Where The God Of Love Hangs Out Part 4

Clare said, and she thought she never sounded more like Isabel, master of the even, elegant tone, "I completely understand, Lauren, and it is very good of you to call."

Lauren put the boys on and they said exactly what they should: Hi, Grandma, thanks for the Legos. (Clare put Post-its next to the kitchen calendar, and at the beginning of every month, she sent an educational toy to each grandchild, so no one could accuse her of neglecting them.) Lauren walked back into the living room and forced Adam to take the phone. Clare said to him, before he could speak, "I'm all right, Adam. Not to worry," and he said, "I know, Mom," and Clare asked about his work and Lauren's cla.s.ses and she asked about Jason's karate and the baby's teeth, and when she could do nothing more, she said, "Oh, I'll let you go now, honey," and she sat on the floor, with the phone still in her hand.

One Sunday, Danny called and said, "Have you heard about Dad?" And Clare's heart clutched, just as people describe, and when she didn't say anything, Danny cleared his throat and said, "I thought you might have heard. Dad's getting married." Clare was so relieved she was practically giddy. "Oh, wonderful," she said. "That nice, tall woman who golfs?" Danny laughed. Almost everything you could say about his future stepmother pointed directly to the ways she was not his mother-particularly nice, tall, and golfs. Clare got off the phone and sent Charles and his bride-she didn't remember her name, so she sent it to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wexler, which had a nice old-fas.h.i.+oned ring to it-a big pretty Tiffany vase of the kind she'd wanted when she married Charles.

The only calls Clare made were to Isabel. She called in the early evening, before Isabel turned in. (There was nothing she didn't know about Isabel's habits. They'd shared a beach house three summers in a row and she'd slept in their guest room in Boston a dozen times. She knew Isabel's taste in linens, in kitchens, in moisturizer and makeup and movies. There was not a single place on earth that you could put Clare that she couldn't point out to you what would suit Isabel and what would not.) She dialed her number, William's old number, and when Isabel answered, she hung up, of course.

Clare called Isabel about once a week, after watching Widow's Walk, the most repulsive and irresistible show she'd ever seen. Three, sometimes four women sat around and said things like, "It's not an ending; it's a beginning." What made it bearable to Clare was that the women were all ardent Catholics and not like her, except the discussion leader, who was so obviously Jewish and from the Bronx that Clare had to Google her and discover that she had a Ph.D. in philosophical something and converted to Catholicism after a personal tragedy. Clare got to hear a woman who sounded a lot like her great-aunt Frieda say, "I pray for all widows, and we must all keep on with our faith and never forget that Jesus meets every need." Clare waited for the punch line, for the woman to yank her cross off her neck and say, "And if you believe that, bubbeleh, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you," but she never did. She did sometimes say, in the testing, poking tone of a good rabbi, "Isn't it interesting that so many women saints came to their sainthood through being widows? They were poor and desperate, alone in the world with no protection, but the sisters took them in and even educated their children. Isn't it interesting that widowhood led them to become saints and extraordinary women, to know themselves and Jesus better?" The other widows, the real Catholics, didn't look interested at all. The good-looking one, in a red suit and red high heels, kept reminding everyone that she was very recently widowed (and young, and pretty) and the other two, a garden gnome in baggy pants and black sneakers that didn't touch the floor and a tall woman in a frilly blouse with her gla.s.ses taped together at the bridge, talked, in genuinely heartbroken tones, about their lives now that they were alone. They rarely mentioned their husbands, although the gnome did say, more than once, that if she could forgive her late husband, anyone could forgive anyone.

Clare dials, as soon as the organ music dies down, and Isabel picks up after one ring. Clare doesn't speak.

"Clare?"

Clare sighs. Hanging up was bad enough.

"Isabel."

Isabel sighs as well.

"I saw Emily a few weeks ago. I dropped off a birthday present for baby Charlotte. She's beautiful. Emily seems very happy. I mean, not to see me, but in general."

"Yes, she told me."

"I shouldn't have gone."

"Well. If you want to offer a relations.h.i.+p and generous gifts, it's up to Emily. Kurt's mother's dead. I guess it depends on how many grandmothers Emily wants Charlotte to have, regardless of who they are." There was no one like Isabel.

"I guess it does. I mean, I'm not going to presume. I'm not going to drop in all the time with a box of rugelach and a hand-knit sweater."

