*
All this from a single turn: his mother, our mother, the four of us children, and now this gray office of his own, where he works in the light of a long metal desk lamp that was once his uncle’s. A large bay window looks out onto the porch. Nights that he fails to close the slat blinds, we can stand on that porch and make out the silhouette of his head bent low in the light of the metal lamp. One night, my mother calls the office again and again and, getting no answer, packs us into the car and drives over—a sure sign she’s nervous, as my mother, the born-and-bred New Yorker from Astoria, Queens, didn’t consent to learn to drive until she was thirty-eight and will never lose the stiffness in her hold on the wheel, her hands locked into the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions as she was taught. Someday, when they have money, she’ll use a car service to take her where she needs to go. But now driving at night is even worse than during the day, and she folds her body to clutch the wheel to her chest as if it were a life preserver.
When we arrive at the office, every window is dark, no sign of my father. “Stay here,” my mother says to me and Andy and my sisters. “Stay right here.” This is unusual. My parents almost never leave us in the car. Unless my grandparents come and babysit, they almost never leave us anywhere. We have been everywhere with them: into the backs of courtrooms, into fancy restaurants. There’s a picture of Andy and me at three years old standing hand in hand on the red velvet steps of the Metropolitan Opera House, me in a white frilly dress and Andy’s curls backlit over his pale blue suit. But tonight we stay in the car. It’s a warm early fall night and the windows are down. The air’s a little sticky, the leaves heavily soft around us. In the glow of a nearby streetlamp, we watch our mother climb the porch steps and press the doorbell. She waits. There’s no response. She presses it again. Nothing. She raps on the bay window and calls in—“Drew! Drew!”—her voice growing higher and louder as she repeats his name.
When I am closer to the age at which she stands on the porch than the age at which I sit in the car watching, I’ll come back to this moment. Then I’ll understand what fears the night held for her. Perhaps he’d finally left the way he threatened to some dark nights, nights that he raged at the choice he’d made on a lonely Missouri road, the choice that had trapped him in this story with us. Nights he sat alone at the white Formica table, drinking off the remainder of the dinner wine he and my mother had opened together, and then opening his own. Those nights he swore we’d be better off without him. Those nights he swore we’d be better off if he were dead.
But this night, as I watch my mother on the porch, and I listen to her call his name and listen to the silence in response, I know only to be afraid that he’s dead not by his hand but by fate. He lost his father when he was a baby. He lost the uncle who helped raise him to an early heart attack. Every March, when we kiss his cheek and tell him happy birthday, if he’s had some wine he shakes his head and says how surprised he is to still be alive. He repeats this sentence year after year until some part of me, I suppose, grows surprised right along with him.
On this night he finally emerges from the door, and in the light of the streetlamp I watch my mother’s face relax into a mix of joy and relief, thankful that they’re still in this together. They walk back to the car hand in hand. She’s beaming. “Hey, kids,” he says. “I fell asleep at my desk.” His tie hangs loosened around his neck. He rubs his eyes with his fingers, then he smiles, too. My mother kisses him, presses the keys into his hand. He’ll drive us home now. They’ll figure out how to get the other car back in the morning.
*
Grief takes root inside people. But I don’t see its mark on my parents at first, not until a bleach-bright summer day nine months later. I am reading my way through my mother’s old Nancy Drew hardbacks, proud to have moved on from the picture books she still reads to my little sisters. Today is The Secret in the Old Attic. I have climbed the swing set at the bottom of the yard and am lying across the top flat ladder with the book cracked open on my chest, one hand shielding the page from the sun’s glare. This position is an experiment. I’m still getting to know our new house, all the nooks I’ll read in. But the ladder rungs dig into my back, splinters press through my T-shirt, and I can’t get comfortable. We should be done polyurethaning the swing set by now, but we’re not. Instead, every Sunday afternoon that my father decides the swing set will be our chore for the day, and my mother dresses us in old OshKosh overalls and gives me, my brother Andy, and my sister Nicola little buckets and brushes of our own, we kids paint the clear gel over our hands instead of the railings. When the gel gets tacky, we press our hands together. Stuck! Then my father marches us into the closet-size bathroom off the kitchen, where I stick my hands under the faucet and wait as he pours from a can of paint thinner. “Rub,” he says, and I do, and slowly through the heat and scratch and wet I feel my hands start to unglue, and my skin comes back to me.
That’s pleasure, that moment. I keep painting my hands together for the pleasure of his standing behind me, his arms on mine. Even years from now I’ll love the metallic smell of paint thinner. And he must love those moments the way I do, because though we make no progress on the swing set, my father doesn’t yell. This will be his dearest summer, all of us building this house together.