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Sanctum
Diver, the evening shift foreman, is on me again, this time because
the tail of my shirt is always untucked, which it is, but only because
every time I lean over to pick up a package the back of the shirt
rides up and eventually the tail comes untucked. It isn’t my
fault the uniforms were made poorly in some sweatshop, is it? But
Diver’s way beyond cause and effect. He’s firmly rooted
in the present. Excuses, even logical ones, do not hold water with
the man.
So I appeal to his sense of reason. I ask him, “Diver, if
the tail of your shirt came untucked every time you bent over to
pick up a package, which meant at least a hundred thousand times
every day, would you stop to tuck it in? How can I meet the trucks
if I’m always
tucking in my shirt?”
The trucks come into the airplane hangar every night at six. For
the half hour beforehand, we all stand around and bitch about the
cold, about the heavy parkas and the way they stink
of jet fuel, about Diver. We bitch beforehand because when the trucks
come in there’s no time to say anything at all—you just
take a truck and start heaving packages into the bins, according
to what zone they’re going to: west coast, east coast, great
lakes, etc., etc. I mean you either make the planes or you don’t,
you know? Never mind if something says FRAGILE or THIS IS END UP—even
Diver says never mind that. You just get to it and for half an hour
you’re in your own little world—with the earplugs in all
you can really hear is your own breathing and the faint whine of
the jet engines—and the next thing you know more than an hour’s
gone by and the trucks are all empty and a guy like me, someone
with a few months experience, has filled two bins. The real psycho
lifers can fill three, sometimes three and a half bins. A new guy’s
lucky if he gets one. Then the bins go out to the planes and after
that we knock off.
If I didn’t have to stop and tuck in my shirt I bet I could
fill three.
Because we’re angry with each other, I call
him Diver and he calls me Nash. He’s the opposite of my parents.
With them, the more names they call you the more trouble you’re
in. If at home I ever leaned back in my chair at the dinner table,
one of them would say, “Michael. Sit up.” If I cut school
and went to the movies with my lunch money, one of them would address
me as “Michael John.” But if, say, I got drunk at a party
out at someone’s camp and, after the cops were called, hid
in the trees and waited for the first cop on the scene to get out
of his car and walk into the camp with his flashlight to investigate,
and then climbed drunk into the idling cruiser and drove it a mile
down the muddy road, the siren going like hell, before turning it
nose-first into a tree that seemed to come out of nowhere, which
I did, and I don’t want to go into that any more now other
than to say that it’s not an advisable thing to do—when
I did that and my father came to pick me up at the police station,
all he said was, “Michael John Nash.”
He shook his head and looked at the ground as they
took the cuffs off. We walked out to the car in total silence. As
he was driving me back to my apartment, he said it once more.
“Michael John Nash,” he said.
And I knew I was in trouble.
But with Diver, when I’m doing good work and meeting quota
he grins at me and says, “Michael John Nash. You’ve got
a strong back.” When I’m hung over and dragging a little
and maybe he catches me copping a cigarette outside the break room,
which is a complete no-no, even by union rules, he claps his hands
and says, “Michael Nash. Let’s move it. Let’s see
a little work, here.” But when I’m in trouble, when I’m
cited for something like, say, the tail of my shirt being untucked
while I’m working, he calls me “Nash.” And that’s
it.
I kind of like it. I mean there’s no gray area
there. You know exactly from the get-go what you’re in for
and how seriously you have to address him. You know exactly what’s
expected, which is a far cry from the rest of life.
The reason they’re so uptight about shirt tails is, some lifer
named Sexton got killed here last year because of a loose shoelace.
Sexton was up in the belly of one of the big planes, securing crates
and fixing the netting, when his shoe came untied. His foreman noticed
and told him to tie it, and Sexton did, but it came untied again
and he just figured, Hell with it. He was walking to the edge of
the plane to pick up a new crate when another worker stepped on
the loose shoelace. Sexton tripped and fell out of the plane and
dropped twenty feet down to the tarmac. Broke his neck. The sound
his head made when it hit the pavement has been described to me
in a number of different ways, like a melon that somebody dropped
out a window etc., etc. Personally, I don’t think anyone heard
anything. Because the roar of the planes is just too damn loud.
So now there are all these posters everywhere about workplace safety,
except the posters were intended for a woodshop. The logic applies,
but the photos just don’t follow, at least not for us. ALL
IT TAKES IS ONE SLIP, one poster says.
