At the kitchen table, the coroner was filling out a report. He watched the man’s pen move across the page in a flurry of checks and hurried notes, and he realized, almost in that instant and in a way that amazed him, what his mother’s death meant. There was no one left to work out the silence between him and his father. There was no interpreter left to relay messages. Who would tell both men that they loved each other?
The coroner stood, closing his folder and taking his cup to the sink. “I believe that’s everything,” he said.
His father was at the dining room table, staring blankly out the window at the woods and road, and it was left to Cole to acknowledge the man. “Thank you,” he said. “My father wanted me to ask about a cause of death.” This was a lie, but he thought it would sound better if he phrased it that way.
“Can’t be sure. An aneurism in all likelihood. Would he like an autopsy performed?”
The words shivered him. Cole ran a hand through his hair, unsure of what to answer and afraid to ask his father who had still not stirred. He’d not said one word after he called 911.
“Tell you what,” the coroner said, reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt. His face was fleshy and pockmarked, his jowls shook as he talked. “Have him call later this afternoon, after he’s had some time. After you’ve both had some time.”
Cole nodded and took the man’s card. “Thank you,” he said and stepped outside with the man. Two attendants from the funeral home were lifting his mother’s body into the back of a blue-gray hearse.
Cole followed the coroner to his vehicle. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, shaking the man’s hand and feeling how soft and smooth it was. So much so that he had to resist the urge to wipe it against his jeans after they were through.
The coroner drove off, and Cole turned to the funeral home attendants, never taking his eye off the back window where his mother rested inside.
“We’ll take good care of her,” the older man said. He wore a set of thin gold-rimmed glasses. His son, just a few years older than Cole, was with him, standing by the car. He looked impatient and unpracticed compared to his father. “It’s a very tough time for you,” the father went on. “We understand that. We want you to know we will do our best to make your family as comfortable as possible.”
“Thank you,” Cole said, for what seemed like too many times in such a short span. His mother had died, and so far the only thing he’d been able to say about the whole affair was a string of thank-yous to people he’d never met or seen before until today. He’d not even had a chance to talk to his father about it.
The man’s eyes saw right into Cole’s with such sincere condolence Cole had to turn away, as if he was searching for something he’d lost or forgotten.
Then they too were gone and Cole was alone in the driveway. The beech tree limbs shook in the breeze. He looked to the window, but his father was not there, though the smudge of where his fingers had been was visible under the bright sky.
Inside the house again, Cole ducked into his parents’ bedroom from the hallway and heard the water running in the master bath. He called for his father, and the old man stuck his head around the corner, a mouth full of toothpaste, his hair combed and a fresh shirt on.
“Where’re you going?” Cole asked, walking into the bathroom.
“The funeral home,” his father said, spitting into the sink. He cupped a handful of water up to his mouth.
“Now?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“You don’t want to talk?”
“About what?”
“Mom,” he said. “What we’re going to do?”
“What can we do?” he said. He put the toothbrush in its holder and flipped the light off, moving past Cole.
“Dad,” Cole said.
“Yes,” he said, sliding change from the top of the dresser into his hand.
Cole wanted to tell him how empty he felt. He wanted to ask his father if her death felt real to him, if he had already processed what the next step was, and how they went on from here. But looking in the old man’s face, with all his stoicism, Cole could only say, “The coroner wants to know if you want an autopsy performed.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going now.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Cole said.
“If you want. There’s probably not much to do, though.”
Cole looked at him, unsure what his father meant by saying this to him. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to sit with her.”
Cole stepped closer to the old man, eyeing him, wanting to feel something more than just the loss between them. “Do you want me to call the coroner and tell him?”
“No, I’ll do it,” his father said. His eyes were already traced with darkened rings. Then he stepped toward Cole and again put his hand on his shoulder, but this time he patted him there and shook him a little. “It’ll be okay,” he said and walked into the garage, and Cole heard the door opening and the car starting. He watched the Buick move up the winding road toward town, leaving Cole in the big lonely rooms of the house.
HIS FATHER HAD not made it easy to ask for the job.
“Do you know how many men come to me in any given week looking for work? There aren’t six men put together as smart as you working in that freezer.”
“I need the work,” Cole said.
They were standing outside, beside the grill, and the drippings from the burgers hissed and made the fire rise.
“Your mother and I sent you off to school so you wouldn’t need to work a job like that. You’ve got a degree from one of the best damn schools in America. Doesn’t that count for something?” He flipped a burger and looked at Cole.
It did count for something, and though he had spent most of his twenties being shiftless and wandering far more than he sometimes thought he should have, he had finally settled into a life in Boston he’d had to give up.
“Please, Dad,” he said at last. “I just need some work for a spell.”
“I can’t promise anything,” his father said and pulled the burgers off the grill. “You better see if your mother needs help,” he said, pointing at the kitchen window, where she was cutting vegetables.
