Survivor's Guilt
1. Last night at work, I had to kick someone out of the bar for attempting to sell another guest cocaine directly in front of my drink well. The two of them looked into their laps, negotiating. Then the woman told the man, Sorry, I don’t have enough money for that tonight. I interjected, Are you stupid or just rude? The man fumbled, apologizing loudly. He told me I misunderstood. The beer he bought from me an hour earlier was $3.75. He tipped me a dollar twenty-five and sat, waiting for this woman and her friend. When she arrived, she said, I’ll start with a water. When I asked them to leave, he continued to apologize, panicked. I did not call the police, only insisted they go.
2. When my sister bought my dad pot, she would ask her friend’s dealer to roll the eighth into joints for him in advance, explaining that her father was blind and couldn’t do so himself.
3. When I rolled joints in high school, I used Bible paper. I had so many copies, one for every year of Catholic high school, that I could pick verses appropriate to each occasion. My friends laughed at me for being precious this way. If there wasn't time to pick a verse, I used ad pages from the phone book, hoping the ink was non-toxic as it darkened my fingers and tongue.
4. My dad told near-constant stories about his time in high school before I was old enough to truly understand them, and all of them included drugs. In his favorites, he was an anti-hero, stoned and napping in Latin class after lunch. The boy who sat next to him followed along in the book they read aloud from, his index finger under each word as it passed, so when my dad was called on to participate, he never got caught for sleeping, always sure of where to pick up, his pronunciation perfect.
5. He did get caught holding at some point, in a car with a girl his senior year, and he took the fall for the bag they had on them. The DA of his small town pressed the right buttons to get him to name names, so my dad showed up to the last hurrah party on the school football field with a gun, sure he’d be jumped. The story didn’t include where the gun came from or who he flashed it to. I imagine it stuffed in the waistband of his jeans, waiting.
6. In college, my dad insists he imported bananas from the caribbean for Grand Union, buying them cheap and selling them for double the price per pound. He also insists this was good cover for moving drugs through the ports in South Florida. One year, a hurricane wiped out the bananas they were importing, and they had to stop all of it. Soon after, he dropped out of school.
7. I say insists but mean insisted. All of this is in the past, but still playing on a loop. I hear the stories, repeating, though he’s been gone long enough that nobody tells them, unless I am desperate to hear his voice. When I miss him most, I push the stories out of my own mouth as I’m wiping bottles and counting the till.
8. The past tense is cruel to people who have died. When my dad died, I was not present, so it’s easy to pretend I can still call him if I want to. Easy to pretend he will still answer his phone, Yellow, or, Hello, this is me, is that you? and the same self-satisfied chuckle as he waits for your response.
9. When he died I was sitting in his bed at the house. He was in hospice. I left him there to drive my brother home. There wasn’t enough room for all of us to sleep in his room, napping on chairs as his breath slowed to a rattle, the sound of brass doorknob struggling against its lock. I sat on Skype with my boyfriend, unsure of what to say about my day. I listened to him talk as a distraction. Everyone thought Dad would go that morning. My sister had left to have lunch with a friend, to take a break from waiting, and his breath grew ragged. Her friend drove her back to the hospice. We sang him “Space Oddity,” one of his favorite songs, Bowie’s voice twinning itself over sparkling guitar as he counts down. Discovering the stars, then disconnecting entirely. We told him it would be okay to let go. But the throaty doorknob rattle dulled, then subsided. In a photocopied packet given to us by the hospice entitled The Journey Home and attributed to no one, this was all very normal. When a person’s body is ready to stop but he/she still has important matters that are not resolved or a significant individual with whom he/she has not made peace, the patient may linger even though very debilitated.
10. It feels monstrous to say I was impatient. But no one bothered to describe the particular agony of waiting that way. How nothing can properly occupy your time during a vigil anticipating someone’s permanent departure. The packet from the hospice addressed restlessness, but on the part of the patient: The person may perform repetitive and restless tasks. This may be caused by decreased oxygen circulation to the brain and body chemistry changes…This is a phase that is often called “terminal restlessness.” Do not interfere or try to restrain such motions.
