—
Two days after I turned eighteen there was a card in the mail from my mother. It was a generic birthday card, one I’m sure the nursing home had boxes of tucked away for residents to use. The lettering on the outside of the envelope had been carefully printed, nothing like my mom’s usual artsy loops and curls. The inside read, in the same steady hand, “Dear Samantha. I am very proud of you for being at college. It was so nice to see you at Christmas. I can’t wait to see you again. Love, Mom.” In the bottom right corner there was a series of unintelligible dots and squiggles. A piece of paper had fluttered to the ground when I opened the card, and I picked it up. It was a note from my mom’s hospice nurse, apologizing for the formality and explaining that her condition had deteriorated to the point that she could no longer use a pen without help. “Grace is a real nice lady. She is having a lot of trouble speaking lately. I tried to figure out what she wanted me to say as best I could. I hope you have a good birthday.” This is a luxury, you know, being spared the day-to-day deterioration of someone you love. I really wish I could’ve hugged that nurse.
—
My aunt called. My father had had two heart attacks and a stroke. Or two strokes and a heart attack. Fuck, these are the kinds of details that blur. I can tell you with near certainty that I was wearing an oatmeal-colored knit turtleneck sweater, but not the ratio of heart attacks to strokes my dad had at the end of his life. He’d been living in a halfway house in Memphis since the failed attempt to reconstruct our ailing family. After we put my mother back into the nursing home, I spent my junior year of high school tiptoeing around his rules and his rage, with mostly successful results. He slapped me a few times, and, once, he punched me in the eye. We ate a lot of navy beans on hot-water cornbread and vegetable soup made with V8 juice and frozen vegetables because, besides hard-boiled eggs, those were the only things I could cook at the time. It was okay. Somehow I managed to get a really high score on the ACT.
His heart had always been bad. Multiple heart attacks and surgeries, that kind of thing. I remember coming home from school one day that winter to find a note that he was going into the hospital, written in his shaky, girlish hand. He said that he hadn’t been feeling well and that Dr. Weiss wanted to admit him for observation. I immediately kicked off my snowy boots in the middle of the living room (not allowed), grabbed a bottle of Baileys from where he’d hidden it (under the sink), and cuddled on the couch under a blanket in front of the television (definitely not allowed). I called myself in sick the next few days, leaving the house only to walk to the corner store for cans of soup and to play the lottery numbers my dad would leave on the answering machine every afternoon with the money he’d hidden for such emergencies in a shoe box in his closet. I shoveled the sidewalks so no one would suspect anything, but other than that, I watched My So-Called Life repeats and slept the dreamless sleep of the relieved. When SB finally came home, he did so with a long scar snaking across his chest.
“It’s called a defibrillator,” he said, tapping the tender flesh over his heart as I tried not to vomit. “It sends a little electrical shock through my heart whenever it stops beating.” He explained the differences between the exciting new technological advancement that had been installed in his shiny new Frankenchest and the average, run-of-the-mill pacemaker inserted into other septuagenarians (“You see, the pacemaker regulates the heart constantly but this guy only gives me a little shock when I need it and that’s pretty cool, right?”) while proudly brandishing a card that he had to carry with him to keep him out of jail in case he set off a metal detector at court or in an airport. He looked gaunt and skinny, even though he’d been gone only a little over a week and had been on solid food for at least five days. My glasses were still taped across the bridge from when he’d broken them with his fist months before, the bones beneath them, though healed, still slightly shifted off track. I remember thinking how big he’d seemed that day as I stood bleeding uncontrollably into the kitchen sink from my broken nose, my vision blurred. This dude here looked like a guy I could take in a fight. He commented on how clean the house looked, but my stomach churned as he surveyed the room, hoping he wouldn’t notice the dust on the piano that I hadn’t practiced on even once while he’d been in the hospital.
I have never owned a microwave. I have lived on my own since I was eighteen years old, and every time I’ve eaten a Lean Cuisine in my pajamas at eight thirty on a Friday night, I have waited forty-five goddamn minutes for that motherfucker to cook in the oven before doing so. Sam Irby had a thing about microwave ovens. “Those silly machines destroy all the nutrients in your food,” he would grunt, shuffling away from the freezer case where I stared longingly at all of the Hot Pockets and Pizza Rolls. “Just get a pack of hot dogs and meet me in the car.” My dad resented that no one had ever taught me how to do “women’s work”; he was disgusted that I had spent fifteen years on his earth without learning how to buff a linoleum floor to a mirror shine or make a proper casserole. It was beneath him to fold his own boxers.
I didn’t know shit about keeping a house. I didn’t know that mini blinds need to be dusted and rugs dragged out in the yard and beaten clean. No one ever taught me how to defrost a freezer or scrub a dirty oven without setting my hair on fire. My dad wanted a perfect 1950s TV housewife, while all I wanted was a perfect 1980s TV dad. Steven Keaton never punched his kids over a frying pan, and Phillip Drummond never kicked a hole through Arnold’s bedroom door because his pants hadn’t been perfectly pleated. But I’m a quick study. You have to pile all of the dirty dinner dishes atop my snoring body only one motherfucking time for me to understand never to go to bed without cleaning the kitchen first, no matter how tired I am.
Dan Conner was the kind of dad who might let you get away with nuking a can of Beefaroni and serving it to him for dinner, but Samuel Bishop Irby wouldn’t stand for any of that. Especially not with his new mechanical heart. The night he came home, he peered at me over his reading glasses with the ICD user manual balanced on his lap. “No magnets, and no microwaves, EVER,” he said authoritatively, tapping the page. “My heart could explode.”