"I wouldn't think so. Clare-"

"Oh, Isabel, I miss you."

"Good night, Clare."

When Clare gets off the phone, there's a racc.o.o.n in her kitchen, on the counter. It, although Clare immediately thinks He, is eating a slice of bacon bread. He's holding it in his small, nimble, and very human black hands. He looks at her over the edge of the bread, like a man peering over his gla.s.ses. A fat, bold, imperturbable man with a twinkle in his dark eyes.

Even though she knows better, even though William would have been very annoyed at her for doing so, Clare says, softly, "William."

The racc.o.o.n doesn't answer and Clare smiles. She wouldn't have wanted the racc.o.o.n to say, "Clare." Because then she would have had to call her boys and have herself committed, and although this is not the life she hoped to have, it's certainly better than being in a psychiatric hospital. The racc.o.o.n has started on his second slice of bacon bread. Clare would like to put out the orange marmalade and a little plate of honey. William never ate peanut b.u.t.ter, but Clare wants to open a jar for the racc.o.o.n. She's read that they love peanut b.u.t.ter, and she doesn't want him to leave.

In an ideal world, the racc.o.o.n would give Clare advice. He would speak to her like Quan Yin, the Buddhist G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion and mercy. Or he would speak to her like Saint Paula, the patron saint of widows, about whom Clare has heard so much lately.

Clare says, without moving, "And why is Saint Paula a saint? She dumps her four kids at a convent, after the youngest dies. She runs off to hajira with Saint Jerome. How is that a saint? You've got s.h.i.+tty mothers all over America who would love to dump their kids and travel."

The racc.o.o.n nibbles at the crust.

"Oh, it's very hard," Clare says, sitting down slowly and not too close. "Oh, I miss him so much. I didn't know. I didn't know that I would be like this, that this is what happens when you love someone like that. I had no idea. No one says, There's no happy ending at all. No one says, If you could look ahead, you might want to stop now. I know, I know, I know I was lucky. I was luckier than anyone to have had what I had. I know now. I do, really."

The racc.o.o.n picks up two large crumbs and tosses them into his mouth. He scans the counter and the canisters and looks closely at Clare. He hops down from the counter to the kitchen stool and onto the floor and strolls out the kitchen door.

Clare told Nelson about the racc.o.o.n and they encouraged him with heels of bread and plastic containers of peanut b.u.t.ter leading up the kitchen steps, but he didn't come back. She told Margaret Slater, who said she was lucky not to have gotten rabies, and she told Adam and Danny, who said the same thing. She bought a stuffed-animal racc.o.o.n with round black velvet paws much nicer than the actual racc.o.o.n's, and she put him on her bed with the rhino and the little bird and William's big pillows. She told little Charlotte racc.o.o.n stories when she came to babysit (how could Emily say no to a babysitter six blocks away and free and generous with her time?). She even told Emily, who paused and said, with a little concern, that racc.o.o.ns could be very dangerous.

"I don't know if you heard," Emily said. "My mother's getting married. A wonderful man."

Clare bounced Charlotte on her knee. "Oh, good. Then everyone is happy."

Opening the Hands Between Here and Here On the dark road, only the weight of the rope. Yet the horse is there.

-JANE HIRSHFIELD

BETWEEN HERE AND HERE.

For ESBL

I had always planned to kill my father. When I was ten, I drew a picture of a grave with ALVIN LOWALD written on the tombstone, on the wall behind my dresser. From time to time, I would add a spray of weeds or a creeping vine. By the time I was in junior high, there were trees hung with kudzu, cracks in the granite, and a few dark daisies springing up. Once, when my mother wouldn't let me ride my bike into town, I wrote, Peggy Lowald is a fat stupid cow behind the dresser but I went back the same day and scribbled over it with black Magic Marker because most of the time I did love my mother and I knew she loved me. The whole family knew that my mother's feelings were Sensitive and Easily Hurt. My father said so, all the time. My father's feelings were also sensitive, but not in a way that I understood the word, at ten; it might be more accurate to say that he was extremely responsive. My brother, Andy, drew cartoon weather maps of my father's feelings: dark clouds of I Hate You, giving way to the sleet of Who Are You, pierced by bolts of Black Rage.