11. My mother’s siblings brought us dinner. We ate in the hospice rec room, everyone red-eyed and unsure of what we should talk about. I was trying to read The Brothers Karamazov. I thought something Russian made sense. My family, unhappy, held up next to another classically unhappy family. Underlined: “it will be easier to go to the other world knowing for certain what it's like,” page twenty-five; “There is no virtue if there is no immortality,” page seventy; “everything on earth is a riddle,” page one -oh-seven; “Ivan is a grave,” page one-ten; “drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk,” page two-oh-six; “a man is rarely willing to acknowledge someone else as a sufferer,” page two-thirty-seven; “I made up my mind a long time ago not to understand,” page two-forty-three. There’s a bookmark, a hole-punched Massachusetts commuter rail ticket for southbound service from zone 1A, abandoned on page two-ninety-six. I did not ever finish the book.
12. My boyfriend wanted to know how many chapters I’d gotten through and which of the characters had died. I didn’t have a chance to answer him. My little sister called, interrupting our non-conversation, to say Dad went not long after I left with Owen, and that now she and our mother and our older sister were driving home, and they saw rabbits everywhere. My parents’ nickname for each other was Rabbit. A crass joke about their number of children. How our family was too big, how they couldn’t help that.
13. I have been trying to write about my dad’s death since long before it happened. His ghost has been an extra member of our family all along, always invited to dinner.
14. My therapist asked me a few weeks ago if it’s possible I have survivor’s guilt. If I am upset that I don’t suffer the same way he did. The same way my siblings do. If I feel I am cheating someone by having a pancreas that still functions. That there are no vials of insulin in the butter keeper in my fridge. I can’t answer her. It’s too ugly to approach that feeling.
15. I come at it from elsewhere. I come at it as a kind of addict.
16. If you believe in astrology, you can blame your own doom on the stars. I was born on the last day of Virgo. In Solange de Mailly Nesle’s Astrology: History, Symbols and Signs, a Virgo is someone who seeks fruition, with an impression that there is always something lacking in terms of attaining complete fulfillment. I returned to this book as I started writing about guilt and addiction, remembering both described as fated limbs of mine in the text, but the reference never was. The cusp between Virgo and Libra is called the Cusp of Beauty, and I thought I had read in this book that those born on that cusp are bound to end up addicts of one kind or another. I even put it in a poem once. But as I reread, I can’t find the reference. Maybe I invented it as an excuse.
17. Before I was born, I had my father’s voice on the rotary phone handset pressed to my mother’s stomach. After I was born, I had his constant stories. His tall tales of himself as he was before his losses were mapped out in scar tissue. His memorized version of The Wind in the Willows. His ghost story every time we lit logs in the fireplace about a hunter who fed the tail of what haunted him to his dogs and was punished for it.
18. And when I got older, his questions. What brand was I smoking these days? Could I believe they wanted him to quit for good this time? Could he smell my hands? Did I know his father had smoked Pall Malls too, that they still smelled exactly the same decades later?
19. There are models of addiction as an incurable disease, people who discuss it as a moral failing, those who are sure they can hypnotize you beyond your need to fill with anything that fits. I believe in what they’re finding now, with rats. Put a rat in a cage with a choice between regular water and a dish of diluted cocaine, and the rat will choose the drugged drink over simply drinking to live. The choice is not even a choice. But put a rat in a cage with water, then the drug, and also other rats, and toys, and food, a world of stimulation and entertainment, and everything changes. Sometimes, the rat chooses altered consciousness, but often, the rat tires of the substance and abandons it in favor of engaging with its rat world. Addiction is not only about the substance of choice, but about a dearth of resources. If nothing feels good without the chemical induction of euphoria, induce away.
20. New Jersey Transit commuter trains still have full liquor licenses, but no bar cars, so you can carry your own booze onto the train home and have your own private happy hour with a briefcase between your ankles as the suburbs slide by. My dad was a regular at the Railhead, the bar in the Hoboken transit hub, where he’d buy a few green-bottled beers for the train every day on his way home. All the bartenders there knew me from a parade of wallet-sized school pictures, so that when I met him there as a teenager for a shared commute, they all asked me about ballet, and my paintings, and my poems. I carried his beers to the train for him, his aluminum cane folded and tucked into his backpack and his hand on my shoulder as we moved through the crowds of white shirts rushing home.
21. I feel closest to him now in train stations, at bars, in airports, though we never flew anywhere together. I go to loud places and wait for his voice to push through the layers of noise and find me.
