“He wants to leave you his desk when he’s gone,” his mother said at breakfast the next morning, before she left for work. His father was upstairs. “The rest you’ll have to wait for me to die to get.”
“Jesus.”
“You want to be a kid forever? You have to hear this stuff eventually.”
Connell knew that getting that desk had been one of the few happy experiences his father had shared with his own father as an adult. It was of no use to his father anymore, though. Now it was where his mother did the bills. She could use the little desk in Connell’s room for that; he could switch them out.
The desk was five feet wide and three deep and made of solid wood. It wasn’t an heirloom, exactly. The wood was scratched and nicked from the banging by the chair. A set of drawers on either side formed the base on which the desktop rested.
Taped index cards ran along the front and side edges. One card listed the day, month, and year of all three of their birthdays. One had a little family tree branching out from his grandparents to his aunts, uncles, and cousins. Off EILEEN TUMULTY LEARY (WIFE) and ED LEARY (SELF) was CONNELL LEARY (SONN). One card read SOCIAL SECURRURITURY #, as though his father had picked out a syllable at random to keep the thread going. Inside the desk was a card with a pump pin affixed to it and the caption, PIN FOR BLOING UP OF BACKET BALLS.
While his father watched television in the den, Connell lugged the heavy thing up the stairs piece by piece to his room. When he was done reassembling it, he felt energized by a sense of possibility. He would fill in the drawers and get down to whatever important work lay ahead, which would reveal itself to him if he sat there long enough.
His own desk was so light that he could carry it downstairs without removing the drawers. He shoved it into place where his father’s desk had been. It looked miniature beneath his father’s diplomas. He taped the index cards to the desk’s surface.
All that remained was to bring his father’s chair up and carry his own down in compensation. His father’s chair didn’t just swivel and wheel; it pivoted back, to allow for those periodic bouts of idleness deep thinkers required for their important ideas.
The chair, which was heavier than it looked, was anchored in a metal base. Once upstairs, it lent his room an appealing seriousness. He sat in it and picked at the remaining tape on the desktop. He leaned back, to let his mind wander wherever his thoughts would go.
He must have fallen asleep, because he awoke to his father shouting. He went downstairs and found him in the study.
“My desk,” his father said plaintively.
Connell pulled at his shirt’s hem. “Mom said you wanted to leave it to me.”
“Yes,” he said. Tears were streaming down his face. “For you.” He pointed at Connell, jabbing him in the sternum. “You.”
“I brought it upstairs.”
“When I’m dead,” he said. “When I’m dead.”
The weight of a lifetime of kindnesses done him fell on Connell at once.
That night, when his mother told him to take it back downstairs, he felt almost relieved.
For a moment, he hoped that his father might forget it ever happened, but then he realized that the condition didn’t work like that. He forgot things you wanted him to remember. He remembered things you wanted him to forget.
? ? ?
The next day, he sat at his little desk again and tried to write Jenna a letter, but nothing came. He covered both sides of a sheet of paper with his signature, trying out different styles.
The weather was nice. He decided to try to take his father outside for a catch.
He found the gloves in a tote bag on which his father had written the family name multiple times in permanent marker during the period when he’d gone around labeling everything. The longer Connell looked at those insistent capital letters, the more they sounded like the cry of a drowning man.
His father had bought them both new gloves the year they’d moved in. Connell felt ashamed at how pristine his father’s looked, scuff-free and auburn-lustrous. They’d spent almost no time playing catch since. Connell’s glove was more worn, its leather cracked in places. When he’d quit baseball to do debate, the shift from body to mind had felt final. He hadn’t even considered taking his glove when he’d left for college.
He put a tennis ball in his glove’s pocket and led his father outside. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, he held his father’s glove out to him.
“Let’s play catch.”
His father could hardly hold the glove on his hand, so Connell decided to ditch the gloves. He stood him with his back to the wall and walked a few paces away, then bounced the ball to him, trying to get it as close to his hands as he could. When he didn’t catch it, Connell fetched it and placed it in his hands. His father couldn’t throw, but he could bounce it to him in a rudimentary way. He could tell his father was throwing because he would hold it for a while and then it would leave his hand.
? ? ?
He felt like he was losing his mind, or at least his intelligence, sitting there watching that much television with his father. He started spending most of his time in his room, reading novels, trying to drown out the noise of the television downstairs, and writing and rewriting a tortured letter to Jenna that got longer and longer the more he realized he’d never send it. He understood he was writing it for himself now, to try to figure out what had gone wrong with him, why he’d asked her to marry him in the first place. She was right: he was nineteen. He was embarrassed to think of how he’d behaved for most of the last semester—like a child and an old man all at once.
He heard his father cry out and dashed down and found him lying facedown in the kitchen. The runner was bunched up on the floor; he had evidently tripped on it. Connell rolled him over, saw that his mouth was bloody and that he’d broken one of his front teeth. Connell sat him up and soaked a dish towel and put it in his mouth. He saw the piece of tooth lying on the floor and laid it on the island. The quantity of blood on the bricks made Connell worry that his father might have bitten part of his tongue off, but when he forced his mouth open he saw that he had only cut his gums and split his lip. Blood pooled under his tongue. Connell leaned him over the sink and got him to spit, then sat him at the table. A broken plate rested facedown on the floor. He must have thrown it as he’d fallen. Connell gathered its halves and the plastic-wrapped sandwich into a saggy bundle that he deposited in the trash.
The runners formed little rolling hillocks. He had even slipped on them himself a couple of times. He remembered now—how had he forgotten it?—that his mother had asked him to buy double-sided tape to secure them to the floor.
He watched his father’s Adam’s apple rise and fall as his father swallowed blood. He gave him ice in a wet towel to suck on. After a while, he brought him up, got him changed, and returned him downstairs. He mopped the floor of the blood and put the piece of tooth in the little pocket of his jeans, because he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out and was too ashamed to leave it on the counter. Then he sat with his father on the couch and waited for his mother to come home and see what had become of both of them.
? ? ?
He heard the garage door. His mother came up the stairs carrying some bags of groceries. She handed them to him and slung her pocketbook onto the island. She told him to put them away.
“Leave that chicken out,” she said. “I’m going to make it.”
She called in “Hello” to his father and filled a glass with water. Connell emptied the bags purposefully, trying not to look at her. When there was nothing left to find a spot for, he turned to see her taking down a second glass of water with deliberate sips, as though it were medicine. She was looking at him over the glass.
“I might send you to the store for garlic,” she said. “I forgot to get garlic.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got to turn that down. I can’t hear myself think. Edmund!” she called again. “I’m home.”
She put her glass in the sink. There was a strange buoyancy in her step.
“Mom, wait.”
“What?”
“Something happened earlier. Dad got hurt.”
She started in his father’s direction. “What is it?” she asked with surprising panic in her voice. “What’s happened?”
She took the remote and lowered the volume on the television.
“What’s happened?” she asked again, sounding more alarmed than Connell had heard her sound, perhaps ever. “Are you going to tell me, or what?”
His father sat there like a statue, looking past her at the screen’s flashing, unaccompanied images.
“He fell down. I was out of the room. He landed hard on the bricks.”
“Let me look at you, Edmund. What did he hurt?”
“He fell on his face. Cut his chin. Broke his tooth.”
“Let me see your mouth, Edmund.”
His father sat stone-faced.
“Open up!” she said, sounding shrilly desperate. She turned to Connell. “How bad is it?”
“There was a lot of blood.”