Which is true.
The photo beneath it is of a guy falling toward a spinning table
saw. He’s about to lose a few fingers. It’s obvious that
the photo is staged, what with the perfect lighting and the posed
expression of doom on the guy’s face—but still, it gives
me the creeps to look at it. Because it does only take one slip.
You think I don’t know that?
So I tuck in my shirt.
Diver softens immediately. “Michael John Nash,” he says,
“I’m willing to let this go if you’ll keep it tucked
in the rest of the day. You’ve been keeping up real well,”
etc., etc. He’s chatty because he’s in a good mood. We’ve
kept up with the Christmas rush, and he’s no doubt got a fat
bonus coming his way. And we get overtime, so everybody makes out.
He’s not a bad guy, Diver. I knew his two kids, Betsy and Oscar,
back in high school. Betsy was one grade above me, Oscar one below,
and they were both totally decent people. They were both state champs
at tennis, and everybody always wanted them to play each other,
but they never would. Like I said, they were totally decent people.
Which is the best way, I’ve found, to judge a parent. If the
kids are assholes you can just bet the parents are, too.
Just before we knock off, which is supposed to happen
exactly at seven but usually happens at more like five minutes to
seven, some of the guys ask if I want to head into Georgetown. I
say No, not because I don’t want to go, but because Mrs. Polansky,
my probation officer, says that I shouldn’t be hanging around
drinking with guys like them, that I have to break the cycle of
behavior, etc., etc. Ever since I took that test she’s been
all over me about getting my life together, about the need to actualize
my potential, etc., etc. Apparently I scored damn near the top one
percent. No fewer than six people telephoned to tell me that, including
one guy from Mensa, who asked me if I wanted to join. Problem is,
I told him, I load boxes. I’m not building a better mousetrap,
here. But you have an extraordinary mind, Mensa said. Extraordinary,
son. Fine, I said. In the box-loading world, where do you think
this great mind gets me? I’ll tell you where. It gets me thinking,
I could save time and load more boxes if I don’t stop to tuck
in my shirt every time it comes out. And somehow, that gets me cited.
People say brains don’t mean shit when you use your back for
a living, and I’d take it one step further. I’d suggest
that brains can get you in a lot of trouble.
After I tell the guys I’m not going they begin talking about
me in the third person, i.e., “This is why Nash never gets
laid,” or, “It’s Nash’s own damn fault he’s
got no experience,” etc., etc. Which pisses me off. Because
they’re being totally inaccurate: I happen to have plenty of
sexual experience. I just haven’t had any lately. They know
this because last week I made the colossal mistake of admitting
during lunch break that I haven’t been laid in more than a
year.
Never admit something like that to married guys. Because when you
do they make you feel like not getting laid when you’re single
is some sort of crime or something. Like it’s something you’ve
perpetrated. And then they start to talk about how, if they had
only known then what they know now, etc., etc., which is a trick
that married men pull a lot, and total bullshit to boot because
you just know that none of them was getting laid, either, when he
was single. That’s probably why he got married.
The answering machine’s blinking when I get home.
“Michael,” Mrs. Polansky says, “this is a reminder
about our meeting coming up on Monday. And of course you have a
scheduled drug and alcohol screen coming up next Friday. I’m
sure you won’t let anything untoward pass between your lips
before then,” etc., etc. I think it’s ridiculous for them
to schedule my drug tests, and I told them so, which I would agree
is kind of ridiculous of me. Since I don’t smoke pot, all I
have to do is stop drinking about thirty-six hours beforehand and
the results come up clean. And of course only an idiot would foul
that up. Or someone who wants to get caught, which Mrs. Polansky
says occasionally does happen.
They said that about me. After the whole thing with the “stolen”
police cruiser: that I wanted to get caught. When my mom got hauled
in to speak to the judge, she said that she and my father had thrown
me out of the house a few months earlier for my behavior, etc.,
etc., that I shouldn’t go to jail since they were to blame,
etc., etc. Man, she really erupted in tears. I did, too. I guess
that was all that was needed, because the judge decided that what
I had done was a cry for help, and he assigned me to Mrs. Polansky.
She had me meet with this psychologist, the same guy who later gave
me my IQ test. He interviewed me for like an hour, asking me all
these questions like, “Do you feel angry with your parents
for throwing you out of the house?”
