“Why don’t you call?”

“Hmmm?” I glanced up from my plate, which held the remnants of my spaghetti; lonely noodles sprawled across white china. My father watched me intently, fingers gripping a coffee mug. Each time I come home he seems more tired. The skin under his eyes droops like wilting lilies.

“I mean, we’d like to know what’s goin’ on with you. You just don’t call that much, that’s all.” He averted his eyes, focusing his vision on some mediocre diner painting while I racked my brain for some reasonable justification. Why hadn’t I called? The sorrowful existence of a voice without a face. The silent buzzing of the wires during the search for words. I shrugged. “I guess I forget,” I said quietly.

He sighed. A white flag in the form of an exhalation, waving sadly in the wind. I watched the raindrops rush down the window against the ebony country sky. Our silence hung in the air like a noose; still, unfathomable. I watch a truck drive by, and I couldn’t hear it through the thick glass but I knew it was making lots of big noise. The engine vroomed and the air swooshed as it passed. I wondered where the driver was going, as he vanished so swiftly into his inevitable fate.

“You know, that woman over there looks like my grandmother.”

I turned around and glanced behind me, catching the eye of an old lady sitting two tables back. She had thin lips and her eyes darted about like frantic minnows. Her food sat untouched and she squinted at me from behind a small teacup, holding it in both hands as if it were holy. I swung my torso back around to face my father. His dreamy smile told me he’s not here, that he’s somewhere in his childhood, with backyard swings and newts after the rain and softball afternoons.

“My grandmother, now that was a strange woman. We would go to stay with her every summer, her place out in Amagansett. ‘To get away from the city,’ my mother would tell us. And every May my father swore he wouldn’t go…‘not this damn year,’ he’d say. But every year my mother got him to go. She’d turn her dark eyes at him and speak to him softly and feed him chocolate mint cake. And if that didn’t work she yelled that she regretted every minute of their marriage and wept and threw anything she could get her hands on until he rolled his eyes and agreed to go. He always counteracted her madness by a display of his own, throwin’ his suitcase onto the bed months before we would actually leave and crammin’ random crap into it, things like long johns and memo pads and nothing he would really bring to Amagansett. All the while stompin’ about and sayin’, ‘Fine, Marie, but only because I love ya so goddamn much!’ I think eventually they just fought about it out of habit. I think they even liked all the yellin’ and weepin’. It replaced the usual beer-and-dominoes of Friday nights, and it gave my mother an excuse to buy new dishes.

“Now Amagansett was a lovely place for a city boy to be, I’ll tell ya. So many little seashells gleamin’ all about me, the ominous sea spreadin’ itself out to the horizon. Little cottages made of damp wood sittin’ among whisperin’ reeds. I loved the beach. But it wasn’t always easy, livin’ with my grandmother. In fact, it was never easy.”

I laughed and sat back as the waitress slowly refilled our mugs to the brims with steaming coffee. My father thanked her hurriedly and rushed back into his story. He gets like this sometimes. Like he had jumped a freight car, drunk on adrenaline, and he was all motion and passing landscapes and he couldn’t stop. There was somewhere that he was going to.

“I’ve heard Italian grandmothers dole out big bowlfuls of lasagna and Swiss grandmothers dole out big cupfuls of hot cocoa, well Irish grandmothers dole out heaps of guilt, I’ll tell ya. That summer I was practically convinced that my father was a low-life and my mother hadn’t a bit of sense in her head for marryin’ him, and thankfully I was too young to know what all that meant. And I, she said, was walkin’ barefoot down a surefire path of destruction. ‘No religion, growin’ up without God,’ my grandmother said. Which was funny because the woman cursed more than anyone I’ve ever met in my whole life. Especially in the early daybreak of mornings, often and loud, as she read the newspaper and sipped sugary black tea and scowled. I would sit beside her, listenin’ to my father snorin’ in the guestroom and eatin’ ice cream, usually butterscotch, a staple in my grandmother’s freezer. Each summer I ate enough ice cream to kill five diabetics. She’d complain about things I couldn’t possibly comprehend. The civil rights movement I would one day celebrate she would respond to with, ‘those bastards don’t be knowin’ a damn thing!’ I don’t even think she knew what she really thought. She just knew whatever anyone else thought wasn’t acceptable. Well, I just nodded at her and gulped down spoonfuls of Turkey Hill. She continued scowlin’ and sippin’, and when I’d get up to put my bowl in the sink she’d ask me her favorite rhetorical question, ‘Ah, Jimmy, tell me now, when ya gunna find Jesus?’”

“She sounds like a maniac,” I said.

My father smiled. His teeth were yellowing, I noticed. Like pages of a well-read book.

“She was definitely insane. Certifiable. But there was something else, too. Like, when I was outside at dusk, playin’ with my army figures or readin’ my Hardy Boys mysteries. She would wait until it got just dark enough that I had to put on my readin’ lamp, shining down bright on my small scenes of warfare, and then she would creep into the porch with a sheet coverin’ all but her eyes which were gleamin’ and pale and she would shriek like a banshee. I’d practically jump out of my skin of course, filled with indescribable terrors and then her shriekin’ would dissolve into cacklin’ and then she would turn right around and hobble back into the house. Laughin’ all the while! And leavin’ me panting and confused on the porch, sitting in silent childhood contemplation. I hold remember this with a certain reverence, though. You see, in that way she loved me. In that small, strange way. She really did love me.”

I stared at him. He was gazing at something behind me now, eyes shining like headlights.

“I’m sorry I don’t call, Dad.” I’m not sure why I said it at all. The words burst from my mouth like thunder.

Something changed in his features. He pushed his shoulders back and sat up straight, like a soldier. Something shut.

“Do you want some pie? I see they have some pecan pie. You love pecan pie.”

It was true; I had loved pecans ever since I was a girl growing up in New Orleans. Our neighbor had a pecan tree, and the nuts would drop into our yard every fall; I thought they were beautiful. Delicious little presents enclosed in difficult packaging.

“No, Dad, I’m full.”

But he was up before I could finish my sentence, hurrying toward the waitress to ask her about the dessert menu. I watched him from a distance. His old blue jeans, his threadbare flannel. His anxious hands and restless kneecaps; his heavy red tongue. My father.

I turned my attention again to the world outside. It was no longer raining, but the remnants of the storm lingered on the windowpane. I couldn’t see the water droplets as vividly as I could see the spaces between them.