A Boy Needs his Father...

GABRIEL

Once my mom tried to leave my father. She packed up the car while dad was passed out somewhere and the moment I got off the bus she told me to get into the car and we drove off. I was 12. Matty was three and wouldn't stop talking and asking questions and Mom only ignored him and it drove me crazy. Even as it was happening, I knew we'd go back. Even as it was happening, I was resenting her. Because we would all have to go back. She could never really leave him.

I had a cracked rib and it hurt like hell and that was why we were going. Dad hadn't done it on purpose; that man drunk in the house was like a gorilla. He didn't really mean to make a mess, but he always did. I had recently started thinking of ways to minimize the severity of the bruises, the breaks in my mind. It was actually easier for me to get over it, to get to sleep when I thought of things this way; that dad wasn't really violent, he was just careless. He was just clumsy. I considered myself to be pretty damn mature thinking this way.

Mom looked at me sideways a lot as we drove. I could tell she felt good about herself doing this: she felt brave. She felt free, like, yes, she could make this decision on her own. She could be a mother bear.

I opened up my grandfather's copy of Capital Punishment and looked at the page with the illustration of a person being dissected alive. I wondered why they stopped administering punishments like that. If you had asked me then, I would have said that I understood why the world was going to shit. I would have been completely sure. If anything, people were doing even more horrible things to each other than they were five hundred years ago, and the punishments were less severe? More humane? Please.

Mom told me to put that book away. She cringed, said she couldn't believe I was reading something like that.

"I'm going to have to talk to your grandfather," she said.

We made it all the way to Roanoke Rapids before it got too late and stayed in a Hampton Inn. I was awake and reading the whole drive even though Mom tried all through South Carolina to get me into conversation, asking me about every damn thing she could except for Dad. She would do anything to avoid a fight. Mom drew the curtains like we were on the run from the mob and it made me laugh out loud, the obvious fear in the action, because I was picturing dad waking up on the floor. I was imagining him getting up with his head splitting open and finding no one around to get him his morning Bloody Mary besides his employees. I laughed at the thought that she could ever be afraid of him, the bumbling fool. I thought of my father like that quite a bit. I still do sometimes, the rare occasions he crosses my mind.

Matty slept the whole way to the motel, then kept sleeping as mom unpacked, actually hanging up our clothes in the closet, folding our jeans and putting them in the dresser under the TV. Like we were staying. Like this was our new home. She made coffee from the package and used the little machine that came with the room and drank and drank and made more and stared at the TV with all the lights off. I was under the covers with Capital Punishment and a flashlight but I could hear Judge Judy, Judge this and that, and all the other shows celebrating the misery of other peoples' lives. It made her feel better. For a while I was just pretending to read, my eyes buzzing like insects in their sockets and my brain couldn't take any more of those little illustrations, those lithographs from the seventeenth century that still remind me of cruel middle school distractions in ballpoint pen. Judge Judy made me feel better too, though I wouldn't concede that to my mother.

She used to say, "a boy needs his father. You just do."

I fell asleep I don't know when, having at some point actually but my book aside and marking my page with a fast-food receipt I found on the floor of the car. As I woke up and looked at the book I realized that what woke me up was a burst of TV audience laughter. Mom was watching a show where two men were talking over a fence, a set that was supposed to be outside but clearly wasn't. She wasn't laughing at the funny parts, it was like she couldn't even hear them. She sat in the upholstered chair near the door, her hand on the receiver of the hotel phone, her eyes huge and wet in the TV light. She was smoking a cigarette and next to her sat an ashtray stuffed with butts. The curtains were opened partway and the window was cracked, the cool air outside dragging the smoke out from the end of the cigarette like thread from a spool.

Mom looked at me, then back at the TV.

"What time is it?" I asked her. I really didn't want anything else from her.

"Almost three," she said.

Her eyes were glassy, unblinking one minute, then squishing shut, oozing out tears the next and it was like she had been saving up her weeping for this moment so that I had to share in it.

"I did this for you," she said, "you know that, right? You believe me?"