I told him I didn’t want to talk about that.
“Have you ever thought about hurting yourself?” he asked
me.
I asked him what he meant by that.
“Have you ever considered how you might do it?”
And I asked, “Do what?”
“Hurt yourself,” he said.
“Why would I ever do something like that?” I asked.
“You already have,” he said.
I disagreed. I’d never pull a stunt like that. If I had known
then what I know now, as the guys at work say, I would have told
him, “All it takes is one slip.”
Something strange happened to my parents after they kicked me out.
I’m an only child, so I was kind of the center of their whole
universe. Sometimes they almost seemed to enjoy that I was so messed
up. At least they had something to talk about, then. When I moved
out there was a minicollapse which has since then, I think, been
shored up.
During the mini-collapse, their respective personalities got the
best of them. My mom, whose own mother was a fall-down drunk, has
been on the prowl for a female role model and surrogate parent all
her life. Apparently she found one. A few months ago my father told
me that my mother had developed a crush on her coworker Alice, a
refugee from West Virginia who wasn’t a hell of a lot older
than me. My mother is a guide at the Smithsonian Museum, down on
the mall. She’s the head guide for the space travel wing, a
job that performs the twin duties of keeping her happy and keeping
my father constantly primed with jokes. This alleged crush is strictly
platonic, my father assured me, a sexless crush, like the crush
one has on one’s much older, much cooler, licensed sibling
while one is suffering through those spineless, awkward, uncool,
unlicensed years of junior high school. (I, of course, know nothing
about this feeling, but my father insists that it exists, and that
it’s very real.) I gather that it must be, considering my mom’s
recent un-mom-like behavior. I made a list of all the things she
started doing differently so that I could keep it all straight,
and tacked it up on the wall:
1. getting her hair cut exactly like Alice’s
2. selling her car and buying a new car exactly like Alice’s
3. buying new clothes, all of which bear a striking resemblance
to Alice’s
4. constantly employing Alice’s favorite phrase, ‘Step
it up,’ when describing parties and/or adventures in bars after
work lets out
5. writing Alice’s name all over notepads while she (mom) talks
on the phone
6. gum
7. Led Zeppelin
My father, who generally languishes at the other end of the I’m-losing-it
scale, broods. And not just everyday brooding, which was typical
of him before. Now it’s like hanging out with some moody bipolar
poet-genius or something. The man is a paragon of regret and baroque
pessimism. Sometimes he zones out right in the middle of dinner,
his chin in his fist, looking steadily out the window at the rain,
like he can see something out there the rest of us can’t. Snap
out of it, pop, I say to him, and he does, but as soon as I turn
my back he’s at it again. Sometimes I want to sucker-punch
him with the same questions the psychologist hit me with. “Dad,
have you ever thought about hurting yourself,” etc., etc.,
“How would you do it,” etc., etc. I’d ask him if
I weren’t so worried about him. He’s teetering on the
fence of his mid-forties and sometimes, out of absolutely nowhere,
he’ll say something like, “You know my life is more than
half over?”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
The both of them.
I’m halfway into my second bin Friday evening, parched as a
castaway, the parka itching the hell out of my neck, when I remember
that tonight, the twentieth, is the night I’m supposed to make
Christmas dinner for my parents. I have done exactly zero to prepare.
They’ve been planning on coming over for weeks, and of course
I forgot about it until now.
I’ve noticed that I often forget simple things like Christmas
dinners, which is strange because my memory’s pretty sharp.
I mean if you were to rattle off ten numbers I could repeat them
right away, backwards and forwards, and I could tell you all about
Occam’s Razor even though I haven’t studied that in four
years, and sometimes these funny little snatches of poetry I studied
in high school keep looping over in my mind, like these two lines
from “The Death of the Hired Man,” or sometimes whole
stanzas by that Eliot guy. But I can’t remember the dates of
Christmas dinners, or of my parents’ birthdays, or of appointments
with Mrs. Polansky. Mrs. Polansky says this is because I have a
selective memory and I passive-aggress people by deprioritizing
them. At which point I ask her why she speaks with so many hyphenated
words, which I think is funny, but apparently she doesn’t,
because when I ask her that she gives me that look. I take the bus
home and then walk to the grocery store, and of course when I’m
halfway there rain starts to fall. The South is kind of nice most
of the year, with the white blossoms of the dogwood trees everywhere,
and that cut-grass smell you get outside the city in the spring,
but in late December it’s just a drag, especially when you’re
walking to the store and a cold rain comes spuming down in sheets
and soaks your hair and your shoes and you’ve got like six
blocks to go. Four hours North, up in Pennsylvania, they’re
busy chucking snowballs at each other, but I’m walking to the
store in the rain. That’s the South. Might as well live in
Thailand. Not to mention that Christmas dinner would be hard enough
to make without the fact that I have to walk or take the bus or
catch a ride everywhere I go, because I lost my license after the
whole “stolen” police cruiser thing, which I don’t
want to talk about, except to say that having no license is a bummer,
especially when it rains.
