“Ask me again,” she whispers.
There is no doubt that she’s referring to “our date.” But I don’t want to make another mistake, if, indeed, I’ve already made one. So I ask her to clarify. “Would you like me to ask you the same question I asked you in our earlier conversation, using the same words?” I say. “Or would you like me to ask you the same question but in a different way?”
“Jesus Christ,” she whispers. “Just ask me out again.” I can hear the urgency in her whisper. I don’t want her to hang up on me once more. So I ask her, again, to accompany me to the NCMHP annual meeting on Thursday. I use the same rhetoric as before. I even tell her that I’m the keynote speaker, in case she’s forgotten.
“That sounds nice,” she whispers, and then she once again hangs up.
Home
Fifteen minutes later, I was home: 22 Thompson Boulevard. I stowed my bike in the garage, walked through the garage door, through the breezeway, through the kitchen door, into the kitchen, which was empty.
It was a quarter of seven, dinnertime, but Mother wasn’t in the kitchen making it. My dad was the one who always made dinner; Mother was the one who ate one, maybe two bites of whatever he made, then left the table and went back to reading something for work, back to business, leaving my dad standing there, looking wistful with his apron and ladle. I walked through the kitchen, into the living room. It was dark except for the flickering TV. Mother was sitting on the couch, watching the TV. Her legs were curled up underneath her and to the side. She was holding a glass with a little brown liquid left in it. The portable phone was next to her on the couch, mouth and ear pieces facing up. I sat down in the easy chair to her right and looked at the TV. She was watching the news.
“I’m home,” I said.
“Where have you been?” Mother asked. She sipped from her glass and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes, which were still red. It had been nine hours since I’d left the house that morning, and still Mother’s eyes were red; I wondered how long she’d been crying.
“Out riding my bike,” I said.
“Your bike?” Mother asked. She turned her head toward me and gave me her lawyer look, daring me to tell her something she’d know wasn’t true.
“What?” I said. “It’s true.” Because it was, mostly.
“You were riding your bike in the snow?”
“What snow?” I said, and then looked out our bay windows, toward the street. It was snowing. Big flakes twirling and drifting in the floodlights. It was the first snow of the year. There is nothing more hopeful than the first snow of the year, and suddenly, everything seemed possible. I walked over to the liquor cabinet, brought back the bottle of Early Times. I poured some of the bourbon into Mother’s glass, put the bottle on the table in front of her. Because sometimes Mother became less of a lawyer, less of a mother, when she drank more than her usual one glass of Early Times.
“Thanks,” she said. But she didn’t pick up the glass and drink from it. She was too busy watching the news. The local news guy had interrupted the national news guy. Two soldiers from Fort Drum had been killed in Iraq. That made twelve total in November and the month wasn’t even half over. The local news guy kept calling them “the latest fatalities.” Then he stopped talking and disappeared from the screen, and the two soldiers took his place: their faces, their names, their hometowns, their ranks. They were both white guys; one guy looked like he could still have been in high school; the other guy was older, like he could have been the younger guy’s high school teacher. Their hair was bristly and short, and they were smiling widely, like they liked their haircuts.
“Oh,” Mother said to the TV. She put her hands over her face and then mumbled something else. I couldn’t hear what it was, but it didn’t sound happy, and I wondered if she was going to start crying again. It’s OK, I wanted to tell her. Those guys are dead, but my dad isn’t. My dad is in the VA hospital, and he’s in bad shape, and I know you know that because you were crying this morning. Even though you didn’t believe it when the VA hospital called two weeks ago, and even though the hospital didn’t call you this morning, you must have found out this morning somehow that my dad really is in the hospital because you were crying in the bathroom. But you don’t have to cry, because at least he’s not dead. At least he’s alive, and he’s going to get better and then he’s going to come home to us. But I need you to help me get him better, get him home. If you don’t help me, then I still have this plan, but it involves finding Exley, and I don’t know if I can do it. Honestly, the plan scares me a little. Please help me get my dad home; please save me from my plan. But I knew I couldn’t say any of those things until Mother admitted she knew that my dad was in the VA hospital, and if she admitted that, then she’d also have to admit that she’d been wrong about my dad going to Iraq and that I was right. And I knew she wouldn’t admit any of that. We were like an old married couple: neither of us would admit we were wrong unless we were presented with proof that we were wrong. That meant I’d have to bring my dad to Mother; I wouldn’t be able to get Mother to come to him.