"Yeah, I believe you," I said to her. But I didn't say anything else because I didn't want to turn this into a conversation. So I rolled back over and as soon as I did this she started crying and I could hear it and I knew I was meant to hear it. It would only get louder if I ignored it.

"I just miss him," she finally said, "I miss him so much."

"I know, Mom," I said, my voice muffled by the pillow, by my own indifference, "my ribs really miss him too."

At the Soup Kitchen

GABRIEL

I get out of the house like it's on fire and start driving. I smoke with the window rolled down and I know it's a rental and I was told explicitly by the woman behind the desk "obviously, there will be a fee assessed," as if she knew by the sight or smell of me that I needed to be told. I will probably have to pay some exorbitant tack-on fee as a penalty. I don't really care. I cannot simply smile, shake hands and pretend like things are okay, can I? Won't that be the same as handing over to him some vital organ with a big, fat smile on my face? What if I say, 'you know what, dad? Things are fine, you're a great guy now"? How do I know he won't clap his hands and laugh that circus clown laugh of his and say, "gotcha!" 

I could kill. Anyone and anything.

The soup kitchen is a squat brick building next to a catholic church and I can remember vaguely that it was not here when this was my home but I cannot recall what was in its place. A parking lot? A gas station?

Inside is a large cafeteria-style room with checkered linoleum floors, halogen lighting,a kitchen at the far end with a serving window. There is a line of people leading up to and running alongside the serving window, their steps toward food as sluggish and belabored as steps towards death. The place smells of bleach and canned vegetables, hot dishwater and body odor. Behind the serving window I see three or four young guys, all in t-shirts and white smeared aprons, dishing out spaghetti and diced carrots. School lunch. Not one of them looks like what I am expecting of Matty. None of them have my mother's red hair, my father's height and the breadth of his shoulders, his blue eyes hard and cold as a precious stone on someone's finger. I cannot remember what Matty looks like outside of my own imagination; whose eyes, whose hair has been passed down to him.

And then he comes out through the swinging door, peeling a pair of vinyl gloves from his hands and looking around. He is tall, like my father, like me, but even from a distance he looks like my mother, like the pictures of her I have kept with me all this time, pictures taken before I was born, before so many things happened to alter her appearance. He has dad's strong chin and mom's dark red hair, a dark red belonging to a shiny car, rusty, almost like blood. It is parted and swept across his face like a strong wind has blown it that way, the smoothness of it nearly pretty. Nearly effeminate. He brushes it out of his eyes and then those eyes find me. 

When I look him square in the face I see all the endowments that I never received from my mother; fierce green eyes and a smile that comes easy, round cheekbones that compliment the square jaw of my father. Even the lightness of his step came from her, I can tell. I am not expecting him to hug me but he does, squeezing me once and then stepping back before I have a chance to return the embrace or reject it. He smiles but tries to hide it, like there is something taboo or vulgar in the expression.

"Mom told me you were coming by," he says.

"Yeah, I thought I'd come see you work."

"It's not exactly work," he says, "I mean I don't get paid."

I realize that he is nearly my height, his shoulders nearly as broad as mine. I had been expecting a child, maybe an almost-adult still clinging to the skinny awkwardness of adolescence but here he is and practically a man. Even his hands are scarred, well-used. But he is nervous, I can tell and underneath his polite exterior I can sense that he is making up his mind about something; about me. He is deciding if he should be rude, if he should be stingy with niceties; if the desire to be hostile and unforgiving is even still valid. He is deciding, much like I am, if he still has the right to be angry.

"Even better," I say, "it's good of you, doing this. You should be proud."

He shakes his head, and I see this little half smile, like his mouth hasn't completely decided to show such an expression, like half of him is trying to suppress it, to keep a serious appearance. This reminds me so much of my father than I cannot look.

"Service for service's sake," he says. 

"Right," I say, "Of course." 