22. de Mailly Nesle again--A Virgo has an excessive need for action (like Gemini, but within a different context), as well as for acquiring knowledge. My father was (is) a Gemini. According to another astrology book that I stole from a cafe I worked at in high school, Virgo and Gemini are doomed to misunderstand each other. My dad talks too much, and so do I, when I’m nervous. We’re both compulsive in the ways we need people and then insist on solitude. I am my own twin, nearly a Libra in my obsession with balance, justice, equal weight to all sides. I am his twin too, almost. In pain and hungry for whatever distraction is loud enough to blot out what I’m carrying forward. I have never believed in astrology as true except in times of crisis. I studied stars obsessively immediately after his death, looking for a trap door. Who or what could I throw myself into to heal, or better yet, disappear entirely?
23. In college, I was constantly left alone with my dad’s preemptive ghost. He wasn’t dead yet, but also, he was. I screened his calls, choosing to hide from him instead of facing that every conversation might be the last one. I didn’t save voicemails. I didn’t want to visit home. Instead, I smoked until my hands shook and swallowed any offered pill. I poured SoCo into my diner coffee and indulged in endless refills. I emptied bags out onto the ends of my house keys, and laughed because I was just like he was—death adjacent.
24. When I met your father, he was on the fast track to being a good-looking corpse, my mom would joke. But she wasn’t kidding, and it didn’t matter, because we were too young to laugh with her. My parents were married, with their first child, by twenty-three and twenty-seven. By the time I was old enough to begin understanding how loss gets bigger the longer you love someone, I must’ve been stupid, or just rude, because I had the same set of plans: live fast, die young, look blank and pretty in a coffin while people still thought it was sad to be without me. Another underline in my copy of Karamazov, page one-oh-eight: “sensuality is a storm.” The longer a life, the more complicated its legacy.
25. When I turned twenty-one, I didn’t know it would be the last, best party. After dinner, my dad bought me a scotch. There was a man playing piano in the restaurant lounge, and we danced, laughing at the objectively bad rendition of Billy Joel. We sang along anyway. I was excited to imagine the two of us meeting in dive bars, where we could sidestep so many years of hurt and become friends instead of adversaries. It was easy to be around him this way, in a room where people would only know he was sick if he told them. I’d been collecting the questions I could finally ask him with a bottle between us, inciting an uncensored interview. I craved a recap of what he’d done with the years between high school and the birth of our family, one where I’d be smart enough to take notes. But he went back to his hotel after that scotch and the party moved on without him.
26. Around this time, my dad bought me a cassette recorder so I could start a project I called Logs, a free form interview series I was too shy to tell him would be a kind of boot camp for me to put myself through before working my way up to the ultimate subject: him. I needed some excuse to ask him to repeat himself, to retell all the stories he’d told me a million times, so that I could ask for context and timelines. I wanted to transcribe him so he wouldn’t ever die. Karamazov, underlined, page seventy-seven: “seek happiness in sorrow.” And soon thereafter, “Let worldly men follow their dead with tears; here we rejoice over a departing father.” I interviewed my friends about their poems and projects. I recorded most waking moments of my first east coast tour, the recorder sitting on the dashboard of the car we drove from Massachusetts to Florida and back again. I have days of tape where I ask people to tell me about themselves and let them wander through their memories without much guidance, more interested in what they sounded like talking than what they thought they should speak about. I thought I would get to do this with my dad, that when he died I would have some artifact of who he was that I had generated by tricking him into being himself without censorship. I never told him about my plans for the project, and time got away from me. I don’t have any tapes of him speaking.
27. I have had to be my own recording. I repeat him constantly, unconsciously. I hear him when I refuse to call the doctor, not wanting bad news. I had Bowie’s face from the cover of Aladdin Sane tattooed on my forearm where his dialysis fistula scars were (are). I make jokes about being in pain and how I know that it won’t pass, that it will only change shape. Karamazov, underlined, page fifty-seven: “I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me.” I know I need to fill my life with other things. To build a world of distraction instead of resorting to induced euphorias. I also know that some euphorias are worth paying for.
28. When I roll joints, I am hard on myself. I want them to be tight enough not to hiccup or shred apart as they burn.
29. I don’t need this shit, I tell my coworker after I tell the dealer and his friends to leave. I grew up with this. I did this. I’m not fucking stupid, I say. I mean it. Today, my father would’ve been sixty-two. I am sure of what it takes to look through someone like a window and see the world differently. I have been the dealer and the daughter and the woman without enough to pay. I didn’t want to sing happy birthday with anything but scotch and bad piano. I feel rude for interrupting someone in a way that makes the night into a story I will tell as proof of what I’ve lived through. But here I am, telling it anyway, in my father’s voice.
