, this would be the hour to show it to prospective tenants.
It’s not much but it’s neat and clean, if only because it’s too small to let it go sloppy. It would sink my soul to walk in and see laundry on the floor, or dishes in the sink, so before I leave for work each morning (Work? Remember work?) I always give it a once-over: wash the dishes, make the bed, hang the towels, sweep the kitchen floor. These are my stations of the cross, so to speak.
The room has a platform bed and a captain’s bed, both of which I bought when my marriage broke up. Jake used to take the captain’s bed whenever he slept over, but now I give him the bigger one, since he’s grown to be taller and rangier than me. He sleeps spread wide, like a starfish, and I sleep fetal, so it works out.
It’s a good thing I had a son. I can’t imagine how the sleeping arrangements would have worked with a teenage daughter.
He sets his sack down and says, “You’ve got messages.” The red light on my phone machine is winking away. I hit the button and an electronic voice informs me that I’ve got twenty-two messages.
I start listening to them. They’re all from people at the newspaper, offering condolences and incredulity over what has happened. There’s a pathetic rhythm to these calls, and about halfway through them I start deleting them after listening to just the first few words:
“I can’t believe—”
“I’m so sorry—”
“No way they can—”
Jake laughs at what I’m doing. “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” he suggests. “Some of them might be job offers.”
“No such luck. All these people want is for me to call back with the gory details of what happened.”
I continue deleting the messages after one or two words. Within minutes all the messages are gone, and the message machine light is back to its steady red glow as the electronic voice says, “You have listened to your last message.”
I turn to my son. “Beer?”
“Why not?”
We’ve been drinking beer together for about a year. He’s under age, of course, but all I’m trying to do is demystify alcohol for him. I take two Rolling Rocks from the refrigerator, toss one to him. He flops on the big bed, I flop on the little one. Upstairs, I hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner, a sound I’ve never heard here before. Like I said, I’m never home at this hour. We pop open the beers and take long gulps.
“Dad.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m a little scared of how Mom is going to react.”
“I thought you had a plan.”
“I do, but I know she’s going to flip out anyway.”
“Maybe not. After all, this is a double punch, me losing my job and you getting kicked out of school. She might be too overloaded to react at all.”
I am full of shit, of course. What happened to me won’t even amount to a blip on his mother’s radar, except as to how it might affect my child support payments. She’s always had contempt for my work but respect for the check, which puts her in the unique position of having to hope I hang on to a job that in her eyes benefits the world not even slightly.
A gleam catches my eye from the windowsill—it’s
