I walk home and think about Martha Fitz’ hands. Her tiny, shaking, withered, wrinkled hands. Her veins that threatened to burst at any moment, her thin skin like saran-wrap. Shaking her hand goodbye I was scared to tear her.
Dad was the same age. How is that possible?
I find Matt sitting on the porch. He’s wearing jeans that are too big and a sweatshirt I haven’t seen since I was fifteen. He’s smoking, of course.
“Can I bum one?”
“Since when do you smoke?” he asks.
“Since today.”
He pulls out his pack of Camels and hands me a light.
“Where’d you get the money for Camels?”
“None of your business.”
“Matt, I’ll buy you smokes. Don’t steal from Mom. She’s too easy a target right now.”
“I didn’t. Christ.”
I holds the unlit smoke in front of me. It’s a peace offering.
“You have to light it for me,” I tell him.
He does.
“So, how’d it go?” he asks.
“Do you really want to know?”
He nods.
“Dad left her for another woman six months into their marriage. Sound familiar?”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” I suck the smoke deep inside me. I cough, uncontrollably. “Jesus, fuck! This looks so much easier in the movies.”
Matt passes me some of his Coke.
“What else did you find out?”
“That he loved this other woman, even though he didn’t want to.”
“What’d she say he was like?”
“He sounded...different.”
“What do you mean?”
“He sounded cool. Hip, or something. She said he very was charming.”
“That was always true.”
“Yeah, when he wanted it to be.” I look towards the busy Queen Street just north of us. I want to go and be apart of those people, get lost in something else, quiet my mind and the questions and the visions and the pictures of my father.
“What’s wrong?” Matt asks.
“Nothing. Everything.”
He sits, sucking on his cigarette. Ribbons of smoke twist through the air.
“So, what was she like?”
“Old and goes to church.”
“Weird.”
There is one bible passage that has always stuck with me. I remember sitting in Church with my father, the one and only Christmas he made us go. The priest said something about the sins of the father being visited upon the son.
“Do you think that’s true, Dad?” I asked.
“Timshel,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means thou mayest in Jewish. It's your choice.”
Jewish wasn’t a language and he knew that, but he was always vaguely, lazily anti-Semetic. I realized in eleventh grade that he'd stolen timshel from East of Eden. I wondered, as I grew older, if he stole everything from great literature. If his whole personality came from Hemingway and Steinback and other men he was disappointed he never became.
Am I making that up? Why would a priest talk about the sins of the father on Christmas?
“I had a dream I killed Andrew last night.”
“How’d that feel?”
“Believable.”
Matt laughs and scratches at his tattoos. I watch him, and in my eyes he looks like a child, my child, and I want to hold him in my arms.
“How’d you do it?”
“I drowned him in a bathtub of my blood.”
“Jesus. Is that why you’re breaking up?”
“Probably subconsciously.” I look down at my hands. My smoke is two seconds from burning my fingers. “So, I’m going to call that lesbian.”
I throw my smoke out into the afternoon, and then suddenly miss it.
Now what are my fingers going to do?
I have a taste of my father. A taste is not enough.
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