2. When my sister bought my dad pot, she would ask her friend’s dealer to roll the eighth into joints for him in advance, explaining that her father was blind and couldn’t do so himself.
3. When I rolled joints in high school, I used Bible paper. I had so many copies, one for every year of Catholic high school, that I could pick verses appropriate to each occasion. My friends laughed at me for being precious this way. If there wasn't time to pick a verse, I used ad pages from the phone book, hoping the ink was non-toxic as it darkened my fingers and tongue.
4. My dad told near-constant stories about his time in high school before I was old enough to truly understand them, and all of them included drugs. In his favorites, he was an anti-hero, stoned and napping in Latin class after lunch. The boy who sat next to him followed along in the book they read aloud from, his index finger under each word as it passed, so when my dad was called on to participate, he never got caught for sleeping, always sure of where to pick up, his pronunciation perfect.
5. He did get caught holding at some point, in a car with a girl his senior year, and he took the fall for the bag they had on them. The DA of his small town pressed the right buttons to get him to name names, so my dad showed up to the last hurrah party on the school football field with a gun, sure he’d be jumped. The story didn’t include where the gun came from or who he flashed it to. I imagine it stuffed in the waistband of his jeans, waiting.
6. In college, my dad insists he imported bananas from the caribbean for Grand Union, buying them cheap and selling them for double the price per pound. He also insists this was good cover for moving drugs through the ports in South Florida. One year, a hurricane wiped out the bananas they were importing, and they had to stop all of it. Soon after, he dropped out of school.
7. I say insists but mean insisted. All of this is in the past, but still playing on a loop. I hear the stories, repeating, though he’s been gone long enough that nobody tells them, unless I am desperate to hear his voice. When I miss him most, I push the stories out of my own mouth as I’m wiping bottles and counting the till.
8. The past tense is cruel to people who have died. When my dad died, I was not present, so it’s easy to pretend I can still call him if I want to. Easy to pretend he will still answer his phone, Yellow, or, Hello, this is me, is that you? and the same self-satisfied chuckle as he waits for your response.
9. When he died I was sitting in his bed at the house. He was in hospice. I left him there to drive my brother home. There wasn’t enough room for all of us to sleep in his room, napping on chairs as his breath slowed to a rattle, the sound of brass doorknob struggling against its lock. I sat on Skype with my boyfriend, unsure of what to say about my day. I listened to him talk as a distraction. Everyone thought Dad would go that morning. My sister had left to have lunch with a friend, to take a break from waiting, and his breath grew ragged. Her friend drove her back to the hospice. We sang him “Space Oddity,” one of his favorite songs, Bowie’s voice twinning itself over sparkling guitar as he counts down. Discovering the stars, then disconnecting entirely. We told him it would be okay to let go. But the throaty doorknob rattle dulled, then subsided. In a photocopied packet given to us by the hospice entitled The Journey Home and attributed to no one, this was all very normal. When a person’s body is ready to stop but he/she still has important matters that are not resolved or a significant individual with whom he/she has not made peace, the patient may linger even though very debilitated.
10. It feels monstrous to say I was impatient. But no one bothered to describe the particular agony of waiting that way. How nothing can properly occupy your time during a vigil anticipating someone’s permanent departure. The packet from the hospice addressed restlessness, but on the part of the patient: The person may perform repetitive and restless tasks. This may be caused by decreased oxygen circulation to the brain and body chemistry changes…This is a phase that is often called “terminal restlessness.” Do not interfere or try to restrain such motions.
11. My mother’s siblings brought us dinner. We ate in the hospice rec room, everyone red-eyed and unsure of what we should talk about. I was trying to read The Brothers Karamazov. I thought something Russian made sense. My family, unhappy, held up next to another classically unhappy family. Underlined: “it will be easier to go to the other world knowing for certain what it's like,” page twenty-five; “There is no virtue if there is no immortality,” page seventy; “everything on earth is a riddle,” page one -oh-seven; “Ivan is a grave,” page one-ten; “drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk,” page two-oh-six; “a man is rarely willing to acknowledge someone else as a sufferer,” page two-thirty-seven; “I made up my mind a long time ago not to understand,” page two-forty-three. There’s a bookmark, a hole-punched Massachusetts commuter rail ticket for southbound service from zone 1A, abandoned on page two-ninety-six. I did not ever finish the book.