Most of the mothers in our neighborhood were housewives, like my mother. But my mother was really a very good cook and a very accomplished hostess, even if the things she made and the way she entertained is not how I would have done it (red, white, and blue frilled toothpicks in lamb sausage pigs-in-blankets on the Fourth of July, trays of deviled eggs and oeufs en gelee-with tiny tulips of chive and egg yolk decorating each oeuf--to celebrate spring). My mother worked hard at what she considered her job, with no thanks from us and no pay, aside from the right to stay home.

Five minutes before the start of a c.o.c.ktail party or bridge night, my father would make himself comfortable on the living room couch, dropping cigar ash on the navy-blue velvet cus.h.i.+ons, or he'd stand in the kitchen in his underwear, reading the newspaper while my mother and I put out platters and laid hors d'oeuvres around him. Sometimes, he'd sit down at the kitchen table and open the newspaper wide, lowering it almost to the tabletop, so we'd have to move the serving dishes to the counter. One July Fourth, when I was about twelve and Andy was ten, my father picked up an angel on horseback as my mother was carrying the tray past him. "What is this, s.h.i.+t on a stick," he said, and knocked the whole plate out of her hands, and then there we were, my mother and Andy and me, scrabbling to grab the hot, damp, oily little things from under the sideboard and out of the ficus plants. My father picked up a couple and put them in my mother's ap.r.o.n pocket, saying, "You kids crack me up." He was still chuckling when the doorbell rang and my mother went back into the kitchen and Andy and I went to our rooms, and he was still smiling when he opened the door for Mr. and Mrs. Rachlin, who were always the first.

When I got to college, other people's stories were much worse. A girl down the hall told her parents she was pregnant her senior year of high school and they drove her to a home for unwed mothers on Christmas Eve and moved out of town. A boy I liked had a long, ropy scar on his back from a belt; my roommate had cigarette burns on her instep. Gross cruelty with canapes and bad temper hardly seemed worth mentioning. (Amazingly, my brother chose to come out to both my parents his soph.o.m.ore year. He said my mother wiped away a quick tear and hugged him and thanked him for telling her, and just as I was about to say, Good for Mom, Andy told me that Dad had lowered his newspaper, poked him in the stomach, and said, "A fat f.a.g? Not much fun in that," and gone back to his paper.) In law school, at night, over drinks, everyone told funnier family stories and no one pulled up their s.h.i.+rt or rolled down their socks to show their scars. When it got really late, a few guys told my kind of stories and then they would say, frankly or sadly or fondly, that these things happened only when the old man had been drinking.

My father didn't drink. He had a gla.s.s of white wine at the c.o.c.ktail parties, and in the summertime, when he was grilling hamburgers, he'd have a beer. One gla.s.s of wine. One beer. I didn't have to watch to see if this was the drink that turned Good Daddy into Bad Daddy; there was no slow, nightly disintegration of the self. I never had to tiptoe around Daddy Sleeping It Off, because my father took a four-mile walk every day, and if it rained, he spent an hour on the rowing machine in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Andy and I always caught the late bus home, and after dinner we did our homework in our rooms, and when I got a stereo for my fifteenth birthday, Andy and I would lie on my floor and listen to loud rock and roll, very, very quietly.

"Am I talking to myself, G.o.ddammit?" my father said one night at dinner, and in the silence Andy said, "I guess so, Dad," and I laughed, which I knew was a mistake even as my lips parted, and my father stood up, hands wandering from head to head, unable to choose which one of us to kill first. I pushed Andy under the table and pulled him down the hall to my bedroom and pressed the lousy little push-b.u.t.ton lock on the door. My father threw our dinners on the floor. My mother was still sitting at the table, trying to be calm, which did sometimes work, and sometimes not, as when he took her two favorite silk scarves and used them to stake his tomato plants, or another time, famous in our family, when he drove her car to a used-car lot, sold it, and took a cab home with a bag of cash in one hand and a box of pizza in the other.

"You could kill yourself on these creamed onions," he said, stepping over them, and I could hear my mother murmuring agreement and I heard him say, pleasantly, that sometimes the kids were too smart for their own d.a.m.ned good. I heard my mother agree with that, too, and my father said he would catch the tail end of the news. About an hour later, my mother knocked on my door and handed us two plates of plastic-wrapped dinner, the meat-loaf slices reconstructed and carrot-raisin salad instead of the creamed onions.