As I breeze in through the grocery store’s sliding doors, my
hair wet, it occurs to me that with a little derring-do I could
compose a serviceable Christmas dinner without dirtying a single
pan. I walk back to the deli and study the food in the cheerless
white light. There are carcasses of chickens, trays of butchered
ham, desserts. Everything. I decide then and there to pass the deli’s
work off as my own, even to the point of wetting some pans and turning
them upside down in my nearly unused pot-rack, a housewarming gift
I nearly turned into matchsticks my first night in my apartment.
Apparently the no-pan thing is all the rage, because the deli counter
is totally crowded. I take a number and wait in the aisle until
it’s my turn. After a quick assessment of what would compose
a plausible, Nash-like dinner, I order a seven-pound roast chicken,
two quarts of mashed potatoes, a pint of homemade gravy—whatever
that means, here in a supermarket—a quart of green beans and
ten dinner rolls from the asthmatic counterman. He seems cheerful
for someone who is obviously busting his ass, and wheezing to boot.
Christmas music is playing through a little radio behind him, and
he’s kind of humming along with it. His mood cheers me up,
and I even find myself looking forward to dinner tonight. But as
he reaches down into the case to lift out my chicken, I’m stopped
cold when behind him I spot a familiar-looking poster on the wall.
ALL IT TAKES IS ONE SLIP, the poster says. Same table saw. Same
expression of doom on the guy’s face. And just like that, I’m
neck-deep in it again. I decide that when I get home the pot rack
is toast. I decide that making kindling out of that emblematic gift
will be a life-affirming, proactive pursuit.
During the walk home I estimate that I had to lift one thousand,
four hundred forty boxes to pay for dinner, which is damn near the
equivalent of cooking it yourself. Or ought to be.
When my parents walk into the living room and find no tree, they
seem lost. Each of them holds a shopping bag full of wrapped gifts,
and the gifts, I realize, are for me.
“Where should we put these?” my mother asks.
I tell her to put them in the corner by the couch.
My father has brought two bottles of wine, one red and one white.
“Which one do you guys want first?”
I tell him to have whichever one he wants.
“I’ll open both,” he says.
My mother has this pinched expression on her face, her lips tight
and thin, the same look she gets whenever she double-faults away
a set of tennis. Obviously they talked over whether or not it was
okay to bring wine, and decided that it was, so why does she have
to beat it to death?
My mothers asks, “What is that great smell?”
I tell her I’m roasting a chicken.
“It looks like quite a production,” she says.
It does look like quite a production, minus the pot rack, which
is now so much kindling shoved deep in the trash can out back. I
wasn’t exactly sure which pots would be used to make a roast
chicken, mashed potatoes, cut green beans, gravy and dinner rolls,
so I wetted one of each type of pan and turned them upside down
on a rag beside the sink. All the sides are in serving dishes covered
with foil on top of the stove. The rolls are in a basket on the
table, which I realize I’ve set backwards. My father seems
impressed.
“Teach a guy to fish,” he says, beaming.
Mercifully, no one asks about the pot rack. I watch my father consider,
and then, a fraction of an instant later, reject a number of a inappropriate
jokes, something, I’m sure, along the lines of, “If we
had known we’d get a meal like this we would have kicked you
out sooner,” etc., etc. I’m glad he doesn’t say it,
mostly because I know he’d have regretted it, and of course
he would have brooded all day tomorrow because of it.
“What should we drink to?” my mother asks.
“How about to Mike’s place,” my father says. “Our
son who’s doing so well.”
