June issue

Do you want me to come back another time?

No, no. This is fine really.

I call my mom again. But we had the same conversation. She told me she was fine. And I wondered how you could live a life away from your children for thirty odd years and then die? I wondered how you survive those years away from the ones you brought into the world. I wondered about his small New York apartment. I thought of my mother alone smoking in her larger house in the Midwest. I had in fact very few memories of my father. Here is one.

We are walking home. I am around 4. He liked to swing me up onto his shoulders. We played a game. I would put my hands over his eyes, and the more scared I got, the more I would clutch at his neck and cover his face. He would pretend he couldn’t see. He probably couldn’t.

Here is another. We are in a park. My mother brought the plaid blanket. Everyone else is gone to swing or to play in the grass. And it is just us two. He takes a log thin blade of grass and puts it in his mouth. He is leaning on his hand with his elbow on the grass. We both stare up at the sky while he twills this thin reed in his mouth. The grass is very green. And I remember