I dated a few boys of the kind you'd expect from a girl like me with a father like that, with no real harm done, and in the middle of law school, I met Jay Johnson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarra.s.singly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team. When we went to his family in Wisconsin to announce our engagement (on our side, my mother took us both to lunch at her favorite restaurant on Northern Boulevard and my father met Jay the night before the wedding), I found a second family; the Johnson women were good, tireless cooks and all the men, including mine, could build you a willow rocking chair or a pair of handsome nightstands in just a few afternoons. And, as it happened, almost all of them were recovering alcoholics. I fell in love with them all. The Johnsons drank coffee and Diet c.o.ke all day (even the toddlers had highb.a.l.l.s of fresh milk with a splash of black coffee at breakfast) and at c.o.c.ktail hour my mother-in-law served Ritz crackers with cheddar cheese and a giant pitcher of Virgin Marys with Tabasco and celery sticks for garnish. You could smoke a pack of cigarettes or eat an entire sheet of crumb cake if you wanted and no one said a word. Most of the Johnsons are obese chain-smokers, and if, like me, you are not, and on top of that, never drank to excess, you are admired almost every day, from every angle. I am the Jackie Kennedy of the Johnson family and it's been a wonderful thing. We still go to Racine for the major holidays.

My brother went a different way, as casting directors like to say in Hollywood, which is where he settled and what he became. After twenty years of smoking pot every day, for his health, as he put it, Andy found himself at a dinner party in West Hollywood, seated next to a handsome tree surgeon in good, but not c.o.ke-fueled, spirits, with compatible politics, no diseases, and absolutely no interest in celebrities. According to Andy, who was calling me with updates from restaurant vestibules, men's clothing stores, and his own bathroom, they had amazing s.e.x fourteen days in a row, without pot or liquor, at the end of which Andy said, Please, marry me, and Michael said, You bet, and they bought a house in Silver Lake the day it went on the market. Andy said that if Michael and affordable housing weren't signs of a Higher Power, he didn't know what were and he quit everything cold turkey the day they moved in, dropping off a four-hundred-dollar Moroccan hookah and a bunch of hand-blown gla.s.s bongs at the men's homeless shelter on the way. For the last eight years, he's been doing an hour of yoga every morning, much the way the Johnsons drink coffee, bake, and whittle. Aside from being in much better shape than he used to be, Andy is the same good and dear person he always was, although Michael says, when I'm visiting, as I'm sure Jay says about me, it's not all sweetness and light. You will have noticed that neither of us has children.

I'd been waiting for the call about my father since he turned seventy. I thought that would be a nice gift from the universe-ten or fifteen healthy years of widowhood for my mother, traveling with friends, taking courses at the Elderhostel, and winding up in her eighties on a hotel veranda sipping a tall, fruity drink with someone who looked like Mr. Rachlin. I hoped Mr. Rachlin was still alive and I hoped that my father wouldn't dawdle in shuffling off this mortal coil. He'd had a fairly serious car accident when he was sixty-eight, which left him limping a little, and he was a heavy cigar smoker, which seemed promising. I sent him crystal ashtrays and silver cigar cutters for his birthdays, expensive humidors and a subscription to that stupid cigar magazine for Christmas, and when friends went to Cuba, I'd ask them to bring back a box for my father. I was, roughly speaking, watching the clock.

Their next-door neighbor found my name on the tiny phone list my mother kept taped to the kitchen wall. Your father's too upset, Mrs. Cannon said, so I'm calling. Andy and I met at the airport and rented a car and drove to our house. Mrs. Rachlin greeted us very warmly and Mr. Rachlin waited in the living room, sitting next to my father, who was reading the paper. Mr. Rachlin jumped up to hug us. He jerked his head toward my father. "It hasn't really sunk in," he said, and Andy and I nodded. My father said, "Hey, kids." Mrs. Cannon left a lasagna on the kitchen table. Broadway Delicatessen delivered platters twice, fried chicken from the hospital where my mother volunteered, and right before dinnertime, six pounds of corned beef and pastrami, with a pound each of cole slaw and kosher dills, from my father's law firm. We let the Rachlins go home and I gave Mr. Rachlin a little kiss for my mother's sake. My father unwrapped the corned beef and made himself a sandwich.

"You kids want some?"

