Page 78 of The Night We Lost Him

“I think it’s you,” he said. “I think it’s you who likes to keep us here. Because it’s safer. Because you’ve decided it’s safer. It’s easy to sit across from me and judge my choices when the only choice I really want isn’t available.”

“How convenient for you.”

“Please sit down.”

She was already putting on her coat. She was already moving away from him. “No. Fighting with you is boring,” she said. “I love you too much to sit here and fight.”

“Then listen to me.”

He tried to think of how to say it so she would hear him. She didn’t want to hear it, not anymore. She didn’t want to hear that it was time they do this another way.

“What if I’m ready?”

“To stop fighting?” she said.

“Cory…”

“Then you can come for a drink.”

Where It Started, Where You’re Going

I don’t go home.

I try to reach Sam again. When he doesn’t pick up, I pass by my stop. I take the subway to Avenue H. My father’s old neighborhood.

My father made no apologies about how eager he was to leave Midwood behind. He found it funny that his only daughter chose to live so nearby a world he couldn’t wait to leave. And that I loved it.

But, no matter how fast he fled from here, my father seemed to love a piece of Flatbush too. I could see it in how he would light up when he talked about Midwood. And he liked showing me around his old stomping grounds, taking me to the places he and Uncle Joe used to frequent, to their old neighborhood hangs.

Now I walk down Bedford Avenue, on my own, and work to remember. I pass his high school, which is letting out for the day, Brooklyn College standing pretty and tree-lined right across the street. Uncle Joe had gone to school there. They were the first two kids in their family to go to college—my father to Yale, Joe a couple of years behind him to Brooklyn College.

The two of them reunited after graduation to live together in Manhattan. The two of them always found their way to each other and spent their lives, one way or another, by each other’s side. Your father was nothing if not loyal.

If he had been loyal to anyone, wasn’t it Joe?

I turn on Twenty-Eighth Street and head to my father’s childhood house. This small yellow house with green shutters, plants lining the outside porch.

I have never been inside. I walk up to the front door and ring the bell. A young mother answers the door in a tank top, a rose tattoo sleeve covering her left arm, her baby son on her other hip. She looks me up and down, an unexpected visitor, the last thing she needs today.

She keeps the screen door closed. “If you’re selling something, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she says.

“No, nothing like that,” I say. “And I’m so sorry to bother you. But my father used to live here.”

“Oh. Are you Mr. O’Malley’s daughter?”

“No, Liam Noone. His family sold to the O’Malleys.”

“Like thirty years ago?”

I nod. It was closer to twenty years ago, but I don’t correct her. One of the first things my father did as soon as he could afford to was to pay off his parents’ mortgage. Then, when his father’s knee got bad enough, he convinced him to retire and moved them (and Joe’s mom) into a waterfront condominium in Naples, Florida. Midwood, finally, and for good, behind him.

“Would it be weird if I came inside for a bit?” I ask. “See his old bedroom.”

“Very,” she says.

I turn and start to go. I hear the screen door squeak open.

“But come on in anyway.”

---