Calypso(61)

“Because he can afford it on his own,” I told him.

Of course, Hugh was right—I should at least offer to pay. Like anyone else, my father loves free stuff. I was hesitating, in part, because he’d cut me out of his will.

“You told me you wanted to be cut out,” he’d said five years earlier when I confronted him about it.

“When?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but you did.”

There was no way on earth that this was true. In that respect my father is very much like the current president: There were a million and a half people at my inauguration. The biggest crowd ever—a million and a half!

It’s hard to even call it lying; rather, it’s a form of insistence. This is the way I need it to be, goddamn it.

He then told me I could pick something out of the house and he’d set it aside for me to inherit. I looked around at the furniture, all of it covered with papers, and at the gloomy artwork he and my mother had bought in the seventies. “There’s a guide for mixing drinks you have downstairs behind the bar,” I said. “A bawdy paperback from 1960 illustrated by a cartoonist named Vip. I wouldn’t mind having that, I suppose.”

“But you don’t even drink,” he said.

I sighed. “You know what? You’re right. It’s better you give it to Amy, or Paul. One of them might want a Pink Squirrel some night.”

Our food was delivered, and I said to Hugh, “I don’t remember ever fighting with my mom, but with me and my dad it was constant. Once, in high school, he was shouting at me for something or other—running too much bathwater, maybe—and I shouted back, ‘You are going to die alone!’ Isn’t that awful?” I pushed some shrimp and grits around my plate. “Now here he is, trying to do just that—die alone—and everyone’s giving him a hard time about it.”



When our check came, I paid. Hugh went to our gate, but there was still an hour to kill before boarding, so I took a walk from one end of the terminal to the other, then back again, passing the now shuttered Brooks Brothers, the Starbucks, the bookstore. This terminal didn’t exist when I lived in Chicago or New York. The Raleigh airport was smaller and slower back then. I’d fly home for a visit and wait at the baggage claim for half an hour before calling the house.

My father would answer—a bad sign, as it was he who was supposed to pick me up. “Did you forget I was flying in?” I’d ask. “I told you my plane was landing at six.”

“Well, it’s not six yet.”

“Dad, it’s six thirty.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m looking at the clock in the airport and at my watch, and both say six thirty.”

“Well, it’s sure as hell not six thirty here, but I’m on my way. I’m leaving the house right now.”

Twenty minutes later I’d phone again, and again he would pick up. I could hear his TV in the background. “I told you I’m on my way. Jesus!”

I’d wish then that I could afford to go to the ticket counter and buy a seat on the next plane back to where I’d come from. My father would arrive to pick me up, and I’d be gone, a speck in the sky.

“The secret to Dad’s longevity isn’t diet or exercise, or even his genes,” I’ve often said to Paul and my sisters. “He’s just late for death, the way he’s been late for everything else all his life.”

There are things I avoid talking about with my father now—politics, for instance. He’s always operated on the assumption that I don’t know anything, can’t know anything, really. The issues are as far beyond my grasp as they are for the chimps in the calendar he gave me. Sure, one might pull a lever in a voting booth, but there could be no actual thought behind it.

The fight we had following Trump’s election had been particularly ugly, and we could easily have it again every hour of every day. I don’t want to, though, don’t want what could be the last words we say to each other to be ugly. It’s why I didn’t bring up Jim Comey during our visit. Easier to put on a straw hat that once belonged to my mother and to accept with grace the framed postcards and nature calendars I dropped into an airport trash can before boarding my flight to Washington. It wasn’t where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where they ended up.