54
The truth? Even if I wanted to see my father again, he hadn’t been back to the house for two weeks. I assume he’s run off on some dusty highway again to take up a life in South Dakota or Montana or somewhere even further off. I don’t know. Johnston may have been a pit stop on his own endless exodus, and only in one transient moment of spirit and bravery had he decided to stop by and see his only son. It’s possible he took one look at me and remembered what it was that made him leave in the first place. He lost his constitution all over again. I try to let it slip from my mind.
It’s all made easier by everything Rose. I’ve found myself completely taken in by her gravitational pull. All day I find little things, normally mundane, made sensational in her honor. And by cleaning this dish, I will make myself good. I will take care of the world around me, as I will take care of her. As I stand, brush in hand, painting the Cornells’s living room, I find myself steeped in a higher attention to detail, inspired. Each shade more nuanced, each glide of the brush more meaningful. It’s all new creation, it has depth, it is significant. All because my heart is on fire.
Never have I been so motivated to instill every second of my life with purpose, renewed by the belief that if there is meaning to something, there is meaning to everything, and so on. I am not only the holder of the burgundy paint brush coated and primed, I am Vincent van Gogh. I see her face in every shadow, her eyes in every color. Her laugh behind overheard jokes, her thoughts on stories. Her fingerprints on any guitar and her hands on any glass of beer. With her so alive in these details, they all become vital. Every small, hidden design. There is magic everywhere. I am riding a wave of phenomenal promise.
All day, Rose.
When will I see you next?
What is your first thought that comes new to you each dawn?
I want to know the whole history, thought and feeling.
When I sit at Jimmy’s and she serves drinks to the customers, it takes only one shared look to engulf me in flame. I am burning inside. And in the evenings when she is lying in my arms, I feel closer to the real meaning of life than ever before. As she hums quietly, gently shifting, kissing me softly before she slowly falls to sleep, I feel a peace I never imagined. Each time is the first time with millions to follow. Over and over into the unstoppable future. Oblivion. There is life, then there is this. Well, I will never stand in the way of it. I have given myself over to its mechanisms. I stand prepared to be ground shaken and rearranged. I fear no pain. I believe that it is all worth it. I will double down, and keep digging further, and there, I believe, lies our cosmic gift. With each part of myself, with each memory or truth or secret offered, I am given one in return, and this is the heavenly exchange of love. So, as the nights inevitably settle in, we wrap tightly around one another and dream. What a feeling.
In the post-midnight hours, we lie together in darkness and Rose tells me secrets.
“My mother came home crying one night after work. Late. I was like thirteen, supposed to be asleep. I could hear her through my bedroom door, and she couldn’t stop. Eventually, I wandered out in my pajamas to try and help her. I knocked on her door and went into her room. She was just sitting there in her bed, so I joined her. I gave her a long hug, but she never did tell me what was wrong. I stayed there with her for an hour and then I went to bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I had it worked up in my mind somehow that she was crying over my father. I don’t know why. And before I really even stopped to think about it, I went to the kitchen, grabbed her keys, got in her car and I drove all the way to Johnston. The whole way. It was crazy. I drove all the way to my father’s house, and I didn’t get there until like four or five in the morning. And when I made it, I stepped out of the car and stood there looking through the front windows from the street. I swear to God. I’ll never forget it. The side door of the garage opened, and Saul came out with his bicycle, and a big bag hanging from his shoulder.”
“Oh my God. Yeah, he did the route every morning. He delivered the paper.”
“That was it. I didn’t put it together at the time. I was so shocked. I couldn’t move from the street, and we just sat there staring at one another for a long, long time. He was short, stocky. Had nice eyes but seemed scared of me. We hadn’t seen each other in years. I don’t know if he even knew who I was. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t. Eventually I just got back in the car, and I left. He was just frozen in the driveway the whole time. Never said a word. That memory always comes back to me at the strangest times.”
“I bet he remembers that too.”
“You think?”
“For sure.”
And one night she told me about her mother.
“She was 5’6’’ and scrappy.
A real hustler, ya know? She secretaried at an accounting firm and ran the place through and through.