Cole walked off, wondering the whole time if his father was standing there and shaking his head in disappointment. He had built a life for Cole that was nothing like his own childhood, and this gave Cole great admiration. He had done that by working an insane number of hours at the office, ninety hours some weeks, and he developed a reputation among his friends’ parents for how often he wasn’t home or at Cole’s ballgames. Work ethic, though, wasn’t the only thing that set the old man apart. It was the chances he gave people to work and make a living. When Cole was only nine and ten, he would go to the office with him on the weekends, and on those short rides up the interstate he sometimes told Cole about the country boys he had hired who drove the trucks or who worked in the warehouse. He knew all these details about their lives, the children they had or had lost, the hollers where they had grown up and where their kinfolk still were. He had more in common with these men than he ever did with his fellow executives, and Cole came to understand his father never stopped feeling like a poor country boy himself. He wanted those men to have as many chances as he could give them.
So it never surprised him once they arrived at the office and he had broken free from the rows of cubicles outside his father’s door and was roaming the large warehouse, tracing the familiar labels from television commercials—Lay’s Potato Chips, Campbell’s Soup, Frosted Flakes—all the way up to the ceiling, that every other worker he ran into always said the same thing. “Let me tell you something about your daddy. He’s the best man.” It didn’t matter that Cole’s father kept no pictures of him or his mother on his desk; they always knew who he was, and they always wanted him to know just what kind of man he had for a father.
His mother tried to ease his worries as she always had, taking up for his father, explaining
in ways the old man couldn’t what it was he expected from Cole. “He thinks you’re too smart for you own good,” she said, then added, “He may be right.”
It had been her idea for him to ask for a job. She had smiled when she told him to do it, and before he had the chance to object, she cut him off. “You need your father,” she said. “And he needs you too.” His whole life she always gave Cole these edicts that seemed so melodramatic and solemn, and he had to laugh them off—and she did too—but he knew deep down how much she meant them.
He pictured her face, the big puffy cheeks, a feature she hated. “I have a moon face, don’t I?” she often asked. “No,” Cole told her, lying every time. The house was filled with black-and-white pictures she’d taken over the years, and Cole found himself looking at one of him when he was three. He wore a pair of cutoff jeans and held an outstretched paintbrush to his father who was covering a wall. It was always her favorite.
Cole wanted to cry over his mother’s death, but he couldn’t. No matter how cold and hollow he felt, how broken apart he was, the tears did not come. He wanted her to know just how much he had loved her, and loved her for never giving up on him. He wanted to know what she would say to him about his fear of dealing with his father. What could she tell him when he admitted that he felt he would never measure up to the old man? He compared his own lack of accomplishment next to his father’s, and it raced through his heart. It was the thing, in the empty house with rooms full of memories, he saw he had always been doing.
THE SMELL OF flowers and air freshener hung in the air. The carpet was marked with lines from vacuuming. Cole’s father was sitting in a high-backed leather chair with brass rivets along the seams. He stayed quiet while Cole paced back and forth, reading the funeral home’s brochure, looking over the wallpapering and pictures, again and again. It was restless waiting, especially when his father said and did nothing.
Finally, he asked his father, “Did you talk to Mr. Kirby?”
“Just for a moment. He said he needs a dress for your mother to wear. Can you pick one out?”
“You don’t want to?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I can do it if you need me to,” he said.
“Thanks. You should go on,” he said. “You don’t need to be here.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Cole said. “Have you gone down to see her?”
“No,” he said. “I will after they’ve prepared her.”
“Are you all right?” Cole tried to read his face, but there was nothing but impassiveness.
“I’m okay. There are some arrangements that’ll need to be made. You should call the church and tell them about your mother. Her friends too.”
Cole nodded. His father was picking at his cuticles. “Dad,” he said after a moment. Cole’s father raised his head.
“Do you need anything? Something to eat? Drink?” But these weren’t the real questions he wanted to ask. He didn’t know how he could simply sit there and do nothing. He wanted to know how the man could spend a life with someone and the moment she was gone not react in some way other than silence.
“No, no. Go on,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Just do those things for us, okay?”
Cole stood and put his hands in his pockets. “Should I leave now?”
“It’s up to you,” his father said, standing. “Don’t feel like you have to stay with me.”
He seemed to be ushering him out the door. Cole nodded and the two men looked at each other, unsure if they should hug or embrace and neither making a move to do so. Finally, Cole patted his father’s arm and said he’d come back later to check on him, and then he walked outside into the breeze.
ONLY ONCE DID he ever remember seeing his father angry, and that was after a big fight with his mother. He had come home from baseball practice, hearing the shouts through the windows of the house as he walked up the driveway. He opened the door to see his mother crying, two glistening streaks of tears running down her face, but her chin was pointed straight at his father, who was leaning back against the stove.
“Go to your room,” he said when he saw Cole.
