here alone with Dad,” I said, “and she managed for both of them.”
“With a lot of help from your sister,” Andy interjected, patting her hand protectively.
Deidre said, “You haven’t seen how she slips sometimes,” then paused to exhale, clearly trying to remain calm. “I want to go back to work. I talked to Carly Fazio and she said her company needs someone in human resources.”
“Who the hell is Carly Fazio?”
“From high school.”
Right: a dark haired girl at the periphery of Deirdre’s social life, that little gang of girls occupying our living room every afternoon, watching General Hospital, drinking diet soda and French braiding each other’s hair. I couldn’t summon up a face, much less where she worked, but here she was, Carly Fazio, playing her tangential role in our family drama. I’m sure Diane Jernigan knew all about her.
“What does Nana have to say?”
Deirdre averted her eyes. “We haven’t talked to her yet.”
“There’s money for this,” Andy added. “I’ve been investing Teddy’s settlement money in tech stocks—software, search engines, portals. The money these start-ups are making! It’s incredible.”
“How much did he leave behind?” I asked.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Andy said. “More or less.”
I hadn’t given a thought to my father’s estate, but as this astronomical number hovered in the air, I found myself instantly calculating my share. I lived check to check, only a few hundred bucks in savings, and I had student loans to pay, and credit card debt piling up because I rarely covered more than the monthly minimum. I’d been treading water financially since college. Even a tenth of this money would make a world of difference to me.
Andy talked at length, and proudly, about his investment strategy. Online trading was his new religion. His day job at the payroll company where he’d worked for eight years offered little room for advancement. “And the office politics,” he said, “could drive a guy berserk.” Andy was upstanding—he spent time with AJ, followed the Mets religiously, shunned hard liquor because he just didn’t like the taste—but I harbored a kernel of resentment toward him. He’d knocked up my sister at age twenty-three, before she’d figured out who she wanted to be in the world, before she and I could form an adult friendship. According to this scenario, Andy had created the Deirdre of today, with the minivan and the do-list and the membership at Big Savers, as opposed to the Deirdre who once sneaked my cigarettes, who might have followed me down the path of rebellion. Now Average Andy controlled my father’s two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar portfolio. As Deidre returned from the kitchen with three bottles of Bud Lite and took a seat, almost deferentially, at his side, I saw him for what he was: the new head of the family.
“Care to tell me what the terms of his will are?” It was terrible to hear my money hunger exposed, no matter how indirectly I’d tried to phrase the question.
Andy explained that most of the money was earmarked to take care of Nana, some of it was set aside for AJ’s education, and the rest of it went to Deirdre and me. Well, mostly to Deidre. “If you want,” he said, “I can invest your share. With the way the market’s working, I can grow it fast.”
Deidre sat quietly, but I felt her watching me. When I raised my eyebrows, telegraphing a question to her, she said, “Ten thousand dollars. That’s what he left you.”
“Well.” I took a long slug from the bottle. I don’t even like beer, much less watery shit like this, but in that moment I couldn’t drink enough of it. I wanted it to flush away the hope I’d let myself feel. “What is that, about two percent? Seems about right.”
Andy cleared his throat. “I wish there was more for you. We both do.”
“Don’t worry, Andy.”
“No, I got to say, it’s sad to me, you know?”
“Seriously. I’m surprised I got anything.”
“But you and him not getting along? As a father myself, I can tell you nothing would get in the way of being close to my son.”
“Well, talk to me the day you catch AJ sucking off his boyfriend.”
His face froze.
Deirdre yelped my name. “You are unbelievable.”
“Sorry,” I said. “But you never know.”
“Guess not,” Andy said, his voice almost hoarse. Poor guy. I could see the wheels spinning behind his eyes, his thoughts trapped helplessly by the muddy image I’d set forth. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess a guy doesn’t want that for his only son. I mean, I can’t lie to you. I don’t want that for AJ. You want your kid to not be different, not get pushed around. You want grandkids some day, and so forth. That’s natural, right?”
“Actually, I think it’s learned.” I paused to figure out how much I wanted to get into this. “With me and my father, Andy, I don’t think it was about grandkids.”
“Jamie, Dad was in denial about everything,” Deidre said, her voice nearly a wail. “Look at the lawsuit! Look at the way he treated Andy at first! It wasn’t until AJ was born that Dad could even admit we were married.”
“But with me, he never admitted—” I cut myself off and lowered my voice. “Why should everything have been so tough for him? The rest of the world knows how to change. But he never did.”
“He was scared,” Deidre said.
“Of what?”
She shrugged, gave her hair a shake. The mystery at the core of our father.
After a long pause, Andy lifted his beer and said, “He’s in a better place now.”
“He found it in his heart to leave his faggot son a little something,” I said. They both flinched, but I just raised my bottle. “Let’s drink to that.”
That night I sat cross-legged on the bed, the San Francisco shoebox open in front of me. Inside was a stash of souvenirs: a collection of bar coasters advertising long-forgotten brands of beer, a map of the city, a tourist guidebook, a San Francisco Examiner announcing John F. Kennedy’s election. I flipped quickly through a small notebook filled with crude pencil sketches—eucalyptus trees, Victorian architecture, the Golden Gate Bridge—and scrawled handwriting, little fragments of a diary. I read one at random. It described an afternoon spent riding around with someone named Don Drebinski: Seems like Don knows every madman and pants-wearing chick in Frisco, and he’s introducing me to all of them. I skimmed a handful of letters from Aunt Katie, chatty with news of her engagement to Angelo, then sat transfixed over a single page written to my father from a woman named Ray Gladwell—a married woman with whom he, and evidently a couple of other guys, too, had been having an affair. I believe in the freedom of the individual, she asserted, spelling out her reasons for dumping him.
My father had gone to California to follow his beatnik dream, and remarkably, he seemed to have succeeded. Nothing in this box indicated the disdain with which he’d always spoken of his time there. After just thirty minutes I was light-headed with astonishment. This was indeed material.
And there was more. Buried beneath an old, rippled paperback edition of On the Road was a photo, an actor’s head shot, the carefully lit and formally composed image of a beautiful man’s face. Beautiful in a sparkling, pretty-boy style—dark, inviting eyes, thick lashes, glossy hair, full lips in a full smile—like Frankie Avalon or Sal Mineo, an ethnic pretty boy, softened at the edges to make teenage hearts race. The name DEAN FOSTER was imprinted at the bottom. A message was scrawled on the photo in black ink:
Rusty—
You can say you knew me when
—Danny, Los Angeles, 1961
To dip into the vernacular of Los