We said we weren't hungry. My father ate his sandwich over the sink.

"You slimmed down," he said to Andy. "The trick is keeping it off. Discipline. Without that, the avoirdupois just piles back on."

I put all the food in the fridge and, for the same reason that I still recut the flowers in a bouquet before I put them in a vase with an aspirin and always put scented soaps in with my underwear and cedar chips in with my sweaters in May, that is, because I am my mother's daughter, I made us all sit down in the living room, To Talk.

"Go ahead," my father said, flirting with a corner of the front page.

"Daddy," is how I started, and I couldn't say another word. On the phone I always called him Alvin, as if it were a joke.

Andy picked up the ball and ran with it. Nope, my father said. No sitting s.h.i.+va; your mother and I didn't believe in that. And no memorial service; your mother wouldn't have wanted that. I couldn't imagine why she wouldn't have wanted it but my father was adamant about everything. Cremation, he said; your mother felt very strongly about that-you know she hated cemeteries. And I'll take care of it.

"We'd like to partic.i.p.ate," I said.

"The fact is," my father said, "I already had it taken care of."

"Where's the urn," I said.

My father laughed. "What, you don't believe me?" He pointed to the sideboard, and we saw a black box about the size of a lunch thermos and sealed with gold tape, sitting next to a bottle of Tia Maria, two bottles of sherry, and a bottle of Scotch someone gave my father fourteen years ago. Andy and I got up to look at it.

"And the will," my brother said. "I'm just asking because- "She left everything to me," my father said, "but if you kids want something from her jewelry box, go ahead and take it."

My father picked up the paper in both hands, and we went into their bedroom, which was as neat as it always had been, except for my father's underwear on my mother's bargello bench. Her jewelry box was on their dresser, centered beneath their big Venetian mirror.

"I wish she had something you'd want," I said.

"She kept Poppa's watch in the bottom," he said. "I'll take that. I don't think the Erwin Pearl clip-ons are going to work for me."

Our grandfather's handsome old Hamilton watch was not in the bottom of her jewelry box. And her good pearls were gone and her diamond watch and the sapphire earrings and matching bracelet she'd bought for herself on her sixtieth birthday, cas.h.i.+ng in the bonds her father left her.

"Daddy," I said. "Mom's good stuff is missing."

"Nothing's missing," he said coldly, and I thought, Christ, I'm going to have to show him, but he cleared his throat and said, "I put all of her valuables in a safety-deposit box. With people in and out of the house, it seemed smart."

There was no answer to that. "Oh, good thinking," I said. I went back to their bedroom with a handful of plastic bags.

"Just take half of it," I told Andy. "In case you have a daughter or you have a friend with a daughter or you start dressing up. Just take half of every f.u.c.king thing that's in there."

He picked up a turquoise bracelet and a handful of cheap Indian bangles and I nodded. I put the beautiful Italian shoes she stopped wearing when she got bunions into a garbage bag and I put the beautiful heavy silk French scarves that she wore until she died in my suitcase. When Andy and I had cleaned out her closet and her jewelry box, leaving her track suits and sneakers and her sensible poly-silk blouses for my father to deal with, we went into my room. I pressed the push lock on the door.

"Please sleep in here," I said.

Andy patted my hand. "We didn't say good night."

"Good night," we both yelled through the closed door.

"Good night, kids," he yelled back. "I'll be back for lunch."

We took a walk in the morning and threw some bad costume jewelry (Boca Bohemian, Oaxaca Farm Girl) into Long Island Sound and cried and talked while the gulls circled and we waited until my father came back. I made three corned-beef-pastrami-and-cole-slaw sandwiches and we each took an A&P diet soda from the case on the kitchen counter.

"So," Andy said. "No service, no interment, no obit, and no visiting. Is that it?"

"That's it," my father said.

"Do you need anything?" I said.

"Like what?" my father said.

"We'll head to the airport this afternoon, then," Andy said.

"Sure," my father said. "You've got jobs, don't you?"

