The Best of Me(96)

“Since when is the government coming for anyone’s guns in this country?” I asked. “I mean, honestly, can’t any of us enter a Walmart right now and walk out with a Sidewinder missile?”

It was a nice moment, all of us on the same page. Then my father ruined it by asking when I’d last had a physical.

“Just recently,” I said.

“Recently, like when?”

“1987,” I told him, adding, after he moaned, “You do know this is the fourth time today you’ve asked me about this, right? I mean, you’re not just being ninety-one, are you?”

“No,” he said. “I know what I’m saying.”

“Well, can you please stop saying it?”

“I will when you get a physical.”

“Is this really how you want to be remembered?” I asked. “As a nagger…with hammertoes?”

“I’m just showing my concern,” he said. “Can’t you see that I’m doing this for your own good? Jesus, son, I want you to have a long, healthy life! I love you. Is that a crime?”



The Sea Section came completely furnished, and the first thing we did after getting the keys was to load up all the televisions and donate them to a thrift shop. It’s nice at night to work puzzles or play board games or just hang out, maybe listening to music. The only one this is difficult for is my father. Back in Raleigh, he has two or three TVs going at the same time, all tuned to the same conservative cable station, filling his falling-down house with outrage. The one reprieve is his daily visit to the gym, where he takes part in a spinning class. Amy and I like to joke that his stationary bike has a front wheel as tall as a man and a rear one no bigger than a pie tin—that it’s a penny-farthing, the kind people rode in the 1880s. On its handlebars we imagine a trumpet horn with a big rubber bulb on one end.

Being at the beach is a drag for our father. To his credit, though, he never complains about it, just as he never mentions the dozens of aches and pains a person his age must surely be burdened by. “I’m fine just hanging out,” he says. “Being together, that’s all I need.” He no longer swims or golfs or fishes off the pier. We banned his right-wing radio shows, so all that’s left is to shuffle from one side of the house to the other, sometimes barefoot and sometimes wearing leather slippers the color of a new baseball mitt.

“Those are beautiful,” I said the first time I noticed them. “Where did they come from?”

He looked down at his feet and cleared his throat. “A catalog. They arrived back in the early eighties, but I only just recently started wearing them.”

“If anything should ever…happen to you, do you think that maybe I could have them?” I asked.

“What would ever happen to me?”

In the ocean that afternoon, I watched my brother play with his daughter. The waves were high, and as Madelyn hung laughing off Paul’s shoulders, I thought of how we used to do the same with our own father. It was the only time any of us ever touched him. Perhaps for that reason I can still recall the feel of his skin, slick with suntan oil and much softer than I had imagined it. Our mother couldn’t keep our hands off her. If we’d had ink on our fingers, at the end of an average day she’d have been black, the way we mauled and poked and petted her. With him, though, we never dared get too close. Even in the ocean, there’d come a moment when, without warning, he’d suddenly reach his limit and shake us off, growling, “God almighty, will you just leave me alone?”

He was so much heavier back then, always determined to lose thirty pounds. Half a century later he’d do well to gain thirty pounds. Paul embraced him after our sister Tiffany died and reported that it was like hugging a coatrack. “What I do,” he says every night while Hugh puts dinner together, “is take a chicken breast, broil it with a little EVOO, and serve it with some lentils—fantastic!” Though my father talks big, we suspect the bulk of his meals come from whatever they’re offering as free samples at his neighborhood Whole Foods, the one we give him gift cards for. How else to explain how he puts it away while we’re all together, eating as if in preparation for a fast?

“Outstanding,” he says between bites, the muscles of his jaws twitching beneath his spotted skin. “My compliments to the chef!”

One night, I looked over and saw that he was wearing a Cherokee headdress someone had brought to the house for Thanksgiving. Paul had put it on him and, rather than shake it off the way he would have a few years earlier, he accepted it—owned it, really. Just before dessert was served, Amy and I noticed that he was crying. He looked like the Indian from that old “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign. One single tear running down his cheek. He never blubbered or called attention to himself, so we never asked what the problem was, or if there even was a problem. “Maybe he was happy that we were all together,” Lisa said when we told her about it. Gretchen guessed that he was thinking about our mother, or Tiffany, while Paul wondered if it wasn’t an allergic reaction to feathers.

It’s not that our father waited till this late in the game to win our hearts. It’s that he’s succeeding.

“But he didn’t used to be this nice and agreeable,” I complained to Hugh.

“Well, he is now,” he said. “Why can’t you let people change?”