And I would never hear his voice again.
And I would never see him sitting in his chair reading a book, never see that pensive look on his face, not ever again.
And I would never see him walk in through the door wearing his mail carrier uniform, that look that said, I’ve done my job today.
And I would never smell the lingering scent of cigarettes in the room again.
And I would never see those looks that he and my mother passed between them.
I got up and took a shower. I knew my sisters would be coming from Tucson and that the house would be crowded, and I had no idea when they were arriving. For some strange reason, I felt so alone as I took a shower and I wished Dante was here. I had never taken a shower with him, and I wondered what that would be like. I supposed men and women did that all the time. And then I just said, Stop, stop, stop with all this thinking.
* * *
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table talking to someone on the phone and having a cup of coffee. I poured myself a cup and kissed her on the top of her head. When she hung up the phone, she said, “I know this may be a little rough for you, but will you write your father’s obituary so we can have it to the newspaper by one o’clock? And will you hand it to the people at the front desk? They’ll take it from there.”
Like I was going to say no. I’d never written an obituary before.
My mother had written some notes on a notepad. “You might want to include this information.” And she’d cut out several sample obituaries from the pile of newspapers she kept to recycle.
“Mom, you are the quintessential schoolteacher.”
“Thank you—I think.”
“And one more thing,” she said. I could tell that what she was going to ask me to do next was going to be lot harder than writing an obituary. “Will you honor your father by giving his eulogy?”
I think we both wanted to start crying again—but we refused to do it out of sheer stubbornness.
“Oh, your father kept a journal sporadically. I have the others put away. Sometimes he wrote in it every day. Sometimes he’d go weeks without writing in it. But I want you read the last entry.” She handed me the journal. I turned it to the last page that had writing on it.
Ari asked me if there was one piece of advice I could give him that would help him live his life. I thought it was a very ambitious question, but I have a very ambitious son. We had been so distant that I thought I would never hear my son ask me for any advice. But we’ve earned the love we have between us, I think. I see him and I think, How can a young man so rare and so sensitive and beautiful have come from me? The answer is easy: He came from Liliana. What advice would I give to Ari to help him live his life? I would tell him this: Never do anything to prove to anyone else, or even to prove to yourself, that you’re a man. Because you are a man.
I kept staring at his words and at his handwriting. “Can I have this, Mom?”
She nodded. Neither one of us had anything to say. But I promised myself that I would live my life according to those words, because if I did, then I would always be able to look at myself in the mirror and call myself his son.
* * *
My mother was making a list, and I was writing a draft of my father’s obituary on a legal pad of paper. I heard the doorbell ring. “I’ll get it.” And when I opened the door, there stood Mrs. Alvidrez, holding an apple pie.
“Hi,” I said.
“I was very saddened to hear of your father’s passing. He was an honorable man.”
“Thank you,” I said.
My mother had come to the door, and I stepped aside.
“I know I’m not welcome in your house, Liliana. You have your reasons, and I am not here to disrespect you or your house.” I couldn’t see, but I could hear what was happening and it seemed to me that Mrs. Alvidrez was fighting back tears. “Jaime was a good man. And I know that your grief must be a heavy weight. He loved my apple pies, so I thought I’d…” And then she stopped in midsentence. And I knew that she was struggling to hold back her tears. If she was anything, she was a fiercely proud woman.
“Come in, Lola. Come in and have a cup of coffee with me and we’ll eat some apple pie and you can tell me what you remember of Jaime so that I will remember that part of him. I was angry the last time you were here. But you are always welcome in this house.”
I was sitting on the couch in the living room. My mother took the pie from Mrs. Alvidrez and handed it to me. Then she hugged Mrs. Alvidrez and the two women wept into each other’s shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Lola. Thank you.”
When the tears were done, my mother took the pie from my hands and they both walked into the kitchen. I kept working on my draft of my father’s obituary and then I shook my head. I heard laughter coming from the kitchen.
My mom and Mrs. Alvidrez—their connection mattered. And they respected that connection. It was true, adults were teachers. They taught you things by how they behaved. And just now, my mom and Mrs. Alvidrez taught me a word Cassandra had begun to teach me: “forgiveness.” It was a word that needed to live inside me. I had a feeling that if that word didn’t live inside me, the word “happiness” would never live inside me either.
My mom and Mrs. Alvidrez were in the kitchen—and they were laughing. They had lost something valuable. And that thing of great value had returned. Forgiveness.
Thirty-Three
THE HOUSE WAS FULL OF people. The living coming to pay their tributes to the dead. Already I was tired of the tears and the sadness—even though I went into the backyard to cry off and on. Legs would follow me and lick my tears away, and I told her that she had better not ever die. This thing of losing your father was a kind of hell I didn’t want to live in. But it wasn’t as if I had a choice.
I knew that death didn’t only happen to me. I knew that hundreds, if not thousands of people would die today, some of them in accidents, some of them killed for no reason, some of them from cancer.
I remembered the banner of the protesters: ONE AIDS DEATH EVERY 12 MINUTES. Who would go to their funerals? Who would give their eulogies? Who would praise their lives? Who would sing their names?
I was thinking that, somewhere, a man with AIDS died at the same hour as my father.
And maybe a woman’s child died in a hospital in London, and maybe a wealthy man who was once a Nazi now hiding in Bogotá took his last breath.
And maybe seven people died in a terrible explosion in a country we know as Syria.
And there was a murder taking place in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And a man and his wife died instantly in a terrible car accident.
And somewhere it was spring and a nest of tiny sparrows were singing for food. And Legs was sitting beside me in my truck as I drove to Dante’s house to write a eulogy for my father, who just a few days before had told me the story of how he met and fell in love with my mother.
And Sophocles, not a month old, was already connected to the land of the living and the dying.
Thirty-Four
NEW YEAR’S EVE. MY MOTHER would not be kissing my father. Dante and I would not be going to the party that Gina had invited us to—though it wasn’t her party to be inviting people. I wasn’t so hopeful about the new year anymore. My mother was talking to my sisters, and it seemed they were planning everything out. There was something very practical about all three of them. Maybe that’s what made them all such good schoolteachers.