My mother used to drag us to the catholic church, the one right next to this building, when dad was having a bad day, a bad week. She would even dress in black, I mean, come on, it's like the woman already saw herself as a widow. I look at Matty and suddenly remember him sitting beside me, his young face glaring up at the ornate, gilded artwork, the towering image of Christ in his most gruesome state, just staring, like he understood it. I could never really look at it for very long before it started to get to my stomach, before I started having that feeling you get right before someone grabs you from behind. It never seemed to bother Matty. He would stare at that thing the whole time, not even playing with the little toy cars he had stuffed his pockets with.

"You're not a believer," Matty says now, with nothing but fairness in his voice, "it's cool." |

Then he turns back toward the serving window and gestures towards me but doesn't look at me. One of the other guys mouths 'what?' and then nods, waves a dismissal. Matty unties his apron and says, "you smoke?" then goes towards the double doors that lead to the street. I follow. 

To the right of the door is another line of people waiting to get in, to get a table and Matty takes a sharp left around the side of the building, leading me into a narrow alley between the soup kitchen and the church and I tease him, saying, "do born-agains smoke?" 

He laughs as he smacks a pack of Camels against the heel of his hand.

"We're all a work in progress, man. I'm not the one doing the miracles."

He hands me one and then a lighter but doesn't offer to light it for me. Then we make small talk and it's positively agonizing. He has been volunteering here for two years, off and on. 

"Off and on?"

"Well I got busted for underage consumption at a party, and got stuck here for community service but I met Father Lawson and he's actually a pretty good guy so I kept coming. And dad thought it would be good for me to stay busy. But then I went to Camp Warren for a few months and Lawson said he'd take me back whenever I got out." 

"Camp Warren?" 

"Yeah. It's a fancy-pants juvenile facility upstate."

"How'd you end up there?" 

He pauses, squints at me and asks, "mom and dad didn't tell you this?" 

"I don't talk to them, remember? Least of all about you."

Matty seems satisfied by this so he continues. He says he was drinking way too much, peddling some painkillers that the FDA had never even seen before but the judge let him off easy because the church was willing to pay for him to go to a private facility. Mom and dad were grateful, and are still in the debt of the church. 

"So I keep volunteering." 

"And that's when you took to Jesus? When you were locked up?"

"Jeez, you make it sound like prison," he says, "I mean...yeah. That's when I came to know the Lord."

"Wow."

"What?"

"Nothing, just...isn't that exactly what happened to dad, too?"

"Yeah, I know it's weird. But that's the way it happened." 

I think this over, looking over my brother with unabashed curiosity. I can't stop looking at him, trying to identify what of my mother he still has, what of my father. The  more I look, the less I understand. 

"You of all people should know how desperate a person can be on the inside," he says. 

"Hey, I was actually in prison." 

"That's what I'm trying to say." 

"And I wasn't in there for doing something wrong."

"You threw a guy in front of a moving car."

"You know about that?"

"Everyone knows about that." 

"Still. That wasn't the same thing."

"Right. Because you were a big hero."

"Hardly."

"No, man, I mean it, I'm not trying to bust your balls. Dad's told me all about it. First in Michigan, you save a woman from getting hit by a car, and the town gives you a medal. Then in Texas you save a woman from getting raped and they throw you in jail for it." 

"I didn't save her from anything."

"Still sounds pretty noble to me." 

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not talk about it." 

He throws his cigarette down and nods, sticks out his bottom lip and says, "fair enough." I am already done with mine, having smoked with more speed and desperation than he. Matty makes no motion to go back inside.

"So mom and dad told you about the trip?" 

"A little bit," I answer, "sounds exciting."

He nods and shrugs. "Yeah," he says without enthusiasm, "it's a pretty big deal." 

"You don't seem that happy about it."

"Oh I am," he says with renewed vigor, "it's just a lot of responsibility. You know, being The Light of the World." 

I chuckle and don't try to hide it and thankfully, Matty doesn't rebuke me for it. He tosses his cigarette and crushes it underfoot. Once the embers are all out, he picks it up, then mine as well. He holds them loosely in one hand.

"So do you go to a shrink?" he asks. 

"Why?"

"Do you?" 

"I see a court-appointed psychologist."

"You sound like dad after he started seeing Rusty every week."

