I turned on the TV and sat at the foot of the bed, but still there was only sound, a commercial for a diet drink. I heard a woman laugh out in the parking lot, and I wondered if this truck stop was like some back East: cold beer and live music in the bar, hot steak and eggs in the diner, hookers for the rooms upstairs. I sat there and listened to the beginning of some TV show about cops and DAs and the streets of New York City. Outside my window was the twangy beat of another country band playing next door, and for the fortieth time since last January I looked at the telephone and tried not to call someone back home.
For a long time my mother would call every Sunday afternoon to catch us up on things, but really to see how wewere. The first few Sundays after Nick left, when I answered the phone and heard her voice, I had to hold my hand to my mouth sometimes to keep from crying. But then I’d start lying about how well he was doing at his new job. I told her how his office was on the seventeenth floor of an earthquake-proof building overlooking San Francisco, and that he was making good money and would probably get promoted in no time. This used to be true.
Sometimes she would want to talk to him and I’d say he was taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him up, or else he was working (she never liked hearing that, not on a Sunday), or he was playing basketball with some guys from his office. She seemed to like hearing that the most, that Nick was out making friends and doing something healthy.
“What about you, K? Have you made new friends, too?”
“Yeah,” I’d say. “I get together with some of the wives and we shop and, you know, do things like that.” There’d be silence on her end. “And there’s one girl, Ma. She’s my age and kind of overweight. She lives nearby and we go jogging together four nights a week.”
That helped, a lie about making friends and taking care of myself. As soon as she seemed satisfied with my news, she’d go on about Frank and my nephews, their house, her thinning hair, the gambling trip to Atlantic City her two sisters were planning. But behind all this talk was the question she‘d never ask: have you been going to those recovery groups out there, K? And that was one lie I couldn’t pull off, anyway. So instead she would finish her calls by asking me the other true question stuck inside her like something she could only ease out by hearing me finally give the right answer:
“When do you think you two will have children, K?”
And for once in our calls I could tell the truth: “As soon as I can talk Nick into it, Mom.” Which was true when Nicky still lived with me. Saying this long after he’d been gone though, my voice sounded hollow.
ONLY THREE YEARS ago we were both into our second week at the program, and we had the same double dose—coke and alcohol—but the day before in Group, Nick had owned up to a third, porno. A lot of us couldn’t accept this as a real addiction, but Larry told us to pipe down and “hear” Nick. That wasn’t hard for me to do because even then, Nick’s body still coming off the ten-day binge of lines and beer and Southern Comfort that got him into an emergency room then the program, his fingers always trembling while he smoked, I couldn’t not look at him, at those hard blue eyes, at his thick black hair and pale face with pimple scars on the cheeks. His arms and legs were skinny, and he had a belly that showed more when he sat down, but all I ever wanted to do from the start was to feel my whole wasted body up against Nicky Lazaro’s.
Whenever he talked he threw me because his voice was so deep and didn’t go with his boy-look, and also, he spoke well, like he was educated or else read a lot of books. He said it was always worse when he was trying to stay straight, that instead of drinking or doing lines he’d be doing dirty movies. Sometimes he even called in sick at work and he’d rent a half-dozen hard-core tapes and spend hours and hours with them.
“Hours?”I said, and I started to laugh, though I felt pretty disgusted. Larry cut me off and said how “inappropriate” remarks like that were in Group. I looked at Nick. He was studying the burning cigarette in his hand like he wasn’t part of this conversation at all. Then he glanced at me, his eyes dark and a little shiny, and my cheeks got hot and I had to look away.
On visitors’ day, while I was waiting for my brother and his wife, I kept watching Nick on the other side of the room sitting straight across from his parents, who reminded me of my own, though Dad was dead and Ma couldn’t face seeing me anymore. Sometimes he’d glance in my direction and I’d look away. All around us were visiting families in plastic chairs around fold-out tables, some of them hardly looking into each other’s eyes, others loud, telling stories and jokes like they were relieved everything had only come to this, a Get Well helium balloon floating in the haze of cigarette smoke above them.
But I felt grateful just to be sitting there. In the two weeks I’d been at the program, the lining inside my nostrils had already stopped bleeding, I hadn’t drunk anything stronger than coffee, and the only stranger I would wake up to was me. But more than that, I had already stopped wanting what I’d been craving off and on since I was fifteen, for Death to come take me the way the wind does a dried leaf out on its limb.
Q UITE EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, AS I LIE SLEEPING UPON THE CARPETnear the open sliding screen, my son touches my shoulder and wakes me to a glass of hot tea and four cubes of sugar. Outdoors, in the trees below us, a bird calls, but the sky is gray and the air through the screen is cool.
“Bawbaw-jahn. Man goh khordam. I am sorry.”
My son is already dressed in shorts and T-shirt, his hair dry, but combed. I sit up and take the tea and drink it without sugar. I look through the screen at the small concrete terrace outside, and I hear my Esmail sit upon the carpet beside me.
“I know you work very hard, Bawbaw. All the days and almost all the nights of the week.”
I look at my son, at his brown eyes that on a woman would be beautiful, and in Farsi I thank him for his apology and for the tea, and I tell to him he must begin preparing his room for moving.
Today, on the freeway crew of garbage soldiers, we work the southbound lanes of Route 101 where it runs along the tall evergreen trees of the Golden Gate Recreational Area. I wear my new blue hat all the day long but of course the morning fog never lifts and I wish for a light sweater. At the lunch break I eat quickly beside Tran, then rise to speak with Torez as he sits behind the wheel of his truck, the door open very wide, as he studies one of those odd crossword grids in the newspaper. I stand there a moment until it becomes clear to me I am standing at attention. I discipline myself to relax my shoulders and speak.
“After today I will no longer be working here, Mr. Torez.”
He completes writing a word with his pencil, then he looks up and says: “You tell the office, Coronel?”
“No.”
“So why tell me, man?” He regards his newspaper. “You know another word for hurricane?”
I return to Tran and my tea and I have a wish to tell the Vietnamese goodbye, but when I point to my chest then to the road, he smiles and nods his head as if I were telling to him a very old and humorous story.
And now it is evening at the convenience store and my legs are heavy, my eyes are beginning to water from fatigue, but I am filled with cheer as I work my very last shift. Rico, the young man working beside me, has always possessed the habit of chewing gum which on other evenings bothered me a great deal—that nasty sound it makes in the mouth—but tonight this is not the case; none of the usual irritants have their power over me, not the bright fluorescent lighting over all the shelves of overpriced boxed and canned food; not the university students who enter with their stupid smiles after drinking too much beer to purchase chocolate bars and cigarettes; not even when people hand to me a gasoline credit card and I have to use the cumbersome machine beneath the magazine display rack; and even those kaseef and dirty magazines of naked women on their covers, which I have always despised having to touch or sell, even they cannot upset me as they have so many times before. Because this I know of life’s difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.