The shouting continued once Cole was in his room, and the last thing Cole heard was the slamming of the door and his father’s car moving away from the house. He lay in bed all that night waiting to hear him pull the car into the garage below his bedroom. Three days passed, and still Cole never heard from him. Not even a phone call. On the fourth night, Cole heard the car outside his window but not the garage door opening. Then his father’s footsteps were downstairs, his Florsheim shoes clicking against the hardwood floors. The shower turned on in the spare bedroom, and moments later, as he stayed still in the darkness, tracing the edges of the ceiling fan with his eyes, his father’s car started up and the sound of the engine moved farther away from their home. In the morning, on the kitchen counter, four new one-hundred-dollar bills. Below them was a note that only said, For groceries.
Even then as a twelve-year-old boy it said something to him about how he should act if he ever found himself in a similar sort of conflict. It reached out to him almost as strong as any hug he had ever received from his father, assuring him that he would take care of them no matter what happened.
Their reconciliation was quick, and no one, not even his mother who loved to talk to Cole about all the details of her life, ever said anything about it. His father had simply shown up one day at Cole’s practice, the white sleeves of his shirt rolled to the elbows and his tie loosened at the neck. “Ready to go home?” he asked as Cole walked up. Cole’s throat clenched when the old man spoke the words, and he’d only been able to nod, and then his father’s arm was over his shoulder, patting his back and guiding him toward the car.
It was hard for Cole to look at his father and not remember how he looked that day. Still young, still strong. Some part of him always believed it was his father who made everything better, despite his quiet ways and unwillingness to talk. As he got older, he knew he could never know the entire story, the words that are exchanged between a husband and wife and the promises they make to themselves and for their children. He never let go of the idea it was his father who went to his mother. It was the money on the counter, perhaps, the sight of it, that fueled his belief.
COLE WENT BACK to the funeral home at eight in the evening, bringing a dress for his mother and letting his father know the obituary would be in tomorrow’s paper. The old man nodded in affirmation at the last piece of knowledge and ate just half of the sandwich Cole had brought him. They sat together in the room where the visitation was going to be held, staring at the space where the casket would sit. It was lit with two soft overhead lights, and already the front of the room was filled with peace lilies, bereavement wreaths, and the petals of countless flowers.
“I can’t believe this,” Cole said, only to break their silence.
His father didn’t respond. He looked at the old man’s jaw, then his hair, grayed on the edges and thinning on top. The wrinkles around his eyes weren’t visible, though. He appeared younger in this light. Cole thought about his father’s leaving so many years ago and how he had never come to Cole’s room and said something to him. Why didn’t he wake his only child in the middle of the night to tell him it would be okay? It had taken everything for Cole not to race out of his room and into the kitchen to grab him. As a boy, he thought that had been bravery on his part, how his father would handle the situation, but here, in the dim light of the funeral home, in the company of his father, he knew it was only cowardice. Because what would he have done if he’d gone out to him only to have his father squat down and tell him he was never coming back?
The next three days were going to be filled with cards and warm wishes. Serious handshakes, somber hugs. He’d been to a dozen visitations in his life, but couldn’t once remember ever actually attending a burial. He thought of the pair he and his father would make, both dressed in black suits, each showing the other in their features—the pas
t and the future. Beneath them his mother lay on a cold table somewhere, while in the back of the funeral home the director and his wife were probably just clearing the dishes from supper, settling in to watch a movie before a long night of peaceful sleep.
“I’m going home,” Cole said.
“Good,” his father said. “You should. Get yourself some rest. Thanks for coming by.”
“Thanks?” he said. “She’s my mother. I loved her too.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m glad you came by. You didn’t have to.”
Cole didn’t know what else to say other than that he was welcome. Then, “Are you coming home soon?”
His father half-grunted and shook his head.
“You need some rest too,” Cole said, but his father didn’t turn to him again.
Cole put his hand on his father’s shoulder, remembering all the strength once held there when he was a boy, and then he left.
THERE HAD BEEN a woman in Boston. They had been drifting apart for a while by the time he lost his job, and if he had honestly thought he could salvage their relationship, he would have stayed. But she wasn’t ready. That’s what she told him. She didn’t know about marriage, she didn’t know about him the way he said he knew about her. They had friends visiting from out of town, and they had taken them to the North End for pizza and sightseeing. She told him all this inside a bakery while their friends toured the Old North Church. His face had gone flush with anger and embarrassment, and a pit below his chest opened up with a burning, melting pain. It was the first and only time he ever felt the physical ache of heartbreak. The breakup had made going home easier, but he had moved enough in his life that he knew he couldn’t outrun his problems. She was still with him in his thoughts far more than he wanted. He had thought to call her and tell her about his mother, but when he picked up the phone all he could do was trace his finger over her name on the cell phone’s screen. She was the only person he wanted to talk to and yet he couldn’t call her. They had parted on good terms, made promises to keep in touch after some time had passed, but he didn’t know what he would say to her. Comfort me, he thought. Come back into my life and comfort me, he wanted to say, but her decision had been that she didn’t want to be a part of his life anymore.
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