"Who's Rusty?"

"Head pastor at the church. He's alright. He actually used to play for Kansas State but he had an injury and started drinking...had a pretty bad time before he became a Christian."

"So why didn't you ask me if I go to bible study every week?" 

"Oh, you definitely don't have the Lord in you. No offense, or anything, but after a while you can tell. I mean...you're not a christian, are you?"

"Definitely not." 

"So is your shrink a total government hack, or what?" 

"No, she's cool. She plays it straight and she doesn't take bullshit."

"She? Is she hot?" 

"She's sixty-three, man. But she could probably kick my ass on a bad day and she could definitely kick yours." 

"Yeah," Matty smiles, "that's kind of hot." 

"There's the Matty I was expecting."

We both laugh and try to drag it out to avoid the uncomfortable silence that will undoubtedly follow. But it comes, like a cold gust of wind it comes and leaves nothing between us but more questions. And Matty is the first to ask. 

"Do you talk to her about what happened?"

"You mean...what happened here?" 

He is not looking at me. But he nods, suddenly, in his timidity, losing all the years and all the strength I had just attributed to him.

"Yeah," I answer, "I do. I talk to my shrink about that."

Mom says Matty wasn't always like this. She says yes, he is a perfect gentleman. She says he is responsible, mild-mannered, helpful and understanding. He is patient and obedient; docile even. But she says he wasn't always like this. 

I sit at the butcher-block table in our family's kitchen--not the hotel; I would prefer to stay out of the ruckus that is the preparation for tonight's Christmas party. I wasn't exactly asked beforehand if I minded coming home not only to my family, but to a house full of strangers each with a thousand questions that will no doubt all be the same, but when Mom finally did ask me, it was moot, since the invitations had already been handed out, the arrangements made. Canceling would have caused a scandal. So here we are, Mom preparing gallons of cole slaw in our kitchen because the hotel kitchen is completely overrun with extra helpers. 

"Matty was such an angry adolescent. I mean, for years. We didn't know what to do with him. Eventually we had to send him away. It was the only thing to do." 

"So what is Camp Warren? I mean, it sounds like a boot camp." 

"No," she says, smiling with a warmth I find odd given the topic, "it's like a safe haven. There are all kinds of young people that are sent there. I mean, young men. Just young men." 

"Still sounds like a boot camp." 

Mom rolls her eyes, poises a large knife above a head of cabbage but stops. 

"Yes, Matty needed discipline. But it was more than that. You know it was more than that." 

"So what did Dad do? I mean, it's not like Matty's problems sprung from nowhere." 

"Your father got involved. They had family sessions every week. At first, Matty wasn't very cooperative. He wouldn't come see us on visiting days, and during the sessions, he would just sit there. It was impossible. He hated your father for putting him in there." 

"Why did you? I mean, what specifically, made you decide to put him away?"

"Well, first there was the drinking. Your father put him on a strict curfew, but Matty kept breaking it. He was making good grades in school but they started to slip; he wasn't showing up, he got suspended for fighting." 

"All of this at the public school?" 

Mom nods, starts chopping. I watch her closely, the meticulous way she protects her fingertips, the speed with which she can chop and the orderly little strips of cabbage that fall to the cutting board after each stroke. I remember a time when Mom wasn't even allowed near a sharp object. I remember it well. 

"Your father had put his name on the waiting list for the Christian Academy before all of that got started. Conrad, the head of the upper school, said the wait time was maybe a year, less if a space became available. But with everything that was happening...let's just say they were more than a little reluctant to let Matty in. So your father had a meeting with Conrad and a few other people and Conrad agreed to put Matty at the bottom of the list, which would delay his entrance but not take him off completely, if Matty could get some real help. The public school was about to expel him anyway; he was impossible.  But then one day dad found him laying in bed with all of his clothes on. He was soaking wet and all scratched up, filthy. He was ranting about a ghost, about a house in the woods."

"So what was wrong with him?" 

"Lord Almighty, he was completely strung out on something called...DMT? Not having a good time of it, I would say. He was like a fish out of water."

