His hand knocks against the metal bar. “Wiya ju ho ma ha?”
I put my hand over the bar and onto his. It is cold. I squeeze and he squeezes back. I keep my hand in his for the rest of the afternoon.
That night, around three in the morning, I wake up crying. I cry on my stomach, the tears spreading on the bottom hotel sheet. I shake the bed, but no one wakes up.
Barbara calls at six. They’ve discovered a large clot in his lungs. They won’t let her in to see him.
“We’re coming over,” I tell her, and we hurry to dress.
We meet in the cafeteria. I let the kids have pie with their breakfast. Barbara insists on paying. Her hands shake as she tries to pick out the change from her wallet.
We take a table in the far corner. And then Lena and Jeremy gasp. I look up to see what gruesome bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan they have seen on one of the screens hanging from the ceiling, but they are not looking at the televisions. They are looking at a man in the middle of the cafeteria smooshing his face with his hands for their benefit. They are looking at their Uncle Garvey.
They run across the room and leap on him, hike up him like a tree, and he pretends to try and swing them off. They are still hanging from his back as he hugs Barbara, who is crying, and then Jonathan, and then me, also crying. He smells like his van: chicken and cigarettes.
“They won’t let me in to see him,” he says.
“They’re intubating him,” I say.
“Jesus. What does that mean?”
“There’s not enough oxygen in his blood because of a clot, and they have to put in a breathing tube and then try to get his blood to thin.”
Garvey nods, breathing in. He is nervous. He thought he’d see Dad this morning. Now he has to wait. Now it might be too late.
“How are you holding up?” he says to Barbara.
“Having all you kids here is the silver lining.” Her voice breaks. I think about that Thanksgiving, about how she’d held a family together for nearly forty years and then broke it for my father. Family is important to her. And we are my father’s family.
“Let’s go get you some pie,” I say, steering him back toward the food.
“Someone’s lost her fiery roar,” he says, once we are out of earshot. He has gotten his fair share of cards, too.
“I know.”
“What’s going on with Dad? Is he going to croak before we can get another good swipe at each other?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like he was doing better. He was alert and talking.”
“How’d that go?”
“Good. He’s sort of circa 1980, so that makes things easier between us.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He thinks I’m joking when I tell him he’s married to Barbara Bridgeton.”
Garvey laughs.
“Hatch told me he was unconscious, and then I get here and he opens his eyes and starts talking to me. Sometimes they have to strap him down because he’s taken out a few nurses. They’re all walking around with neck braces and bandages.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s a little trippy.” It feels so good that Garvey is here and I can exaggerate everything.
“Is he about to die? Is the doctor going to come find us and pat our backs and tell us they did all they could?”
“I don’t know.”
My father dying still doesn’t seem possible to me. It never has. Seeing him in a hospital bed seems like a violation of natural law. And now, with Garvey here, he’s turned back into a caricature, fodder for jokes, not someone who is our father and is about to die. We don’t know how to be serious about that.
Garvey looks toward the parking lot. “I don’t really want to be here for that.”
We pay and head back toward the table. “Kids look good,” he says. “Lena’s shot up three feet. They’re not mad you dragged them up here for the macabre deathbed scene?” He throws his head back, raises and tightens all the tendons in his neck, and rattles quietly, so Barbara can’t hear, “Don’t let them take me! He’s not exactly going to go gently, is he? Jeremy looks darker than he did last Christmas. He got some serious African genes, didn’t he? Very Masai. Lucky bastard. Shit. No sickly pouffy-haired portraits of him by a fucking fountain looking like Lord Fauntleroy.”
“How’s Baby D?” Lena asks when we reach them.
Baby D is my namesake. Garvey pulls out a new photo. She’s a very large two-year-old and Garvey likes to take Paul Bunyan-like photos of her. In this one she is lifting up the back end of one of his moving vans.
“How does she do that?” Jeremy asks.
“She’s a strong little girl,” he says, and winks at Lena.
“We have a giganormous TV in our hotel room!” Jeremy says.
“Cable?”
“Two hundred and eighty-six channels!”
“They don’t get much TV at home,” I explain to Barbara. “So it’s a big deal.”
She nods but she’s not listening to us.
“There’s a TV right there,” Garvey says, pointing up. The screen is split three ways, with John McCain getting into a black SUV, Hillary making a speech to a huge crowd, and Obama springing up the metal steps of his airplane with the big O sunrise on it. “I guess I don’t have to ask who you guys are for.”
I wait for Jonathan to react. He lets Garvey get away with a lot, but this assumption is a particular vexation of his.
“We’re one of those families they interview on local news shows, split right down the middle,” he says.
“Daley’s always had that dyke side,” Garvey says. “I should have warned you.”
“Could you watch your mouth, please?” I tell him, a perpetual refrain when he’s around. “And I’m the Obama supporter, thank you very much.”
“You’re for Hillary?” Garvey asks Jonathan.
Jonathan is used to this. He has condensed his response. “He can’t win. She can. She has the party behind her and she knows how to play hardball.”
“They did find in medical examinations that she has one more testicle than he does,” Garvey says. Lena and Jeremy are perplexed. I need to carry earplugs. “I don’t know, man,” he continues, serious now. “I think you’re underestimating him. This guy knows how to play the game.”
“But in the game, the real game, there’s no room for a man of color.”
“Have you seen the crowds he draws?”
“Hillary is beating him fifty to twenty in the polls.”
“Not for long.”
“If he wins the nomination, we’ll get to see how deeply racist this country really is. The guy doesn’t have a prayer.”
“He’s going to be our next president.”
“And then everyone can dust off their hands and forget about the black poverty rate and that one in nine young black men are in prison. We’ll be post-racial. Have you heard that one yet?”
“Man, and I thought I was cynical,” Garvey says. “I bet your mother doesn’t share your sentiments.” He and Jonathan’s mother have become good friends over all the holidays we’ve spent together.
Jonathan laughs. “No, she does not. My mother is the biggest pie-in-the-sky dreamer there is. She’s walking door-to-door with her Obama pamphlets right now, I’m sure.”
“Our mother used to do that,” Garvey said. “Remember all the rallies she dragged us to?”
I shake my head. Garvey often remembers me into his youth, but most of the time I was home with Nora.
“I’d vote for Obama,” Barbara says.
Garvey pats her hand. “I think you need to lay off the hard stuff in the morning, Barbara.”
“I like him. I like his smile.”
“Well, he’s got the white vote at this table,” Garvey says. “It’s the black vote that’s going to be the bitch.”