my life. “Will you promise me you’ll look?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean it, Jamie. We need it in the morning, before the funeral mass.”
“I’ll look, I’ll look.”
I did look. I went back upstairs into his bedroom, which still smelled medicinal, the antiseptic fumes a kind of ghostly presence, a reminder of the failure to hold back death. I moved furniture, and pushed aside clothes on hangers, and got on my hands and knees to root through my father’s closet. I found a jar filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. A few boxes of receipts that went back years. Some old hats. A years-old, dusty plaque from his employer—an office furniture company for which he spent the last twenty years writing marketing brochures, catalog copy and annual reports—commending him for perfect attendance. No sick days for Teddy Garner.
Then, buried deep on a shelf, I found a short stack of Penthouse magazines, five or six in all, dated from the 1980s. I glanced over my shoulder, worried that Nana might be standing in the doorway, catching me with this pornographic contraband. I tucked them under my shirt and tiptoed back to my tiny bedroom. Penthouse had been my porn of choice as a teenager because the “Forum” section, made up of supposedly true stories from readers, was good for at least one bisexual story per issue—my first exposure to man-on-man sex. Sure enough, I opened one of my father’s and immediately found a “letter” from a big-breasted woman recounting the day the pool guy seduced both her and her home-early-from-work husband. The money shot: The stud fucks her husband as he’s ramming his wife. Everyone orgasms together. Crude, but very sexy. Did my father, so revolted by gay sex, actually read this story? He must have, at least once. But it was nearly impossible to imagine: Teddy, in his bedroom, the very room where he told me to keep my private life private, letting his own private thoughts unfold, taboo story in one hand, family jewels in the other.
The next morning I woke and shaved my face clean, watching the brown and orange bristles, my scruffy soul patch, slide down the drain. In the mirror, to my own eyes, I looked not so much like a new man as an impostor, trying to pass myself off as the son I was supposed to be. The day was as glacial as any since I’d been back, and the newly shorn spot under my lip seemed to attract the cold the way an open window draws in a draft. All day long, at every step along the ritual path from funeral parlor to church to cemetery, the damp air was an icy kiss pressed to my face, a mark only I knew was there.
I served as a pallbearer, feeling the tremendous weight of the coffin in every muscle as I joined my cousins lifting the heavy box into the hearse, working hard to keep my balance on the ice-streaked sidewalk. No eulogy was delivered at St. Bart’s, but the priest gave a homily in which my father was referred to as a fighter, a family man, and a son of a bitch. I mean, a son of God. “Son of a bitch” was what I wrote in my journal that night, scribbling furiously, without remorse, trying to fill up the pit in my guts, a throbbing hollow that had grown since I’d gotten here and that now threatened to subsume me.
I never did find his wedding ring. He was buried without it.
In the days after the guests were long gone, the last of Nana’s roast eaten and the last can of carbonated soda guzzled, the folding chairs stowed and the ashtrays emptied, Deirdre kept buzzing with projects. “Take a break,” I urged, but she insisted she was better off.
“Know your strengths and work with them,” she told me. “That’s my motto.”
“You’re too young to have a motto,” I said.
“Jamie, we’re not kids anymore. I have a child of my own.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
I hadn’t spent much time with AJ, so one morning I drove to Deirdre’s house with the plan to take him to kindergarten. I found him alone in the kitchen. The microwave was beeping four high-pitched signals, and AJ was climbing up on a chair to retrieve some kind of plastic-encased breakfast food. “I have to split it open and let the steam out,” he explained to me. “I can wait three minutes for it to cool down.”
Three minutes. The kind of precise instruction Deirdre had no doubt been giving him all his life.
“So, where’s your mom?”
“Having her morning time.”
“What’s that?”
“In the morning she closes her door and I don’t bother her for five minutes.”
Five minutes went by, then six, then seven. AJ kept count. I went upstairs to her bedroom to let her know I was here. From behind the door, I heard her crying and talking to herself, though I couldn’t decipher the words. I imagined her crying over that never-found wedding ring, but of course it was more than that. Mourning in the morning.
Quietly, I retreated to the top of the stairs, then called out, “I stopped by to take AJ to school.”
She yelled out a strangled, “Oh, hi. Okay, just a minute.”
I microwaved myself a bowl of instant oatmeal—the cinnamon scent brought me right back to long-ago winter mornings in Greenlawn. AJ was pouring himself orange juice from a container, the glug-glug of it sending splashes all over the table.
“Here, let me show you a trick,” I said. I grabbed a knife, poked an air slit in the top, then poured a glug-free stream into my glass. “Ta-da!” I swept my arm wide, clumsily backhanding my oatmeal, which went flying to the floor.
The crash echoed. My eyes met AJ’s worried stare. “So you see, AJ, that’s how you keep from spilling orange juice. You throw your oatmeal on the floor!”
He melted into giggles. We cleaned up the mess together, making a promise not to tell Deirdre.
After dropping him off, I returned to find Deidre leaning over her clipboard, snapping her pen. The radio was on, and she was singing along to a pop song I’d never heard. She’d emerged from her crying jag looking as pulled-together as ever.
“You think it’s okay for me to take Dad’s car to the city?” I asked.
“When?”
“Today. I figured I’d look up some old friends.”
“Well, actually—” She presented me with the clipboard. “Here’s your do-list.”
“Not to do? Just do?”
“Yes, as in will be done,” she said firmly.
Beneath my name, she’d written a list: “Attic. Garage. Dad’s closet.” I felt myself wilting. “I need to get out of here, Dee. I’m going stir-crazy.”
“Come on, Jamie. There’s so much.”
“Not today. I’m not in the right headspace.”
“Well, excuse me, but you’re going back to California in a couple days, and then what? We have to sell Dad’s house. If you want anything at all, you better call it, or it’s going to wind up in the dump.”
I looked at the list again. I considered mentioning the porn in the bedroom, but I held back; let it be a secret between him and me. “I don’t have anything in the attic anymore. I cleared out all my stuff when I left for San Francisco. And I don’t want any furniture. I live in a tiny one-bedroom. Plus, I don’t have money to ship anything.”
“Fine. I’ll just throw everything away. Our whole family history. What do you care, anyway?” Her voice cracked and dropped off.
“Okay, okay.” I lowered my head into my hands, willing myself to do the right thing. “I can go to New York another time. No biggie. Really.”
“It would be a huge help,” she said. “So, you’ll start with the attic?”
“Sure. Just tell me one thing: Who died and left you in charge?”
She froze, and then, catching my smile, shook her head. “You know, you’re an asshole.”
“It’s