She says all of this with complete nonchalance. No more rattling, no more wringing her hands, pulling out her hair, no more screaming over the voices in her head. No more downing pills and red wine. I should be happy, should be comforted or even elated, but instead I am disturbed, and then guilty for admitting to such a feeling. She chops up more carrots quickly and expertly, though I am nervous for her fingers.

"He'd been talking about the house before, though. That was the weird thing. We all just thought it was another of Matty's stories to scare the crap out of the younger ones. But then that day...even if it was just that Matty believed it was there, it was scary enough. He had said something about seeing an old house out in the woods past the park, a falling down old place, way off the path." 

"So, is there one?" 

"Well no, sweetie. There was your great-grandfather's plantation house but that got torn down same time the carriage house did."

"What carriage house?" 

"The house your daddy was born in." 

She stops chopping and doesn't look at me when she speaks. 

"The house your grandmother died in." 

The memory, like so many others, presents itself to me as if it's new information; for the first few seconds it really seems like I am hearing this for the first time. But I know this already. I know about my grandmother, the baby that came after my father, the baby that killed her and then died right away, like its short life had been created for one horrible purpose and only one purpose. I know all of this. I've just forgotten. 

"Oh," I say, quite stupidly. 

"Yeah, honey, I mean, I was only six years old but I remember going to the demolition like everyone. Nobody could believe your grandpa would want to tear down his family's home. I mean, honestly, it was falling into disrepair so I can understand he wouldn't want to incur the costs..." 

She chops up three more carrots and then starts on the onions, tired of talking, tired of rehashing. I have only been here a few hours, and already she's tired. 

Thank God, I think. 

"You Know Where She's Buried"

Matty

"Mom said you wanted to see me?"

The old man is sitting in his wing chair by the window, holding the respirator in his lap, not over his face. Every time he breathes you hear things move in his throat, maybe even deeper.

"Yes, yes," he says, almost cheerful, "yes I do, step into my office." 

The room smells so much like a hospital that you can't even believe it's your own house. You can't believe this was once your brother's room. Your grandfather's essence has taken it over, and somehow it seems that the room is dying, not him. His hair has lasted him longer than most men, staying dark and thick long after other men his age were considering toupees, accepting baldness and exposed, spotting scalps. Now it's all gone, after only a few sessions of chemotherapy, which are no obsolete, pointless. He wouldn't accept them anyway. Even when the doctor said he could make it for another six months, maybe a year, Mathis sat up straight and said he would rather go out naturally, with some dignity. You immediately admired him for this and you still do, even though he looks like an infant born prematurely, shrunken and hairless and wrong, his teeth all gone and dentures long ago rendered as pointless as the heroic measures your parents have tried to push on him. Somehow, he still looks dignified. He looks like death is supposed to look. 

there's just the one issue. it will have to come up sooner or later. you sit on the edge of the bed and feel even stranger here, since you and he both know he will die here, in this bed.

"So what's up?" you ask, "how are you feeling?" 

"Right as rain, son, right as rain."

He puts the mask over his face, breathes deeply, takes it away again.

"I was hoping you could fill me in on my funeral arrangements," he says.

This almost sounds like another language, a language you have not heard or dared to speak. Then you realize what he has just said and all you can come up with, all the response your clever, smart-ass little brain can muster is, "what?" 

"I know that father of yours," he points with the oxygen mask between two fingers, the same two fingers that used to hold his cuban cigars, "I know he's gonna try and pull some move to have me buried in that damn church graveyard."

"It's a beautiful piece of land, Grandpa," you say, then you choke on what you're about to say because you're about to say that hardly anyone's been buried there, that it's brand-new and he has his choice of plots. He could be buried right next to the live oak tree if he liked.

"I wrote it in my will--"

"Please Grandpa..."

"I wrote it in my will," he says again, louder this time, "I wrote it down that I wanted to be buried next to your grandmother. I want to be buried next to my wife."

"Oh yeah, Grandpa? And where exactly is she buried?"