Sometimes when I was younger, she would work shifts at the gas station too and be out most of the night, just to provide for us.
I used to sit across from her at breakfast and cry about the bags under her eyes.
I thought she might be dying.
Just tired, honey , she’d tell me.
When I got old enough, I took over the gas station shifts and finally mom could rest here and there.”
Rose looked up to the ceiling and smiled.
Her mother was her hero, and you could tell.
The admiration was beautiful in her voice.
When she spoke of her passing it was always with a deep, quiet pain.
This was one of many things we shared.
One night we traded stories of our mothers all night.
And then we laughed, and we tangled, and fell quickly to sleep just to dream.
Remember sleepovers as a kid? You’d stay up all night in a black room chatting and giggling before falling asleep? Sometimes it’d go on for hours.
God, how simple it was then.
There was no dark future.
There was nothing but chatter and joy in speaking secrets with a best friend before rest, and you’d lull yourself to it in time.
In the morning you’d wake all the better.
Well, this is my life with Rose, every night, and I think I love these moments best, right after the last person whispers and we drift off together.
Serenity.
Talk talk talk until finally no one continues.
Together you take a sweet glide into peace.
We wake before the morning sun.
Rose off to Jimmy’s for one thing or another.
She’s started keeping the books, serving and restocking and cleaning and such.
And I’d maybe have something lined up.
A paint job or whatever it was.
It’s a renewed hunger in me.
I’ve never wanted to work like this before.
I’m after something entirely reimagined.
There are mysteries to be discovered, meaning to be seen in the walls which I color.
The truth is, everything is just a bit more magnetic with Rose on my mind.
And yet, the thought of my father still wandered in and out like a serpent.
One minute around, one minute not, moving silently with danger.
It is true that a son is a son for all time.
The presence of the father never leaves.
Even those that linger in the sky.
Even those that you hear tales of from centuries past.
They are like planets, always above, looking down, looking down.
I’ve spent the last five years wrestling with the truth of my father.
Anguishing over him throughout countless sleepless nights, cursing whichever path he was walking.
A son abandoned by his father is a vulnerable stone.
And how many of us there are.
America is scattered with our harbored pain and anger.
Still, swimming through my blood are the remnants of love.
How can this be? What is it inside that calls out to my father like a lost child? Perpetually craving some sort of adoration, respect, or appreciation.
Just love.
After everything, I still have thoughts of making him proud and living up to a standard of honor.
I have ambitions of becoming a man he can applaud, or wink at or hug.
This is a man who never seemed to love me in my life, not really.
I can hardly remember him saying the words.
I don’t remember many smiles, or kind gestures.
He provided a roof above my head and put food on the table.
I suppose that was more than some in the end, but he was so angry with me, all the time, as if he regretted something in me.
I frustrated him somehow, continually.
In me he saw an enemy, but why? I rallied against that feeling my whole life.
Even as a child it was true.
When I looked up to my father like a Greek God or hero, he looked down at me, ant-like, small.
I never understood.
Into my teens I pushed my way forward, burrowing always into something or another aimed at earning his grace.
It took ages for that longing to die in my chest.
It wasn’t until late high school that I began to resent him, to hold him accountable.
It was only then that I slowly started treating him like the failure I feared him to be.
I wanted to punish him for his constant despondence and lack of faith in me, his only son.
By the time I got to my early twenties, there were moments I hated his guts.
And what does that do to a young man? To hate his father? It was an enormous cloud spreading larger over my life all the time.
Every visit to my parents’ house.
Every conversation with my mother.
Once, amidst my heartbreak, I told her to leave him.
Imagine that.
I hadn’t considered the pain that would cause her, and I lament that now.
I was lost.
The truth is, by the time of Ma’s accident, I had felt finished with my father for years.
At that point, he wasn’t even actively against me, he was still just shuffling to work, forever bent to it.
Saying nothing to anyone.
He was still getting geared up at Jimmy’s.
Still putting food on the table, paying bills, showing up to dinners.
What did I know as to why? It was simply as if he had forgotten who I was.
As if he had forgotten he had a son in the first place.
It was always the distance that bothered me most and broke my heart.
Even in my younger years, when he had struck me for disobedience, it was better than other nights of silence, the nights where he ignored my existence.
