“This ring,” I had said to Chris that day, standing on Wabash in the midst of Jewelers Row, tears dousing my tired, insomniac eyes, eyes which hadn’t slept since before my father died, “is all that remains of my father. The rest is gone.”
I don’t tell Willow how I fell into a state of deep depression after my father died, a quiet, placid death following an altercation with lung cancer, small cell lung cancer, that is, the kind that had metastasized to the brain, the liver and the bone before he ever knew it was there. I don’t tell her how he refused treatment. He continued to smoke. Marlboro Reds. Half a pack a day. I don’t tell her how my mother buried him with a carton of Marlboro Reds and a neon green lighter, for use in the afterlife.
I do tell Willow about the glorious fall day that we buried my father in the cemetery beside the church, beneath a sugar maple that had turned tangerine overnight. I tell her how the pallbearers carried that casket out of the church, up a spongy hill and to the cemetery. It had rained the night before and the ground was wet. I tell her how my mother and I followed behind. How I held on to my mother so she wouldn’t slip, but more so, because I couldn’t let go, because I was already burying one parent and I couldn’t bear to lose another. I tell her how we watched them lower him in, and then we laid roses on top of the casket. Lavender roses. Because it’s what my mother carried when they were wed.
It’s then that she looks at me with those tired cornflower eyes and says—in that way one says they hate terrorists or Nazis, as if they are truly an abomination to all mankind, and not just how people say they hate the smell of burnt popcorn or hate the sight of overweight women in midriffs—“I hate roses,” and I try hard not to take offense, reminding myself: to each his own, and yet it seems a terribly odd response to my confession.
And then she says, after a period of silence so long that I’m all but certain our revelations are through, “My momma is dead.”
And that word—dead—sneaks out noncommittally, as though she isn’t quite sure whether or not she’s dead, or what that word really means to her. Like someone told her that her mother was dead, like one says A drop in the bucket, or, a piece of cake. An idiom. The kind of word or phrase that makes no logical sense.
My momma is dead.
“How?” I ask, but she won’t say. Instead, she curls into a ball, hiding inside her armadillo shell. Her eyes remain locked on the TV, though they’ve grown glassy and inexpressive, as if she’s made a hard-line decision not to cry. I ask again, “Willow?” but she ignores this completely, as if unaware of my voice, unaware of the way my eyes are cemented to her, cemented to the wayward hair and the lips caked in ChapStick, desperate for an answer to my question.
An answer that doesn’t come.
And then, in time—when she tires of my staring perhaps—she lifts the baby from my arms and leaves the room.
CHRIS
I’m taking the steps, two at a time, down to the “L” platform when the call comes in on my cell. Henry. I stop midstride and retreat to street level, leaning against the fence that encloses the steps leading underground. The street is full of cars and pedestrians heading home from work. It’s not quite dark outside, one of those rare workdays I leave the office on time. A bus is holding up traffic on the street; some suburbanite or out-of-towner tries to bypass it, nearly killing a half-dozen pedestrians at the same time. Brakes squeal. A horn blares. Someone yells, “Asshole!” and shoots the driver the finger.
I shield the setting sun from my eyes with the back of a hand, and say, “I don’t even want to hear it,” into the phone. It’s hard to hear Henry over the commotion of the city, but I make out the sound of his laugh, loud and obnoxious, like nails on a chalkboard.
“Hello to you, too, Wood,” Henry says, and I have visions of him on the commode making this call. His pants are down around his knees. There’s a magazine spread across his lap. Playboy. “Kiss that pretty wife of yours goodbye. We head out in the morning.”
“What now?” I ask and he says, “Road show. Denver by way of New York.”
“Damn,” I say. It’s not that this comes as a complete surprise. We’ve been preparing for this dog and pony show for weeks. But still. Heidi is going to be pissed.