Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Oh?”

“I went back to school, Mingus. Got my degree. I’m a midwife.”

“A midwife? But you’re a man.”

“It’s a same-sex term.”

“You mean unisex?”

“Yeah, that one.”

It didn’t sound unisex.

“All practitioners of midwifery are known as midwives,” he informed me with the inflection of someone who’d memorized the manual. “We’re respected independent contractors in the health care profession.”

“Huh.”

“We help women have healthy pregnancies and then, when it’s showtime, we guide them through a natural childbirth.”

Jumbo’s presence at an actual baby delivery seemed as discordant an image as there could be. “You don’t have to go to med school or something for that?”

“Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well. Good for you, James.”

“Yeah. Just don’t eat lunch before a childbirth.” Then he fake retched.

That seemed as good a time as any to cut to the chase. “So Jumbo, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m not just passing through.”

We were then interrupted by the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. “Jim? You down there?” a man’s voice called.

“Yes indeedy.”

Plodding footsteps advanced down the stairs, and soon a severely thin man, midforties and balding, stood at the base of the steps, a red rugby shirt hanging off his scrawny frame. He was carrying a little girl who instantly leapt out of his arms and bolted for a Fender acoustic propped up against an amp. Jumbo looked on with a smile as the toddler started scraping her fingers across the strings, chiming out an open chord over and over.

“Sounds great, Ingrid. Your practice is really paying off,” Jumbo said. “Israel, meet Teddy. Teddy, Israel.”

I shook his bony hand. The man was fucking emaciated.

“Tremble, right?” Israel said with a point and a squint.

I nodded.

“Great to meet you. We’re obviously all big fans in this house.”

There was nothing obvious about it, considering that the band’s guitarist used to be married to this man’s wife and had taken up residence under his stairs.

“And this little princess,” Jumbo said, scooping up the girl and tickling her tummy, “is Ingrid. Ingrid, can you say hi to Teddy?”

I said, “Hi, Ingrid.”

The kid said nothing.

Then Israel turned serious. “So, Jim, I just got a call and it looks like I’ve got to run into the office for a couple of hours. Sandy took Zed to the movies and I don’t know if you guys are busy or were just going to be hanging out here . . . You know I hate to ask.”

“We don’t mind, right, Mingus? Ingrid can tag along.” Jumbo had now inverted the two-year-old so that she was dangling upside down and squealing with laughter.

“You sure? I can always take her with me,” Israel said, staring uneasily at his kid, whose head was swinging mere inches above the concrete floor. Jumbo was now shaking her like a can of spray paint. This Israel fellow must have been completely out of options to leave his toddler with a repeat offender of his “no dope in the house” policy.

“No biggie, man,” Jumbo said.

“I really appreciate it, Jim. And please, just be extra careful and—”

“Don’t worry, Is. We’ll be fine. Teddy and I were just going to catch up a little. Maybe we’ll take her down to the Inner Harbor. What do you think, Mingus? It’s a nice day out there. We’ll pack sandwiches.”

“Sure.” I smiled tight as a lash. “I love boats.”

“He looks like he’s being treated for something, that’s all I meant,” I said, as I buckled myself into the passenger seat of the great sandstone minivan. The sticky garage air smelled of mulch, motor oil, and bicycle tires.

“I suppose he is thin,” Jumbo allowed.

“He’s rickety.”

“I know he’s a big cabbage guy,” Jumbo said thoughtfully. “That might have something to do with it.” He was leaning through the open door, struggling with the straps of Ingrid’s car seat. “Sorry about having to take the whaler. My Chevelle isn’t great for kids.”

It may have, at one point, been charmingly quirky that Jumbo drove a Chevelle, a car out of print since the seventies. But now, it couldn’t have been more than a rusty, protective covering for a disgruntled muffler.

Jumbo slid behind the wheel and started rifling through a disorganized flock of keys. As he coiled his burly frame toward the rear and started backing the van down the driveway, wild giggling erupted from the backseat. “She cracks up every time I do that,” he said bemusedly. “All I have to do is turn my head around to back up and she thinks it’s hysterical.”

“Well, reverse is the funniest of all gears,” I said.

We’d barely reached the bottom of the driveway when Jumbo slammed on the brake.

“Christ!” he yelled, squinting into the rearview mirror. “I almost killed him!”

He checked on Ingrid, but the abrupt stop had barely registered, so engaged was she with a frayed picture book illustrated with golden-locked princesses.

Jumbo opened his door and began ambling down the driveway. “I didn’t even see you, Dad,” I heard him say.

Dad? I unlatched my door and stuck out my head. At the foot of the driveway, standing next to an antediluvian Oldsmobile, was a senior citizen in a drab-green jacket.

“It’s not your weekend, Dad,” I thought I heard Jumbo explain. “Did you forget?”

The man at the end of the driveway was stooped over with his arms wrist-deep in the pockets of his trousers—there’s no other word for that variety of pants; it’s just trousers—periodically lifting his expectant eyes toward his son. Jumbo laid a gentle hand on his back as the old man contemplated the curb. A miscommunication was being sorted out.

Then Jumbo pointed at me. “Hey, Dad, look. There’s Teddy Tremble. Mingus, you remember my old man.”

A brittle smile raised the edges of Elmer Jett’s unkempt gray mustache, and we exchanged waves.

Jumbo’s parents were divorced by the time we’d reached our early teens, but his father refused to be a stranger. Aside from sharing a roof with his son every other weekend and for two months over the summer, the old man attended all school events, including the close call that was Jumbo’s graduation. He showed up at his son’s Little League games to watch him sway dreamily in right field with his glove on the wrong hand. And for the entire month of July, they rented a Winnebago and embarked on a road trip dotted with Americana’s greatest hits—Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Route 66. July was the only time I ever felt envious of Jumbo.

When the father-son confab reached its natural conclusion, Jumbo gave his dad an affectionate pat on the shoulder, and the geezer sloped back toward his beat-up ride.

“What was that all about?” I asked once Jumbo was back in the van, slinging the seat belt across his drooped chest.

“Oh, he’s just a little confused, that’s all. He thought it was his weekend.”

“His weekend for what?”

“To hang out,” he replied, pulling out of the driveway and waving one final toodle-oo at his father. “He still honors the custody arrangement. You gotta give him credit. It’s been, like, thirty years and still, every other weekend.”

I combed Jumbo’s face for even a speck of irony.

“Hasn’t anyone told him his obligations ended about twenty years ago?”

“Don’t go all lawyer on me, Mingus.”

“No one has custody of a thirty-eight-year-old, Jumbo. You have custody of yourself. I’m not saying a little parental guidance would hurt in your case, but you no longer need a court order. You can sleep over at your dad’s any time you want. Concepts of custody don’t apply anymore.”