Mother took her hands away from her face, and I could see that her eyes were dry, even though they were still red. “I’m sorry, Miller,” Mother said, “but I’m going to bed. I had a long, rough day.” She smiled like she really was sorry, but then she picked up the remote control and — click! — turned off the TV and also ended whatever conversation we were about to have. This was one of the reasons I called her Mother in my head. I went to the kitchen, put two pieces of bread in the toaster, waited until they popped, then peanut-buttered them. Then I brought them back into the living room. Mother was gone, and so was the bottle of Early Times. I ate my toast, walked upstairs. My parents’ door was closed; there was no light coming from underneath the door. I thought maybe she was already asleep. But then I could hear Mother in there, talking very softly. But to whom? And what was she saying? I moved closer to the door and stepped on the loose board in the hall floor, the one that always creaked when you stepped on it. It creaked, and Mother stopped talking. I stood there and listened for a long time, but I heard nothing else. Finally, I went downstairs to my dad’s study. I took a pen and a pad of paper out of my dad’s desk and wrote all about what had happened to me that day, just like Dr. Pahnee told me to do. And while I was at it, I also wrote down another thing that my dad had taught me, just like the first doctor had told me to do. When I was done, I put the pen and paper back in the drawer, closed the drawer, got a copy of A Fan’s Notes out of the window seat (my dad kept a bunch of spare copies stashed there, the way some people store spare batteries or hide bottles of booze, in case of an emergency), and took it with me to my room.
THIS TIME I didn’t stop. I got into bed, sat upright with the help of one of those big corduroy reading pillows with the arms, opened A Fan’s Notes to the first page. I read the whole first sentence: “On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants — Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.” And then I just kept reading. I learned so much: I learned that you never wrote the whole year out, but instead used a — for the last digit. I learned that with some people you could use their whole name, but others you just used their first initial. I learned that Exley’s favorite football team was the New York Giants and that every Sunday he’d have breakfast at the Crystal and read all the New York and Syracuse newspapers, and then, later that day, he’d watch the Giants on the TV at the New Parrot with the bartender, Freddy. I learned that when Exley watched the Giants game at the New Parrot, it really meant he acted the game out, like he was doing charades. I learned that Exley was, or had been, an English teacher in Glacial Falls, a town I’d never heard of. I learned that Exley had a best friend, a guy he called the Counselor. I learned Exley drank, and he drank, and he drank, and he drank so much he thought he’d had a heart attack, although he hadn’t. I learned that he’d been married and that he had twin sons. I learned that sometimes he talked like a guy who didn’t know he wasn’t onstage, and sometimes he talked like a guy who’d learned to speak at a bowling alley. I learned that he sounded a little like my dad, or that my dad sounded a little like him. I learned that Exley’s dad, Earl Exley, was a great athlete and that he was tough, tougher than Exley. I learned that even though his dad had been dead for a long time, Exley hadn’t gotten over it yet. And that was just the first chapter! Anyway, I read and read until I got to the end of the second-to-last page, and then I stopped. Because now that I’d read the book, for the first time, after more than a year of not reading it because I promised my dad I wouldn’t, I didn’t want the book to end. I was like Exley, who never wanted the Giants games to end. I felt the same way about his book. As far as I’d known up until that point, the most important thing about reading a book was to say you’d finished it faster than anyone thought you could. But I did not want to finish this book. Some of the books I’d read had told me that love is fleeting; some of the other books I’d read had told me that love is eternal. But they were wrong. Love isn’t either of those things. Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end. I was in love with A Fan’s Notes, just like my dad was. And I was in love with my dad, just like I was in love with A Fan’s Notes. I wanted both of them to last forever.