Becoming Memory
We’re standing
in the Florida night outside the hospital where my father is dying so Christine
can have a smoke. She pushes back her Farrah Fawcet hair with bright sculpted
fingernails I imagine floating above the typewriter keys at her receptionist
job. Both middle-aged now, she is reminiscing, laughingly, about the first time
she met my father twenty years earlier when her big sister Mimi, now his wife,
brought him home for dinner.
He was such
a character, so funny, fit right in with the family, attributes apparently any
daughter should be proud of. Christine had been especially taken with him, she
tells me, because she was only fifteen at the time. I stare at her blankly. She
keeps on talking.
If Christine
was only fifteen at the time, I realize, I was only fifteen. I was only fifteen
and waiting for my father to come home. Waiting for him, and he
was with another family, a big, sprawling, messy family that parked their many
cars on their lawn. What was another plate for dinner at that house? We never
added another at ours. When would he come home? What shape he would be in,
fumbling the front door handle? Who needed the embarrassment? And then the
later years when you hoped he wouldn’t come home at all.
But we’re
together now, Christine and I, waiting for death. The heartless rhythm of disco
music pounds from a car leaving the parking garage. We stand with our separate
memories, my father upstairs becoming only memory, while the flat humid air
holds the cigarette smoke around us and doesn’t let it go.
Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster
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