12. My boyfriend wanted to know how many chapters I’d gotten through and which of the characters had died. I didn’t have a chance to answer him. My little sister called, interrupting our non-conversation, to say Dad went not long after I left with Owen, and that now she and our mother and our older sister were driving home, and they saw rabbits everywhere. My parents’ nickname for each other was Rabbit. A crass joke about their number of children. How our family was too big, how they couldn’t help that.
13. I have been trying to write about my dad’s death since long before it happened. His ghost has been an extra member of our family all along, always invited to dinner.
14. My therapist asked me a few weeks ago if it’s possible I have survivor’s guilt. If I am upset that I don’t suffer the same way he did. The same way my siblings do. If I feel I am cheating someone by having a pancreas that still functions. That there are no vials of insulin in the butter keeper in my fridge. I can’t answer her. It’s too ugly to approach that feeling.
15. I come at it from elsewhere. I come at it as a kind of addict.
16. If you believe in astrology, you can blame your own doom on the stars. I was born on the last day of Virgo. In Solange de Mailly Nesle’s Astrology: History, Symbols and Signs, a Virgo is someone who seeks fruition, with an impression that there is always something lacking in terms of attaining complete fulfillment. I returned to this book as I started writing about guilt and addiction, remembering both described as fated limbs of mine in the text, but the reference never was. The cusp between Virgo and Libra is called the Cusp of Beauty, and I thought I had read in this book that those born on that cusp are bound to end up addicts of one kind or another. I even put it in a poem once. But as I reread, I can’t find the reference. Maybe I invented it as an excuse.
17. Before I was born, I had my father’s voice on the rotary phone handset pressed to my mother’s stomach. After I was born, I had his constant stories. His tall tales of himself as he was before his losses were mapped out in scar tissue. His memorized version of The Wind in the Willows. His ghost story every time we lit logs in the fireplace about a hunter who fed the tail of what haunted him to his dogs and was punished for it.
18. And when I got older, his questions. What brand was I smoking these days? Could I believe they wanted him to quit for good this time? Could he smell my hands? Did I know his father had smoked Pall Malls too, that they still smelled exactly the same decades later?
19. There are models of addiction as an incurable disease, people who discuss it as a moral failing, those who are sure they can hypnotize you beyond your need to fill with anything that fits. I believe in what they’re finding now, with rats. Put a rat in a cage with a choice between regular water and a dish of diluted cocaine, and the rat will choose the drugged drink over simply drinking to live. The choice is not even a choice. But put a rat in a cage with water, then the drug, and also other rats, and toys, and food, a world of stimulation and entertainment, and everything changes. Sometimes, the rat chooses altered consciousness, but often, the rat tires of the substance and abandons it in favor of engaging with its rat world. Addiction is not only about the substance of choice, but about a dearth of resources. If nothing feels good without the chemical induction of euphoria, induce away.
20. New Jersey Transit commuter trains still have full liquor licenses, but no bar cars, so you can carry your own booze onto the train home and have your own private happy hour with a briefcase between your ankles as the suburbs slide by. My dad was a regular at the Railhead, the bar in the Hoboken transit hub, where he’d buy a few green-bottled beers for the train every day on his way home. All the bartenders there knew me from a parade of wallet-sized school pictures, so that when I met him there as a teenager for a shared commute, they all asked me about ballet, and my paintings, and my poems. I carried his beers to the train for him, his aluminum cane folded and tucked into his backpack and his hand on my shoulder as we moved through the crowds of white shirts rushing home.
21. I feel closest to him now in train stations, at bars, in airports, though we never flew anywhere together. I go to loud places and wait for his voice to push through the layers of noise and find me.
22. de Mailly Nesle again--A Virgo has an excessive need for action (like Gemini, but within a different context), as well as for acquiring knowledge. My father was (is) a Gemini. According to another astrology book that I stole from a cafe I worked at in high school, Virgo and Gemini are doomed to misunderstand each other. My dad talks too much, and so do I, when I’m nervous. We’re both compulsive in the ways we need people and then insist on solitude. I am my own twin, nearly a Libra in my obsession with balance, justice, equal weight to all sides. I am his twin too, almost. In pain and hungry for whatever distraction is loud enough to blot out what I’m carrying forward. I have never believed in astrology as true except in times of crisis. I studied stars obsessively immediately after his death, looking for a trap door. Who or what could I throw myself into to heal, or better yet, disappear entirely?