My mother begins to cry. She stands with her arms crossed over her
chest, eyes closed, the rim of the wine glass in her left hand pressed
to her lower lip. Everyone’s embarrassed. She cries, as she
always does, in absolute silence. Even in court, she didn’t
make a sound. If you didn’t see the tears rolling down and
the way she trembled, you wouldn’t even know it was happening.
I
walk over to her and say, “Come on, mom. I’m all right.”
I hug her but she doesn’t move a muscle. I’m hugging an
edifice.
She cried the same way on the day I left home. I had packed the
night before and lined the cardboard boxes along the front hall,
and all that afternoon we were tripping over the mess. We have a—they
have a very narrow, short front hall, so I stacked the boxes up
almost all the way to the ceiling. It occurred to me that they might
think I had created a mess on purpose, but I
really hadn’t. There was just so much stuff. Every time you
stacked one thing on top, something else came sliding back down.
I went to bed early that night because the movers were coming at
six. My bedroom was on the first floor and for a long time after
I went to bed I heard them doing the dishes. Neither of them spoke.
When they went to bed they forgot to turn out the front hall light
and through my open bedroom door I could see the boxes stacked in
the front hall. Every hour or so something slid down and fell on
the floor. The next day they were up before me and they helped pack
the boxes into the truck, and then we drove over to my development,
where I’d picked out a one-bedroom townhouse the week before,
and we did it all in reverse. After the movers were gone, we took
a break and drove into Arlington, where my parents bought me a dining
room table, a set of pots and pans, a silverware set, and the pot
rack. By the time we got back to my apartment it was night again,
and the boxes were stacked up in the front hall, just like they’d
been stacked up in their front hall the night before, except this
time it was my front hall. Everything was turned around. Except
things kept falling down here, too. My mother seemed to pick up
on this, and right away she began to cry, exactly the way she’s
crying now. Except that night she was holding a bottle of iced tea
instead of a wine glass.
I took the test at the psychologist’s house on the last Sunday
in August. My dad drove me over in the afternoon and the shrink
took me upstairs to his office over the garage, this little room
he called his sanctum sanctorum. It wasn’t exactly what I had
expected, what with all his degrees and everything. Just a plain
little room filled with fishing rods and rolled up maps and stacks
of National Geographic sort of spilling over onto the carpet. The
whole time we were up there I could hear his kids playing in the
backyard pool, and I could tell he wished he were outside with them
and not cooped up with me. Not to mention that he looked like he
was about to throw a Nicotine fit the whole time.
I expected the shrink to hand me a stack of paper and leave me alone
for an hour, just like a normal test I’d take in school, but
instead he sat across from me at the desk and, one at a time, wrote
questions down on a sheet of paper and then pushed the paper across
the table toward me. Usually he wouldn’t give me any instructions—he’d
just push over a page that said 2, 10, 58, ?, 2074 and I’d
fill in the answer, or sometimes he’d say, “There’s
a word hidden in these letters,” and push a piece of paper
across the table that said
h t e a n i v a l
I answered damn near every question. It was kind of easy, if you
really want to know. I don’t mean to sound full of myself or
anything, because, really, if you were to put me on Quiz Show or
something, I’d totally get my ass whipped, and I always lose
arguments because I have a hard time not seeing the other person’s
point, and during holidays nobody in the family ever wants to have
me as their partner on Trivial Pursuit, because I don’t know
jack shit about history or baseball. I have very little of what
Mrs. Polansky calls applied knowledge.
This is a problem. Whatever Mrs. Polansky may say about my potential,
my grades were always terrible. I struggled in calculus, in history,
in physics. School in general had started to seem like slow torture,
so I began ditching class, sneaking out of the house after midnight
so I could hang out at the playground and smoke grass, etc., etc.
That’s what got me thrown out of school, and then out of the
house.
They even gave me a couple of warnings before they did it. My dad
came into my room one night as I was getting into bed, and he said,
“This has to stop.”
I asked him what had to stop.
“You snuck out again last night after your curfew.”
I told him that I was sorry about that.
He sort of walked around the room for a few minutes with his hands
in his pockets, not looking at me, examining my movie posters really
closely, reading the fine print on the bottom like he wanted to
know who all the actors were, and then, with his back still turned,
he said, “Do you ever get lonely, Mike?” Then he turned
to look at me and I saw that he was blushing, and he had this strange
look on his face that was sort of half anger and half sadness.
I told him yes I kind of was sometimes.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I told him I didn’t.
