Memorial(16)

My father’s eyes.

Who’re you, he says.

Stop it, I say.

My father squints a little deeper.

I think, just for a blip, that this could be worse than I’d thought.

Kidding, he says, opening the door.

Learn to take a motherfucking joke, he says.



* * *





The house is a sty. It’s almost unbelievable. My father’s got takeout cartons on the carpet, and the counters give off a musk. The windows are dewy from the inside, my father’s sweatpants are stained, and I have to wonder if things were this way when we lived together or if Mike’s standards just rose my own.

My father sits on the couch. An open beer stands between us. He eyes me, and then the beer, and then the ceiling above.

Go ahead, I say. I’m not the cops.

Might as well be, says my father. Showing up at the crack of dawn. Out of the blue. You even take your meds yet?

Don’t worry about me, I say. Ma says you’re not doing well.

You’re right here. You tell me how I’m doing.

She says you’re not taking her calls. She’s worried.

Then tell her to come out here her damn self.

When my father gets like this, there’s no talking to him. No point. So I pick up the burger wrappers around the couch, which gets me looking for a bag to put them in. After a while, I’ve made my way through the foyer. Then the kitchen. I leave his bedroom alone, but my old room’s open beside it.

I look inside, and it’s the one place that hasn’t been trashed. The posters haven’t been touched, Bowie and Hendrix and Ultraman Tiga. Vinyl records lay scattered on the desk. Below them, in the desk drawers, there’s still probably some faded, printed-out porn.

When I’m back downstairs, my father’s dozing. I reach for his beer, but he grabs at it before I do.

He drinks, looking me in the eyes.



* * *




? ? ?

I can count the number of times my parents touched each other in front of me.

Once, after my father’s promotion at the station. A hug.

Once again, after his mother died, before a two-day drive to Columbia for the funeral.

And then again, after my mother’s mother died, during a five-hour drive to Dallas.

A fourth time, the night Lydia told them she was done with their shit.

And once again, before our lunch at the deli, after our last big argument. I watched them from the house’s driveway, through the window. I’d flipped a dresser on my way out, knocked over a generation’s worth of photographs. When my father put his hand on my mother’s back in the dining room, it happened briefly, instinctively, I think. And then my father took his palm back, squinting through the glass at me, and neither of my parents said shit about it.



* * *




? ? ?

When I’m finished, the house isn’t clean, but it is cleaner. My father tinkers with his shirtsleeves. He frowns at my fifth bag of trash.

Nobody asked you to do that, he says.

But here I am, I say.

You ever think that’s the problem? says my father. Niggas voluntarily doing things I’m not asking them to do?

That’s my cue. I grab my shoes by the door.

Bye, Dad, I say. Call Mom. She’s worried.



* * *





And then I’m back outside.

And I’m maybe, what, three steps from Mike’s car when I hear the door open behind me.

My father stands there, watching me. I lean on the car’s window.

When do you think you’re coming back, he asks.

You want me to come back? I say.

Can’t answer a question with a question, says my father, and I look at him, and he really does look lonely.

For a while, this was a man whose guffaw commanded entire newsrooms. But now, here he is. Or was. I hadn’t even asked him when he’d last subbed for a class. I hadn’t asked how he was on money. Not that I could’ve helped him.

Soon, I say.

Approximate, says my father.

I don’t know, I say. In a few days. Next weekend.

Hunh, he says, you still working with those bad kids?

I’m still working with those bad kids.

I figured.

Promise me, says my father, playing with his hands.

Whatever. Fine. I promise.

I’ll believe it when I see you.

Then I’ll see you, I say, stepping in the car, turning the ignition, gone.



* * *




? ? ?

Lydia figures our household’s lack of intimacy is why I have trouble connecting. She told me that, in those exact words, when we were packing up her last apartment. She was moving, again, to another spot a few blocks up the road. Her place was all portraits of friends, pictures of the places she’d been.

How the fuck would you know what’s wrong with me, I said.

Baby brother Benson, said Lydia, I literally watched you take your first steps. Of course I’d know.

We were smoking something entirely too strong on the stairs of her new place, this walk-up behind a gaggle of bars in Montrose. I’d asked Lydia if she was worried about her new neighbors, and what they’d think of her, and she made the tiniest shrug.

Who gives a fuck what they think, she said. I pay rent every month.