Tavern was still there, and we sat at a table bigger than we needed next to the window. My father took five minutes wrestling between the beers on the menu while the waitress, black haired and disarmingly pudgy, waited patiently with her knees almost touching mine. This too was my father; sometimes spending two hours in a supermarket for a list the length of my pinky, meticulously comparing the ingredients on the backs of all the cereals and calculating prices to find the cheapest per gram, and other days making his mind up in the blink of an eye, taking a train from Philadelphia to Boston without telling anyone so he could see his sister who was writing her doctorate on women in religion. In the end he ordered a Yuengling, and when it came yellow and sparkling he asked me if I wanted some, but I said no and took a sip from my water. Waiting for our Southwest burger and steak he talked of how he was thinking of joining the French Foreign Legion, how he really believed it was God’s plan and that he should go. The only thing keeping him here, he said, was my little brother; he didn’t want to leave him just yet. I thought of how I had been the one to give my brother his first razor when he began to shave and the guilty knowledge that it should have been my father, not me; that he wouldn’t go to France for this child. I said if it were me I would be cautious about it. I didn’t want him to go and had told him so before but I didn’t want to argue here in this tavern with the old man at the table behind us watching train wrecks and Obama on the corner TV who shifted every time my father laughed. I finished my burger as my father ignored his steak and talked rapidly and loudly and made short urgent movements with his hands, and I let him, nodding and saying yes or uh-huh, enjoying the tavern and my father and the light going through his Yuengling. I took a picture of him and the table with the light coming all from one side and showed it to him, and he said it was good. On the corner before the college we stopped and he knelt on the pavement and dug an American Photo and New Yorker from his bag and gave them to me. I told him which bus to take back and how long it would take, and he hugged me and held it a bit longer than I would’ve, but I didn’t
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