Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

On this score I'm damn proud of Eunice, for it seemed like she was constantly wincing at the start of construction as she flipped through the catalogues of mass-produced and marketed items but is now (perhaps with regular bathroom duty on her mind) celebrating availability and easy-care use as her primary design considerations. She was pretty depressed to have to move out of their house at Haymarket Estates (Jack found a Danish corporate executive on assignment to take a three-year lease on the place for $6000 a month, fully furnished, which will cover the mortgage and taxes plus), but she's no dummy and as Theresa said is genuinely devoted to Jack, duly remaking her bed minus all the silk shams and throws. The plan, I suppose, is that they'll use the time to regroup and reload and maybe in three years return to the château, assuming Jack is back earning. But I'm hoping things will go well enough here at our busy little ranch and maybe they'll have refigured their aims and priorities and decide to stay on longer, just renting their mini-mansion out again. The truth (which I'm sure Jack and Eunice already know) is that the chances of Jack's making the kind of dough he was paying himself are as slim as some homeowner adding a 20 percent tip to a Battle Brothers contracting invoice, and why I was the one first championing the bedroom addition, to make it as easy as possible on them to stay, my secret plan being that not too far down the road Jack will take over the house permanently and still have room for their kids and Pop and Paul and Barthes, and that I, with whatever luck is left to me, will find my closing digs elsewhere, such as Rita might desire.

Slim chances there again, champ.

At least this is what Pop tells me after lights out. With the kids in the third bedroom, we're bunking together, the space between our twin beds just wide enough that we can't simply reach over and nudge/hit each other. This is a good thing, I suppose.

The other night he was snoring again with such a tortured, bes-tial rage, as though his body were trying to force his tonsils out through his nose, the wracked growls alternating with nearly minute-long cessations of breathing (Rita says it's sleep apnea), that I had to toss a slipper at his hulking mass, and wake him.

"Do you know what time it is?" he said, like I was the one who'd been sawing away.

"It's late."

"What do you want, Jerome?"

"You think I should put up another headstone out there?"

"What?"

"You know, out there."

"There are stones out at the cemetery."

"I mean one for Daisy."

"Oh," he said, scratching at himself down low. "I was wondering why there was that space in between your mother and Theresa."

"I think it all looks pretty good. But Daisy's spot just seemed kind of lonely."

"Maybe to you."

"Still. I should put another one up."

Pop rolled back away from me, onto his side. "Well, I thought that from the day she died. So did your mother."

"Really? Why didn't you say something?"

"She was your wife."

"But you both loved her. You had a say."

"You think you would have listened to us?"

"Yeah," I said. "I probably would have."

"Well, maybe that's why we didn't say anything. Now let's get some shut-eye."

I thought about that for a while, as Pop almost immediately started rattling the windowpanes with his two-stroke, how in fact after what happened Pop didn't seem to bother much with me as he'd always bothered before, instruct me to do exactly this or that with the customers or the business or the kids. He just kind of re-ceded in an un-Pop-like way, which I attributed to my mother telling him to back off for a while and just lend me whatever hand I might need. Which they both did, my mother especially helpful around the house and Pop, too, at the garage, where he came by a couple of times a week to keep the mechanics in line by replenishing their dented metal cooler with cold beer and sandwiches.

It never occurred to me back then as a presumably long-minted adult that he might have finally decided it was time to let me stew in a holding tank of my own, be it eye-high with shit or honey, and not, as was his wont (born out of ego-fied generosity and expedience), to keep giving me things anymore, foremost opinions and advice. I suppose this would normally be my moment to be expressing gratitude to him, for the usual. (if tardy, extra-subtle) parental relinquishment, but I still wish he'd naturally intruded and called me a cowardly coldhearted fool and went ahead and ordered up a customary funeral and headstone for Daisy, as I wouldn't now be staring at an oddly unbalanced plot of sod whenever I visit the cemetery with Paul, following a day at St. Jude's.

At the gathering at our house after Theresa's funeral, in fact, among the countless other miserable happenings of that day, Sal Mondello (who is officially retired now, after the bankruptcy filing) came up to me afterward and extended his condolences and then added, "It's a shame her mother can't be with her." If the randy old geezer hadn't actually looked so brittle about the chops I'd have busted him one solid and wrung his neck with his own Major Johnson. But I didn't, and just nodded and accepted his old-country gesture of an envelope, then received the scores of her friends and relatives and other sundry people who came out, some of whom I didn't even recognize. But of course her high school friends, Alice Woo and ladle Srinivasan, were there, in black-on-black dresses and hose, clinging to each other like there was a fierce ill wind blowing, crying their eyes out from the pew to the grave, and then those who obviously came out for us be-reaved, like Richie and his associates, and Kelly Stearns and Miles Quintana, who despite showing no such indication were clearly there together (the Movietone story of how this happened I later learned from Miles, and it involved a final Parade parking lot altercation with Jimbo and the subsequent mutual realization by a maturing white Southern woman and her young brown urban knight that they had more in common than simply a love of enabling their respective constituencies to temporarily exit the dreariness of life through mid-budget holidays). The supporting presence of these friends and associates didn't comfort so much as reveal for me a surprisingly pernicious secondary gloom over the already near-suffocating pall of woe, the knowledge of collective mourning initially soothing but soon enough all the more depressing, such is the idea that no one completely escapes.

Paul, to his credit, didn't try to keep it together for anybody's sake. He lost it at the house that morning, and on the car ride to the church, and literally a few words into his remarks at the pulpit he simply stopped and stepped down and sat down next to us and bawled as loudly as he could. I was proud of him. At the lowering of the casket Jack had to hold him up, lest he stumble and fall into the hole, and back at the house afterward he had an attack of sharp pains in his belly and chest, which Rita and one of our doctor friends attended to, successfully treating with a dose of Pop's antigas tablets. That night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, while sharing the last $150 bottle of a boutique cabernet that Jack had brought over and opened unbidden and somewhat oddly insisted the two of us drink, Paul thanked me for getting up and finishing his eulogy.

I said it was no problem, an honor and a privilege. So we drank to those, and to a few other puffed up et ceteras, even chuckling a bit, and soon thereafter we polished off the plump, inky wine.

Because he naturally couldn't handle it and was completely grief-exhausted besides, I had to walk him to his bed, where I'm sure for the first time in days — certainly then and perhaps since — he slept an intractable, unfettered sleep.