Jonah pulled out his chair and plopped down. He took a drink of milk, leaving a white mustache. “Do you think Ronnie’s coming home soon?”
“I hope so.”
Jonah wiped his lip with the back of his hand. “Sometimes she stays out pretty late.”
“I know.”
“Is the police officer going to bring her back home again?”
Steve glanced out the window; dusk was coming, and the water was turning opaque. He wondered where she was and what she was doing.
“No,” he said. “Not tonight.”
After their walk along the beach, Jonah took a shower before crawling into bed. Steve pulled up the covers and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thanks for the great day,” Steve whispered.
“You’re welcome.”
“Good night, Jonah. I love you.”
“Me, too, Dad.”
Steve rose and started for the door.
“Hey, Dad?”
Steve turned. “Yes?”
“Did your dad ever take you out to look for spider crabs?”
“No,” Steve said.
“Why not? That was awesome.”
“He wasn’t that kind of father.”
“What kind was he?”
Steve considered the question. “He was complicated,” he finally said.
At the piano, Steve recalled the afternoon six years earlier when he took his father’s hand for the first time in his life. He had told his father that he knew he’d done the best he could in raising him, that he didn’t blame his father for anything, and that most of all, he loved him.
His father turned toward him. His eyes were focused, and despite the high doses of morph**e that he’d been taking, his mind was clear. He stared at Steve for a long time before pulling his hand away.
“You sound like a woman when you talk like that,” he said.
They were in a semiprivate room on the fourth floor of the hospital. His father had been there for three days. IV tubes snaked out of his arms, and he hadn’t eaten solid food in more than a month. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was translucent. Up close, Steve thought his father’s breath smelled of decay, another sign the cancer was announcing its victory.
Steve turned toward the window. Outside, he could see nothing but blue skies, a bright, unyielding bubble surrounding the room. No birds, no clouds, no visible trees. Behind him, he could hear the steady beep of the heart monitor. It sounded strong and steady, with regular rhythm, making it seem that his father would live another twenty years. But it wasn’t his heart that was killing him.
“How is he?” Kim asked later that night when they were talking on the phone.
“Not good,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer he has, but…”
He trailed off. He could imagine Kim on the other end, standing near the stove, stirring pasta or dicing tomatoes, the phone cocked between her ear and shoulder. She’d never been able to sit still when talking on the phone.
“Did anyone else come by?”
“No,” he answered. What he didn’t tell her was that according to the nurses, no one else had visited at all.
“Were you able to talk to him?” she asked.
“Yes, but not for long. He was drifting in and out most of the day.”
“Did you say what I told you to say?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What did he say?” she asked. “Did he say he loved you, too?”
Steve knew the answer she wanted. He was standing in his father’s home, inspecting the photos on the mantel: the family after Steve was baptized, a wedding photo of Kim and Steve, Ronnie and Jonah as toddlers. The frames were dusty, untouched in years. He knew that it had been his mother who put them there, and as he stared at them, he wondered what his father thought as he looked at them, or if he even saw them at all, or if he even realized they were there.
“Yes,” he finally said. “He told me he loved me.”
“I’m glad,” she said. Her tone was relieved and satisfied, as though his answer had affirmed something to her about the world. “I know how important that was to you.”
Steve grew up in a white ranch-style house, in a neighborhood of white ranch-style houses on the intracoastal side of the island. It was small, with two bedrooms, a single bathroom, and a separate garage that housed his father’s tools and smelled permanently of sawdust. The backyard, shaded by a gnarled live oak that held its leaves year-round, didn’t get enough sun, so his mother planted the vegetable garden in the front. She grew tomatoes and onions, turnips and beans, cabbage and corn, and in the summers, it was impossible to see the road that fronted the house from the living room. Sometimes Steve would overhear the neighbors grumbling in hushed voices, complaining about declining property values, but the garden was replanted every spring, and no one ever said a word directly to his father. They knew, as well as he did, that it wouldn’t have done them any good. Besides, they liked his wife, and they all knew they would need his services one day.
His father was a trim carpenter by trade, but he had a gift for fixing anything. Over the years, Steve had seen him repair radios, televisions, auto and lawn mower engines, leaking pipes, dangling gutters, broken windows, and once, even the hydraulic presses of a small tool-manufacturing plant near the state line. He’d never attended high school, but he had an innate understanding of mechanics and building concepts. At night, when the phone rang, his father always answered, since it was usually for him. Most of the time, he said very little, listening as one emergency or another was described, and then Steve would watch him carefully jot the address on pieces of scratch paper torn from old newspapers. After hanging up, his father would venture to the garage, fill his toolbox, and head out, usually without mentioning where he was going or when he would be back home. In the morning, the check would be tucked neatly beneath the statue of Robert E. Lee that his father had carved from a piece of driftwood, and his mother would rub his back and promise to deposit it at the bank as his father ate his breakfast. It was the only regular affection he noticed between them. They didn’t argue and avoided conflict as a rule. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company when they were together, and once, he’d caught them holding hands while watching TV; but in the eighteen years Steve had lived at home, he never saw his parents kiss.
If his father had one passion in life, it was poker. On the nights the phone didn’t ring, his father went to one of the lodges to play. He was a member of those lodges, not for the camaraderie, but for the games. There, he would sit at the table with other Freemasons or Elks or Shriners or veterans, playing Texas hold ’em for hours. The game transfixed him; he loved computing the probabilities of drawing an outside straight or deciding whether to bluff when all he held was a pair of sixes. When he talked about the game, he described it as a science, as if the luck of the draw had nothing to do with winning. “The secret is to know how to lie,” he used to say, “and to know when someone’s lying to you.” His father, Steve eventually decided, must have known how to lie. In his fifties, with his hands nearly crippled from over thirty years of carpentry, his father stopped installing crown molding and door frames in the custom oceanfront homes that had begun to spring up on the island; he also began to leave the phone unanswered in the evenings. Somehow, he continued to pay his bills, and by the end of his life, he had more than enough in his accounts to pay for the medical care his insurance didn’t cover.
