“No.”
“Don’t you have a friend who lives nearby? The old one. What’s her name? Mal?”
“Mel.” Mel lives in a condo complex just east and north of here. It has a name too. Eden. East of Eden. Something like that.
“So?”
“We see each other sometimes.” That used to be true, but now we haven’t in more than a year. For a while after I moved back, we’d meet up every few months or so for coffee or a drink in the afternoon. Have a stilted conversation about her boyfriend, whether I was dating anyone, her work, my work, for about two hours, then one of us, usually Mel, would bring up all the things we had to do the next day. Better be heading off. But it was good to see you. It was good to see you too. We should do it more often. We should. We’ve grown apart, I guess. Some friends do.
Tonight, I can feel him wanting to ask me more questions but he doesn’t. Instead he hands me a bowl of microwaved Orville Redenbacher’s. Tonight, I do not refuse him. I accept. And after the popcorn is polished off, then, together, we eat a box of stale brandy-filled chocolate beans.
When he gets up to get himself a glass of water, he hits his head on my mother’s low-hanging iron candelabra. This often happens. As always, he sighs a little but says nothing.
When I first moved back here from out west, he used to tell me I should get rid of my mother’s stuff. Then he would ask me if I ever thought of getting rid of it. Now he just sits on it and says nothing. Props his feet on the sharp-edged glass-and-chrome surfaces. Sometimes I’ll see him looking over at my mother’s ashes on the mantel of my fake fireplace. Housed in an undusted blue urn patterned with big, tacky flowers. The pattern reminded me of the one you find on muumuus or the sorts of clothes they used to sell in fat-girl stores, the kind my mother wore all of her adult life, the kind I wore for a large chunk of my youth, the kind fat girls and women had to wear before everyone got fat, before supply met demand. Perhaps there were more options urn-wise beyond the muumuu one, but at the time, in my grief, I didn’t see them. And anyway, I told myself at the time, she wouldn’t be in there long. I’d release her soon. Scatter her into a body of water, which is what she told me she wanted. Now, years later, I keep thinking I’ll do this, have even pictured myself at the edge of how many expanses of gray, lapping water, or sometimes it’s a river, the water dark and moving quickly, too quickly, or sometimes it’s a blue-green expanse and very still. I’m wearing a long dark gray coat. I’m right on the rocky shore. I’m right at the edge of the long pier. I’m right on the stony riverbank. I’m leaning over the bridge rail. I’m standing with my feet in the white wet sand that is the shore of this green waving sea that will house my mother. The muumuu urn is heavy in my hands. But no matter how many bodies of water I have stood over in my mind, no body seems right. Certainly not that lake I see a sliver of through my window. Or whatever it is. What is it? A reservoir. A man-made expanse of wet. Not the sea, surely.
“That lake goes out to sea, right?” I ask my father.
“To the sea?” he repeats, his eyes on the TV. “I’m sure it does. It has to, doesn’t it?”
When my father gets up to leave, he hits his head again on the candelabra and swears.
“Do you ever light this or . . . ?”
“Sometimes.”
“You should light it. If you’re going to keep it, you should light it.” My father is currently seeing two different women in the building, both of whom live in Phase One, both on the fifth floor but in different towers. Both are efficient, evening gym users, one slightly more so than the other. When he’s finished hanging out with me, he will go back up to see her.
“Good night,” I tell him.