You immediately regret your tone, though you have been through this before, all of you have. Stubborn old man, refusing to see reason. Your mother and father have long ago thrown up their hands. Now the old man looks at you, squinting his myopic eyes and pointing again with that damn oxygen mask.

"You know where she's buried," he says, his voice low, conspiratorial.

"Grandpa, come on. You have to stop saying stuff like that--"

"You know where she's buried! You've seen it!" 

"See, Grandpa? That's why your will isn't worth anything, because it's full of crazy talk! Your lawyer said so!"

"So they're not going to bury me next to my Nina, then?"

"No, Grandpa. There is no grave. There is only an urn. She was cremated, remember? She's been on a freaking shelf in the living room for years!"

"Cremated my ass," he mutters.

He replaces the mask, coughs a horrible wet cough and lets the mask drop to his lap.

"Your grandmother was never cremated. She's buried next to our house in the woods. I don't even know why we're having this conversation. You've seen it. You've been there; you've seen the house you said so yourself."

"Grandpa, no. I'm not doing this with you, okay? It's a waste of time and there isn't any time left to be wasted."

He looks at you with those eyes of his, watery and soft like raw oysters in his withered skin. He doesn't blink.

"So you're letting them win, huh? You're letting them tell you what's real and what's not? You're letting them tell you you're crazy?" 

"Maybe I was crazy, Grandpa. I don't know. I just know that I can't go back to thinking like that anymore. No good ever came out of it for me and it won't for you either. They're going to let mom and dad decide where you go if you keep this up and then not only will you not be buried next to your make-believe house but you'll be buried wherever dad wants you to be buried. If there's another place you'd prefer, you'd better say it now."

The old man cusses under his breath and coughs again. 

"They can let me rot for all I care. I have one request and if they're not going to let me have it, then fuck them all."

"Grandpa!"

"And fuck you too. I'm not going to sit here and be called crazy, least of all by you."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You get locked up in a looney bin for six months and you come out all filled up with Jesus like you're a totally different person? Just like your father, you're both crazy."

"We've found the Truth, Grandpa. You're about to die and you're laughing at the people trying to ensure the salvation of your soul. That's what's crazy."

"I'm not letting you anywhere near my soul. You'll just toss it in a drawer like all the others in your collection."

"Here we go again..."

"You think you're so special because you fall on your face and apologize for all the bad things you've done? Guess what. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change who you are on the inside and it doesn't change your father. He's still the same man he was he just can't live with himself and the things he's done." 

"And what's he done that's so bad, Grandpa? What's he done that God can't forgive?" 

He glares, seeing right through you, hie eyes lighting up every ounce of doubt you've got until it's all you can feel, all you can believe and he says, "see what I mean? Crazy."

"Dirty Old Grandpa"

GABRIEL

They say he's not well enough to come out of bed. Not today, at least. But when I get up the stairs and to his doorway, I see that he is sitting up in bed, doing a crossword puzzle, holding his oxygen mask over his face with one hand. The room smells like plastic and antiseptic and deep in my brain I miss the smell of cigarettes that I used to associate with him. I miss the smell of cuban cigars. I miss the ashtrays piled high around their house, the bitter smell characterizing the room. But in my immediate consciousness, I do not miss any of these things. I have long ago eradicated that emotion and even recalling what I know of this place is a task. Best not to think about it too much. 

Issuing from the CD player in the corner is familiar music, booming piano complete with the buzzing and clicking that mark an old recording. Something spanish maybe? 

Grandpa smiles and opens his arms, thin and shaking under his flannel pajamas. He is missing teeth and his grin is a macabre vision. I lean down to embrace him and I am surprised by his strength, the hardness of his arms that is not the hardness of bone. He pulls me down so that I have to kneel by the bed, he pats my back and lets me go. 

"What is this?"

"Lecuona," he says, complete with accent, "Poetico." 

"I remember," I say, "Spanish?" 

"Cuban," he corrects.

"You don't look so sick," I say.

I take my place in the chair by the bed, moving a stack of books: Ogden Nash, Poe, Wordsworth. There are more around the room, this room that used to be mine. 