Those were the worst—when he was apathetic and departed.
When he finally pulled the trigger and left, he was just rounding out the metaphor, playing his part.
He went off to the horizon in real time and I wasn’t surprised.
I just wasn’t.
I told myself it made little difference to me.
He had always felt many state lines away.
I told myself it didn’t matter a thousand times until I began to believe it, but of course, deep and buried, it did.
It mattered to the child in my heart, the part of me that spent hours obsessing over the moment before he turned the ignition and left me, alone.
How had he decided at last? What went through his mind as he sat there with the key in hand? Was it always his plan? Was it the snap of stretched cord?
A culmination of many years dealing with the dying soul that he carried? All I knew was my mother had left, and the tethers were gone.
He had served his sentence and was free.
I don’t know.
And that’s the truth about me, I don’t know a fuck damn thing about anything.
I spent almost ten hours today coating layers in the Cornells’s basement and bedrooms, ruminating on the state of my life.
I listened to Dylan all day.
I don’t care what Prince says about you, Bob.
You’re one of the best fucking writers to ever live.
Rose has a late night scheduled out at Jimmy’s, so I won’t be seeing her this evening.
It’s eight and I’ve just gotten home.
I’m putting together a plain lunch meat sandwich for dinner.
God.
How many times have I taken wet slices of ham and turkey and turned them over on bread? A million simple habits make a man.
I take a bite and breathe deeply through my nose as I chew, releasing all of the knots in my mind.
They unravel, one at a time, and I lay them at my feet in circles.
The phone rings and ruins the image.
I take a step toward it and swallow the meat to my gullet.
With my tongue making rounds through my gums, clearing the way, I say dryly.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, son?” A recognizable gravel.
“Hello?”
The thing is, it could be the easiest motion of my life. You never saw such a close distance between my ear and the button on the phone stand below. I am still and silent for a moment, then relent.
“Yeah?”
“It’s your father.”
“I know.”
“I uh, I was just callin—ehm”—and he lets out the most vicious cough you’ve ever heard as he stalls for more time. He takes a second or so to find the words in his convoluted mind—“I wanted to see, well, how are ya?
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
He continues after the phone line stays silent.
“You gettin on?”
“Yeah.
“Good, ehm”—again with the hacking—“look, I uh, I’m sorry it’s been some days. I wanted to give you a second since I saw ya”—and he pauses again as I wait, stout mute—“Uh, I know showin up like that was, well, not the best planned.”
“Yeah.”
“I just, well I wanted to see ya, and so I showed.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, but, uh look, son.” He trails off once again, sadly unpracticed in speaking his mind.
“I want to see ya again, is what I want to say now.”
It’s wild, but my heart in my chest is pounding. Nervous spasms threaten to run all across my spine, and I feel short of breath. It’s as if I’m gearing up for an attack and getting ready to defend myself. I feel primitive. So much memory lies dormant in my body. Still, I’m silent.
“Cash. You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you have a coffee with your old man?”
Before I can answer, I hear the voices of my mother and Rose echo in my mind. Forgiveness is the face of God . Ma spoke about it at length, giving platitudes and virtues to me daily on its behalf. And I hear her now. Unprompted, unsolicited, she ascends from inside me, she rises to my heart for the reminder. Perhaps it is her voice that floats from me now.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah, okay. Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, uh, yes, yes tomorrow morning. That works.”
“Alright. Eight should be alright.”
“Eight. Alright. Okay. Eight it is.”
I hang up the phone.
I’ve ventured so far into the ocean that I no longer see land, not a ship, not a bird, not a thing. In the deep blue unknown there I swim, treading water and searching for life. I am delirious, salt soaked, no longer tied to solid ground.
It’s true that in life, everything’s changing. From one day to the next, it’s a new story. Sometimes the change happens rapidly, all at once, like a long, black-and-white domino line falling. The narrative re-routes completely. This is my life as I know it. In the middle of my kitchen, near a half-eaten lunch meat sandwich, I am blank. My only audience is God. He’s sitting on his throne and nodding. What a great understanding He possesses, and how little of it He shares with the rest of us.