Good Riddance(7)

Wouldn’t leave Pickering. She got her wish. I pictured their double gravestone, the blank half waiting for my father’s eventual burial. I couldn’t say what I was thinking: that he’d been liberated. Too cruel and untrue emotionally. He’d loved my mother and was still mourning her. Instead, I said, “Maybe the silver lining to losing Mom is that you can fulfill a lifelong dream.”

“So you’re giving me your blessing? I won’t be invading your territory?”

“Highly unlikely in a city this size.”

“Three hundred square miles if you count every borough!”

Such enthusiasm. It was almost heartbreaking. What if New York didn’t deliver? “So what’s the next step?” I asked.

“An apartment, of course.”

I said I’d invite him to stay with me for a scouting trip but again—I didn’t even have the floor space for a blow-up mattress.

“I’ll do that Airbnb thing.”

“I’m impressed.”

“I’ll take the bus in and reserve for a couple of nights. I think I’d like to be near Lincoln Center.”

I laughed.

He asked me what was funny about Lincoln Center.

“It’s not Lincoln Center. It’s you, the Manhattanite already. I never knew this guy.”

“What’s your neighborhood again?”

“Hell’s Kitchen. Aka Clinton. I think you should get closer to a subway, though, especially in this cold spell.”

“I’m from New Hampshire! I laugh at the cold.”

He came the following weekend and stayed for five days in a skinny duplex, one room up and one down, connected by a spiral staircase I didn’t think was safe to negotiate.

He loved the place. Further delighting him was what he called the cornucopia of conveniences: restaurants of every ethnicity, and bodegas and people selling fruit and vegetables on the streets. In winter! He had his hair cut on Columbus Avenue and declared Reuben his new barber. Never had anyone been so sold on a city within the first hour of setting foot in it. And on day five he’d met with a rental agent and signed a lease for a one-bedroom with a loft in the same building he’d Airbnb’d in, four blocks south of me, effective the first of November.

Now that it was actually happening, my worrying set in. I asked if he might be rushing things. Weren’t widows and widowers supposed to wait a year before they made any big decisions or lifestyle changes?

“It has been a year, Daff.”

Oh. So it had been. “Of course. October. I knew that.”

“If this isn’t hard to hear: After a year, a widower can supposedly keep company with a woman without causing tongues to wag—”

“And that can’t happen in Pickering?”

“Let me put it this way: I sat next to Ceci Walsh at church. Remember her? She was the art teacher before the program was cut—”

I heard the grandfather clock clang in the background. I checked my watch. It was on the half hour and had the eerie effect of my mother chiming in.

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I didn’t want to start up with anyone in Pickering who might be anti–New York and probably make a live-free-or-die fuss about paying state income tax. What I was really asking was if your old dad invited a woman to a show—just being hypothetical here—would that sit okay with you?”

“Yes, of course. You could do more than take her to a show. What daughter wouldn’t be okay with that?”

“Holly, maybe.”

“You know why that would be, don’t you? If you met someone, you might marry her, and she could have children and grandchildren, and what if they were smarter or cuter or lived closer than Holly’s two in Beverly Hills? Or, God forbid, a younger woman who’d give you a second family?”

“I don’t know if that’s fair, Daff.”

“Don’t worry. When or if the time comes, I can handle Holly.”



Was my father a flirt? He certainly went out of his way to open doors for women of all ages. Appraising him through the eyes of prospective partners, I thought, Yes, handsome in his rimless glasses, his well-cut gray hair, his herringbone overcoat, his cashmere scarf, and his high school principal’s dignity.

I’d told him over wine, our farewell-for-now dinner, that I thought—after seeing him in action—he’d do very well in the dating department.

“Action? Hardly? Good manners, maybe. Well, there are a lot of ladies around. And I like the way they look here: smart—in both meanings of the word. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re available.”

“They’ll let you know, believe me.”

“First things first. I have to get down here and moved in.”

I asked if he was going to put the Pickering house on the market.

“I am. I don’t want that responsibility, don’t want to worry about who’s plowing the driveway and shoveling the walks and weeding the perennials and checking for dead mice in the traps. It’s not a snap decision; it’s not like I came here on vacation and decided on a lark to relocate.”

“I was playing devil’s advocate. It’s time for the adventure to begin.”

“I already called Kevin Hogan. Remember him from Fairgrove Avenue? He’s an agent now. I’d promised him the exclusive. He was just waiting for the go-ahead.”