"Hope you don't mind me moving in," he says. 

He folds his glasses and the newspaper and puts them down beside him. His eyes look like something congealed in their sockets, blinking but unseeing. Everywhere things are bonier, more discolored, more gnarled than when I last saw him, his hands all twisted with arthritis, marred by liver spots. And there is the smell, worse than the antiseptic and the plastic, the lingering smell of shit and decay that seems to characterize the nearly-dying. 

I tell him, "not at all. I'm happy to see you make good use of this old room."  

He folds his hands, relaxes, says, "tell your dirty old grandpa what you've been up to." 

I race through my past like shuffling through a deck of cards, contemplating what to tell him. Hustling? Prison? Scratching out a living for two years in some kind stranger's trailer out back? No, I decide. I'll focus on the positive. So I tell him,

"Actually, I just finished an adult film." 

He laughs that toothless, wheezy old-man laugh and slaps me hard on the knee, asks me what it's about. So I tell him in the film, I play a plastic surgeon who travels to Africa and risks his life to reconstruct the vaginas of mutilated women. The women of this particular tribe are so amazed by their ability to enjoy sex that they no longer want the men of their tribe; they want only me. So I spend the first half of the film reconstructing clitoral tissue, and the second half getting my dick polished by a tribe of big-breasted African women. 

I tell him it's socially conscious. Not for everyone. Grandpa laughs and starts to cough, I start to get worried. But then he says, "I'm glad I got to live to see this day." 

I cannot tell if he is thinking about the watch; if he even remembers it now. I cannot tell if he is thinking about the last time we saw each other. But he has never asked me about it; never brought it up in all the years since I left. It's always just been our secret, indicated only in a sideways glance and nothing more. 

But I think he will ask. Before this is all over, he will ask.

I ask him how mom has been and he says, "why don't you ask your father?" but laughs since he knows as well as I do that trying to get a straight answer from my father is like trying to get pussy from a nun. Then he gets serious and he says that she's been doing fine, that she has been doing fine for a few years, ever since she and my father became christians and all. 

"Do you really believe it?" 

"Believe what?" 

"That they're, you know, born-again." 

Grandpa shrugs.

"Hell if I know what that means. Your guess is as good as mine."

"Well, do they seem changed?" 

"No one really changes," he says, and he seems to be scanning his memory, taking an inventory of his experiences, every drop of wisdom he's got before coming to an answer, "they just think they do." 

He says I know that as well as he does. 

"But," he adds, seeing my frustration, "if I didn't know your father any better, I would believe in his conversion one hundred percent." 

I give him a wry smile, trying to pull, pull, until the truth comes out, shiny and squirming like a fish from under the rocks. 

"But you do know him." 

He smiles back, proudly displaying his rotting teeth, the black inside of his mouth.

"Oh yes," he says, "that I do." 

Grandpa doesn't really want to know what I've been doing. He thinks he does, but I know better. He's in no state to hear of the jail time, the dead-end jobs, the desperation and the loneliness that has been my life since I left here. He doesn't need to know about all the women, all the loss. He doesn't need to know about Elena. Not her. When I was young, my grandfather had this game, a game designed to stimulate my imagination, which was the only real thing I had protecting me from my father. My grandfather had tried to physically intervene, to threaten, to expose. But it didn't do any good. My mother and father were a good team, my mother was too much of a victim to do anything but protect my father. And she did it well. 

So when grandpa asks what I've been up to, I pretended, just like I did when I was ten. He would ask how school was, and I would tell him, depending on my age, that a stampede of elephants had destroyed the gymnasium, that I painted a mural in art class of the Pelopennesian war and an art dealer gave me a check for a million dollars for it. I would tell him that I crawled inside the grand piano in the music room and found my own secret wonderland, my own Oz. I would tell him all kinds of things and he would listen. Then it was back to the real world, back to my father. I suppose if I really look back, grandpa could have done more. But I don't like to think of it that way. I don't have enough time to think of him like that. I guess you could say my grandfather made me a good liar. The consummate liar that I am today.