“People don’t usually come to your door with good news,” she’d said on more than one occasion. It had certainly been her experience, most notably when she was a young girl, and officials of the U.S. government had come to inform her mother that her father would not be coming home from Korea.
I nosed the car close to the steps that led up to the porch, parking my four-wheel-drive Audi Q5 next to Dad’s ten-year-old Chrysler minivan. He didn’t think much of my German wheels. He questioned supporting the economies of nations we once fought. “I suppose,” he’d said a few months ago, “when they start importing cars from North Vietnam, you’ll buy one of those.” Since he was so concerned, I offered to return for him his beloved Sony TV with a screen big enough that he could actually see the puck when watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“It being a Japanese set and all,” I’d said.
“Touch that thing and I’ll knock your block off,” he’d said.
I took the porch steps two at a time, unlocked the front door—I hadn’t needed to take a house key from Dad’s ring; I’d always had one—and went into the kitchen. The clock on the wall said it was nearly four thirty. Time to start thinking about something for dinner.
I hunted around in the fridge to see what might be left in here from my father’s final trip to the grocery store. He wasn’t much of a cook, but knew the basics. He could boil water for pasta, or heat up an oven and throw a chicken in there. But for the days when he hadn’t the energy for anything that fancy, he’d stuffed the freezer with hamburgers and fish sticks and french fries and enough frozen dinners to start a Stouffer’s franchise.
I could make do with what was here for tonight, but tomorrow I was going to have to make a trip to the grocery store. The truth was, I wasn’t much of a cook myself, and back in Burlington, found many nights I couldn’t be bothered to make myself anything more ambitious than a bowl of Cheerios. I think, when you live alone, it’s hard to get motivated to make a real meal, or eat it in a proper way. Many nights I’d eat dinner standing in the kitchen, watching the news on the TV, or I’d take my plate of microwaved lasagna up to my studio and eat while I worked.
I opened the refrigerator. There were six cans of Bud in there. My father liked his beer affordable and basic. Part of me felt funny, dipping into his last six-pack, but it didn’t stop me from taking one out and cracking it.
“To you, Dad,” I said, raising the can, then taking a seat at the kitchen table.
The place was almost as neat as I’d found it. Dad was meticulous, which made the upstairs hall all the more difficult for him to accept. I attributed his fastidiousness to his time in the Army. Drafted, he did his two years, most of it overseas in Vietnam. He never talked about it. “It’s over,” he’d say anytime it came up. He was more inclined to credit his habits to his work in printing, where precision and attention to detail were everything.
I sat there, drinking Dad’s beer, working up the energy to defrost or nuke something. I cracked open another as I began pulling things out of the freezer. Given my unfamiliarity with this kitchen, I had to open several drawers to find place mats and cutlery and napkins.
When things were almost ready, I walked through the living room and rested my hand on the banister before heading upstairs. I cast my eye across the room: the checkered couch my parents brought here two decades ago from the house in Albany, the recliner my father always sat in to watch his Sony. The chipped coffee table they bought the same time as the couch.
While the furniture was dated, Dad didn’t skimp on the technology. There was the TV itself, a thirty-six-inch flat screen with HD that he’d bought a year ago to watch football and hockey. He liked his sports, even if he had to enjoy them alone. There was a DVD player, and one of those gadgets that allowed him to order up movies from the Internet.
He watched those by himself.
The living room looked like a million other living rooms. Normal. Nothing extraordinary.
That changed as you got to the top of the stairs.