He turned and started reading the same poster all over again, and
then, with his back still to me, he said, “Your mother and
I have decided that you have to make a change. If you want to live
here you’ll have to follow our rules. If you don’t follow
the rules you have to leave. It’s that simple.”
And I did, for a while. But then of course I started sneaking out
again, etc., etc. And that question he asked always bothered me.
Do you ever get lonely, Mike? At first I thought it was just an
innocent question, that maybe he thought that was the reason I was
acting out, to try and make friends. Now I realize that he was pleading
with me. Don’t make me do this, he was saying, because we’ll
be lonely here without you. I wish I had understood. When the day
finally came, my father said they were throwing me out because they
wanted to give me a sense of ownership and responsibility over my
own life, whatever that means. At first I struggled a bit with being
able to make my own rules, and eventually arrived at the whole incident
with the “stolen” police cruiser. Then they assigned me
to Mrs Polansky, and she got me the job with Diver.
The first day on the job, Diver said to me, “I used to have
problems, too. I used to be in your shoes. You know I never finished
high school?”
I said I didn’t know that, but that he seemed to be doing just
fine anyway.
“Nash,” he said, “that’s the whole point. A
guy like you could do well, if you’d just keep your head together.”
I asked him what he meant by that.
“I mean,” he said, “you can’t keep acting like
your own worst enemy. Mrs. Polansky, she’s tough, but someday
you’ll see that she was the best friend you ever had. I told
her I’d give you a chance. And I will. But you’ve got
to promise me you’re going to keep it together.”
I told him I would try. And I did. Everyone seems to think that
I’ve got my act together. Whereas to me everything seems exactly
the same as it always was, except now I’ve got to pay all the
bills.
My mother stops crying. She doesn’t apologize, but she does
sort of loosen up and she hugs me back. “Dinner looks great,
Mickey,” she says, which she hasn’t called me for years,
which damn near brings me to tears, but I hold that back and say,
because I’m so grateful that she’s sad, “I lied,
mom. I didn’t make any of it. I forgot all about dinner until
a few hours ago and I walked to the store and got it all there.
That’s why my jacket’s still wet in the front hall.”
My father laughs. Then the two of them go silent as they realize
I’m serious.
“No shit?” he asks.
“But,” I say, “I did the math, and I figure I lifted
one thousand four hundred forty boxes to pay for it.”
“Well that’s something,” he says.
“And you don’t have to lift anything more until Monday,”
my mom says.
“You even put the pots out,” my father says. He’s
seems genuinely impressed.
“I’ll grant you this, Mickey,” he says. “You’re
getting things done.”
And he’s never called me that, so this time I do tear up,
but I go into the bathroom and lock the door and do it quietly until
it’s all over. When I come back out, they’ve brought the
food to the table. They’re sitting there waiting for me.
“Shouldn’t we say grace?” my mother asks.
“Mike should say it,” my dad says.
“Do you know how?” my mother asks.
“Hell,” my father says, “it’s his place. He
can do what he wants.”
“I can do it,” I say.
We hold hands. My mother’s hand feels warm in mine, her fingertips
long and slender, and she’s holding my fingers tightly. The
two of them close their eyes and lower their heads, and I can sort
of imagine what they’re thinking, “Thank you Lord for
helping my son get his life together,” “I am thankful
my son has turned his life around,” etc., etc., and although
I’m happy they feel that way, I feel like reminding them what
the poster on the wall said: All it takes is one slip. Then it occurs
to me that although I’ve already slipped with them a lot of
times, somehow they’re still here. It occurs to me that this
was harder for them than it was for me, and I try and think of something
nice to say, some nice line that will make everything all right,
and forgive everyone.
Except I can’t think of what to say. I’ve never said grace
in my life, and the whole idea of consecration seems a little absurd
right now. What I really want to do is ask them if I can come home
yet. But in the same way I know that the missing number in 2, 10,
58, ?, 2074 is 346, and that h t e a n i v a l is really leviathan
in hiding, I already know the answer is going to be No—and
because I already know that, instead I say the first thing that
leaps into my mind, the two lines from that “Death of the Hired
Man” poem I read in high school.
I know just how it feels.
To think of the right thing to say too late.
And then my mother opens her eyes and catches me looking at her.
“Michael John Nash,” she says, and I count three long
heartbeats before she takes her hand back.
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