23. In college, I was constantly left alone with my dad’s preemptive ghost. He wasn’t dead yet, but also, he was. I screened his calls, choosing to hide from him instead of facing that every conversation might be the last one. I didn’t save voicemails. I didn’t want to visit home. Instead, I smoked until my hands shook and swallowed any offered pill. I poured SoCo into my diner coffee and indulged in endless refills. I emptied bags out onto the ends of my house keys, and laughed because I was just like he was—death adjacent.
24. When I met your father, he was on the fast track to being a good-looking corpse, my mom would joke. But she wasn’t kidding, and it didn’t matter, because we were too young to laugh with her. My parents were married, with their first child, by twenty-three and twenty-seven. By the time I was old enough to begin understanding how loss gets bigger the longer you love someone, I must’ve been stupid, or just rude, because I had the same set of plans: live fast, die young, look blank and pretty in a coffin while people still thought it was sad to be without me. Another underline in my copy of Karamazov, page one-oh-eight: “sensuality is a storm.” The longer a life, the more complicated its legacy.
25. When I turned twenty-one, I didn’t know it would be the last, best party. After dinner, my dad bought me a scotch. There was a man playing piano in the restaurant lounge, and we danced, laughing at the objectively bad rendition of Billy Joel. We sang along anyway. I was excited to imagine the two of us meeting in dive bars, where we could sidestep so many years of hurt and become friends instead of adversaries. It was easy to be around him this way, in a room where people would only know he was sick if he told them. I’d been collecting the questions I could finally ask him with a bottle between us, inciting an uncensored interview. I craved a recap of what he’d done with the years between high school and the birth of our family, one where I’d be smart enough to take notes. But he went back to his hotel after that scotch and the party moved on without him.
26. Around this time, my dad bought me a cassette recorder so I could start a project I called Logs, a free form interview series I was too shy to tell him would be a kind of boot camp for me to put myself through before working my way up to the ultimate subject: him. I needed some excuse to ask him to repeat himself, to retell all the stories he’d told me a million times, so that I could ask for context and timelines. I wanted to transcribe him so he wouldn’t ever die. Karamazov, underlined, page seventy-seven: “seek happiness in sorrow.” And soon thereafter, “Let worldly men follow their dead with tears; here we rejoice over a departing father.” I interviewed my friends about their poems and projects. I recorded most waking moments of my first east coast tour, the recorder sitting on the dashboard of the car we drove from Massachusetts to Florida and back again. I have days of tape where I ask people to tell me about themselves and let them wander through their memories without much guidance, more interested in what they sounded like talking than what they thought they should speak about. I thought I would get to do this with my dad, that when he died I would have some artifact of who he was that I had generated by tricking him into being himself without censorship. I never told him about my plans for the project, and time got away from me. I don’t have any tapes of him speaking.
27. I have had to be my own recording. I repeat him constantly, unconsciously. I hear him when I refuse to call the doctor, not wanting bad news. I had Bowie’s face from the cover of Aladdin Sane tattooed on my forearm where his dialysis fistula scars were (are). I make jokes about being in pain and how I know that it won’t pass, that it will only change shape. Karamazov, underlined, page fifty-seven: “I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me.” I know I need to fill my life with other things. To build a world of distraction instead of resorting to induced euphorias. I also know that some euphorias are worth paying for.
28. When I roll joints, I am hard on myself. I want them to be tight enough not to hiccup or shred apart as they burn.
29. I don’t need this shit, I tell my coworker after I tell the dealer and his friends to leave. I grew up with this. I did this. I’m not fucking stupid, I say. I mean it. Today, my father would’ve been sixty-two. I am sure of what it takes to look through someone like a window and see the world differently. I have been the dealer and the daughter and the woman without enough to pay. I didn’t want to sing happy birthday with anything but scotch and bad piano. I feel rude for interrupting someone in a way that makes the night into a story I will tell as proof of what I’ve lived through. But here I am, telling it anyway, in my father’s voice.
