call, had he literally forgotten the previous argument? Was he, in general, beginning to forget? It was only six or eight months later that Deirdre first started reporting Dad’s strange behavior—how he’d begun repeating himself, misplacing things, losing his sense of direction and time.
Her reports continued, always worsening, and Deirdre began urging me to come home. She had always been like our mother in her willingness to compromise for him, to build a game plan around his inflexibility. “You’re his son,” she would inevitably say. But I couldn’t come home. I wouldn’t. I had stopped caring, had stopped making myself crazy because my father disapproved of me, and this stopping had unburdened me. Case closed.
Long before my father died, I’d made peace—not with him, but with our estrangement.
And yet.
2
Nana woke me the next morning with a hand on my shoulder, an urgent whisper in my ear. “Up, Jimmy, up!”
The sky was still dim outside the window. Nana had a sympathetic, silvery glow about her. “Mass is at eight. You’ll take me, then?”
“What time is it?”
“Seven. But the driveway’s covered in snow. It could use a good shovel.”
“Okay,” I groaned. “Will you make me coffee?”
“Of course,” she said. “A fair trade.”
Maybe not so fair—Nana’s coffee was percolator-burnt, the charcoal taste lingering on my tongue. She really was slipping; I couldn’t remember Nana cooking anything that wasn’t just right. The night before, she’d microwaved a lasagna and a freezer-pack of vegetables, all of it bland, and during the meal she’d hardly spoken. When Andy tried to draw her into the conversation by asking about her girlhood in Ireland, she responded tersely, with a gaze in my direction, “We didn’t have much, but we took care of each other.”
She was born Margaret Carey and had come to the United States as the bride of John Garner, a boy from a neighboring West Irish farm; they’d always been Nana and Papa to me. They raised my dad and his sister, my aunt Katie, in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, back then still an immigrant ghetto on Manhattan’s West Side. A few years after Papa died, Nana took a lump sum from her landlord, who was condo-converting the building, and moved to a nondescript garden apartment in Hackensack to be near her children. Three years ago, she moved again, to Greenlawn, taking charge of my father’s care. The side-by-side bedrooms that were once Deirdre’s and mine were transformed for her into a floral-print-covered sleeping area and a tchotchke-filled TV room. She’d always seemed strong enough to survive anything—her husband had died, then my mother, then Uncle Angelo, who was Aunt Katie’s husband—but perhaps this, the death of her only son, Edward, was just one blow too many.
She was already dressed for church, sitting in the kitchen, once again glued to the TV, watching one of those courtroom entertainment shows. A female judge narrowed a hawkish brow and wagged her finger. “Sir, sir, just a minute, sir. This is my court. You speak when I tell you to.”
Out the window, day was breaking, revealing the shocking brilliance of icy tree branches and white rooftops. “I haven’t woken up to snow since forever,” I said. “I forgot how beautiful it is.”
“The roads will be slippery,” she said. “Your father keeps the shovel in the garage.”
Father had a dull magnetic force to it, drawing her gaze from the TV and mine from the window. Between us vibrated some combination of bond and rift; the thing that tied us to each other was also the place where we were worlds apart. In the bitter gloom on Nana’s face I glimpsed her years as Dad’s caretaker—feeding and washing and changing him like he was an infant again. I was reminded of gay guys I’d seen survive their lovers or their best friends; death offered no real relief, no catharsis, just the cold reality of inevitable demise. Nana bore the same kind of battle fatigue.
I felt my face getting hot. “This must be hard for you,” I offered.
Something sharp flickered across her face, but all she said was, “He’s no longer suffering, thank God.”
Years ago, I had talked to Nana about the tension between my father and me, about the reasons behind it, about who I was. We were at her apartment in Hackensack, and she’d cooked me lunch and made a rhubarb pie for dessert. I remember the queasiness I felt as I ate, preparing to break a silence, unsure of what to expect. When the moment came, she listened without interrupting, and then told me, “You’ll always be my grandson.” At the time this had seemed like a great generosity, but when I asked her to talk to Dad on my behalf, she replied, “When Edward had words with his father, I kept out of it. I’ll stay out of this one, too.” I had tried not to hold this against her. She was old, even Old World; I could hardly expect her to wave my flags. But why wouldn’t she cut me any slack now? Was it so hard for her to understand my reasons for staying away? Was I really so unforgivable?
Outside, the air was so crisp my cheeks felt slapped. I used a shovel that had been in our family for as long as I could remember, its handle worn smooth, its blade gouged in two places. Each push left behind snaky parallel trails of powder on the black driveway, a sight that had the force of déjà vu: the teenage me clearing this same path with this same faulty shovel, my father examining the work and scolding me for not scooping it all up: Everything you leave behind will be ice by tonight.
I drove Nana to St. Bartholomew’s in Dad’s boxy Chrysler K-Car. Before she got out, she asked, “Will you come to mass, then?”
“I don’t go to church, Nana.”
“This is a time for prayer.”
“Say one for me while you’re at it.”
“Well, then,” she sighed, lifting herself from the car.
I drove through the slushy streets of Greenlawn, to the Athenaeum, the Greek diner where I’d spent a lot of time as a teenager. I took a seat at the counter, read the New York Times and slowly came to life over bottomless cups of strong coffee and single-serving boxes of cornflakes. Amid the red vinyl booths and faux-marble tabletops, a memory ignited from fifteen years earlier: sitting here, across from Eric Sanchez, deliberately pressing our knees together under the table, while around us our friends complained about how life majorly sucked, how totally stupid teachers and parents were, how so fucking boring it all was. Eric and I passed a cigarette back and forth, his dark bangs rising upward with the force of each exhale, our eyes stealing time with one another’s, sending wordless messages.
I returned to find Nana already waiting for me on the sidewalk, complaining about the cold. She presented me with a list of places she needed to go: a rotation of doctors, then the pharmacy, then Coiffures by Diane, where she had a standing appointment with Diane Jernigan, the older sister of a girl I went to high school with. Nana was very proud about her hair, still thick and full, and though she rarely left the house for anyone to see it, she kept it dyed a deep brown, like stout, like wet earth. It took years off her looks.
“Jimmy Garner!” Diane exclaimed when she saw me. Through Nana, Diane already knew about my father, and her sympathy commingled with reports of other dead parents, dead siblings, dead spouses, the accumulated losses of our high school peers as we left our youth behind. While Diane went to work on Nana, I listened to updates on people I hadn’t thought about in years, their marriages and divorces, the births of children, descriptions of the houses they’d bought. A remarkable number of my former classmates still lived in the area, their lives still knowable, without the mystery of departure. I thought of Deirdre among them, caught in this grind, an item of gossip for the Dianes of the world.
“Do you know what happened to Eric Sanchez?” I asked.
Diane paused above Nana’s dye-slick head. “Barbara’s brother?” she asked. “The one who went into the Navy?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”
“I think he’s married and living in Maryland or something.”