He never played poker on Saturday or Sunday. Saturdays were reserved for chores around the house, and while the garden in the front yard may have bothered the neighbors, the interior was a showpiece. Over the years, his father added crown molding and wainscoting; he carved the fireplace corbels from two blocks of maple. He built the cabinets in the kitchen and installed wood floors that were as flat and sure as a billiard table. He remodeled the bathroom, then remodeled it again eight years later. Every Saturday evening, he put on a jacket and tie and took his wife to dinner. Sundays, he reserved for himself. After church, he would tinker in his workshop, while his wife baked pies or canned vegetables in the kitchen.
On Monday, the routine started all over again.
His father never taught him to play the game. Steve was smart enough to learn the basics on his own, and he liked to think he was keen enough to spot someone bluffing. He played a few times with fellow students in college and found out he was simply average, no better or worse than any of the others. After he graduated and moved to New York, he’d occasionally come down to visit his parents. The first time, he hadn’t seen them in two years, and when he walked through the door, his mom hugged him fiercely and kissed him on the cheek. His father shook his hand and said, “Your mom’s missed you.” Apple pie and coffee were served, and after they finished eating, his dad stood, reaching for his jacket and car keys. It was a Tuesday; that meant he was going to the Elks lodge. The game ended at ten and he would be home fifteen minutes later.
“No… no go tonight,” his mom urged, her European accent as heavy as ever. “Steve just got home.”
He remembered thinking that it was the only time he’d ever heard his mom ask his father not to go to the lodge, but if he was surprised, his father didn’t show it. He paused at the doorway, and when he turned around, his face was unreadable.
“Or take him with you,” she urged.
He draped his jacket over his arm. “Do you want to go?”
“Sure.” Steve drummed his fingers on the table. “Why not? That sounds like fun.”
After a moment, his father’s mouth twitched, exhibiting the tiniest and briefest of smiles. Had they been at the poker table, Steve doubted he would have shown even that much.
“You’re lying,” he said.
His mom passed away suddenly a few years after that encounter when an artery burst in her brain, and in the hospital, Steve was thinking of her sturdy kindness when his father woke with a low wheeze. He rolled his head and spotted Steve in the corner. At that angle, with shadows playing across the sharp angles of his face, he gave the impression of being a skeleton.
“You’re still here.”
Steve set aside the score and scooted the chair closer. “Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because you’re in the hospital.”
“I’m in the hospital because I’m dying. And I’d be dying whether you were here or not. You should go home. You have a wife and kids. There’s nothing you can do for me here.”
“I want to be here,” Steve said. “You’re my father. Why? Don’t you want me here?”
“Maybe I don’t want you to see me die.”
“I’ll leave if you want.”
His father made a noise akin to a snort. “See, that’s your problem. You want me to make the decision for you. That’s always been your problem.”
“Maybe I just want to spend time with you.”
“You want to? Or did your wife want you to?”
“Does it matter?”
His dad tried to smile, but it came out like a grimace. “I don’t know. Does it?”
From his spot at the piano, Steve heard an approaching car. The headlights flashed through the window and raced across the walls, and for an instant he thought that Ronnie might have gotten a ride home. But just as quickly the light shrank to nothing, and Ronnie still wasn’t here.
It was after midnight. He wondered whether he should try to find her.
Some years ago, before Ronnie had stopped talking to him, he and Kim had gone to see a marriage counselor whose office was located near Gramercy Park, in a renovated building. Steve remembered sitting beside Kim on a couch and facing a thin, angular woman in her thirties who wore gray slacks and liked to press her fingertips together. When she did, Steve noticed she didn’t wear a wedding band.
Steve was uncomfortable; the counseling had been Kim’s idea, and she’d already gone alone. This was their first joint session, and by way of introduction, she told the counselor that Steve kept his feelings bottled up inside but that it wasn’t his fault. Neither of his parents had been expressive people, she said. Nor had he grown up in a family that discussed their problems. He sought out music as an escape, she went on to say, and it was only through the piano that he learned to feel anything at all.
“Is that true?” the counselor asked.
“My parents were good people,” he answered.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
The counselor sighed. “Okay, how about this? We all know what happened and why you’re here. I think what Kim wants is for you to tell her how it made you feel.”
Steve considered the question. He wanted to say that all this talk of feelings was irrelevant. That emotions come and go and can’t be controlled, so there’s no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone.
But he didn’t say this. Instead, he threaded his fingers together. “You want to know how it made me feel.”
“Yes. But don’t tell me.” She gestured to his wife. “Tell Kim.”
He faced his wife, sensing her anticipation.
“I felt…”
He was in an office with his wife and a stranger, engaged in the type of conversation he could never have imagined growing up. It was a few minutes past ten o’clock in the morning, and he’d been back in New York for only a few days. His tour had taken him to twenty-some different cities, while Kim worked as a paralegal at a Wall Street law firm.
“I felt…,” he said again.
When the clock struck one a.m., Steve went outside to stand on the back porch. The blackness of the night had given way to the purple light of the moon, making it possible to see up and down the beach. He hadn’t seen her in sixteen hours and was concerned, if not quite worried. He trusted she was smart and careful enough to take care of herself.