I didn't stop speaking to my father. I did what my mother would have wanted me to do. (I like to think that her wish was for my father to have slipped painlessly and just hours after Andy was born into a deep crack in the world and never return, but I could never get her to say so. What I wanted was to have come out of her womb armed to my little baby lips and killed him with my superpowers before the cord was cut.) My weekly phone calls had none of my mother's social flourishes. (It doesn't hurt to be nice, she said, but that wasn't true in this case.) I did make sure my father wasn't dead and that he was not, with his driving, a danger to others or, with some old-man slippage in hygiene or nutrition, a danger to himself. I hired Delphine Jones to keep the house tidy and to look in on him three times a week, and when she couldn't stand him anymore ("Your father is a very exacting man," she said, her island lilt just about knocked flat after days and weeks with Alvin Lowald), she would pa.s.s him on to a colleague for a week of R & R.

Delphine called me on a Wednesday afternoon in January.

"I see the pipes have burst," she said. "Your father isn't sure who to call."

I called Andy, and he called a plumber, who, for only fourteen hundred dollars up front, would make things right, and I found the Cutler Brothers Catastrophe Company, whose receptionist said, very kindly, that they specialized in "this kind of thing," and I canceled my appointments and got back on a plane to make sure that things were okay. ("I'll give you a million dollars if I don't have to go this time" Andy said. "Seriously. I will give you a weekend at the spa of your choice. I will buy you diamond earrings.") I rang the doorbell and my father let me in. Aside from needing a haircut, he looked good. The house did not. And it smelled the way it had forty years ago, when our whole family sat on the kitchen porch and watched Long Island Sound rise past the pear tree and onto the driveway and then into the TV room, which had never really recovered.

"Better late than never," he said. "The girl left a note for you."

The note said, as I knew it would, that Delphine found herself too busy to clean for my father, and it was her distinct impression that he actually needed more than a cleaning person since, as she wrote in her neat, curvy handwriting, there was an exceptional amount of filth and personal uncleanliness acc.u.mulating from week to week (she itemized the most offensive occurrences at the bottom of the page). She was happy to recommend Beate Jaszulski, a Polish person who had been a nurse in Poland and whom she had met at adult education. She left me Beate's number. My father and I ate the only things in the refrigerator, hard-boiled eggs and American cheese, and he asked why Andy hadn't come. I said Andy was very busy, and my father snorted.

"Busy sucking some guy's c.o.c.k," my father said.

"You know," I said conversationally, "we try to be nice to you. We try to be nice, which isn't easy because you are an emotional black hole and the coldest, most self-centered sonofab.i.t.c.h I have ever known, we try to be nice in honor of our mother's memory. So, if you can't be civil, why don't you just shut the f.u.c.k up?"

My father took his slice of cheese into the living room and read until he heard me go to bed.

In the morning, I showered with my mother's Arpege bath soap and used her antique hair dryer and got dressed and started again. I suggested that it might be wise to sell the house and move into a.s.sisted living. Near me, I even said.

"The only way I'm leaving this house is feetfirst," he said.

I have to say, I did laugh and I did say, "That's not a problem." Oh, we should have smothered him the night after my mother died, we should have just snuck into their bedroom, pulled back that Venetian damask duvet cover she was so proud of, put the matching pillows over his face, and leaned in until he stopped moving.

"Look," I said, "You can sell the house and move into a.s.sisted living or you can keep the house and hire someone to care for you-a housekeeper-type person-and you do that for as long as you can afford it, and then your backup plan is you die before you run out of money."

"Fine," my father said. "Hire someone. A nice pair of t.i.ts wouldn't hurt."

Beate Jaszulski moved into my old room. My father handed her the car keys. (What do I need the ha.s.sle for? People drive like G.o.dd.a.m.n idiots around here anyway.) And every Friday, she dropped him off at the five o'clock movie, while she did the grocery shopping. She kept the house clean, he said (You can eat off the G.o.dd.a.m.n floor) and cooked the meals he preferred (Just plain food, he said, no French song and dance). Two boiled eggs and dry rye toast every morning, a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch, and two broiled lamb chops and rice for dinner, or sometimes, caution to the winds, she cooked a small rib eye with a side of mashed potatoes. I know this because I spoke to Beate every Sunday and she would recite the meals cooked, the walks taken, the minor household repairs her cousin Janek performed and she billed us for. She never complained about my father and she never criticized me for not visiting. At the end of every conversation, I'd ask to speak with my father, and she'd say, "Sure. Sure, you want to talk to Dad," sympathetically, as if she understood that I was so eager to talk to him, I just couldn't stand another moment of chitchat.

"Alvin," I said.

"Alison."