600 Hours of Edward

deification of my father. Her grieving has begun.
    I wonder when mine will.
    – • –
    By 10:00 a.m., my mother has begun to wane and says she wants to go to sleep. She asks me to stay, and I say I will. Whatever plans I had—I can’t remember what they were—have gone by the wayside.
    At 11:11, when she is fast asleep, the phone rings. I pick it up.
    “Yes?”
    “Hello. Could I please speak to Maureen Stanton?”
    “She is asleep right now.”
    “This is Matt Hagengruber with the
Herald-Gleaner.
May I ask who I’m speaking with?”
    “Edward.”
    “Edward Stanton?”
    “Yes.”
    “You are Ted Stanton’s son?”
    “Yes.”
    “Edward, I’m sorry to hear about your father’s death. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
    “Yes.”
    “I can ask a few questions?”
    “No.”
    “Would it be all right if I called later to talk with your mother?”
    “Yes.”
    “Thank you for your time.”
    I hang up the phone.
    The calls come all afternoon like that, some from friends of my parents (I know none of those people), some from the radio and TV stations. Those are all variations on the call from Matt Hagengruber, and I tell each of them the same thing: they are welcome to call back later and see if my mother wishes to talk.
    The only exception is the stupid woman from the TV station who asks for “Mrs. STAINton.” I tell her never to call back again. I would like to say the same thing to Jay L. Lamb, who calls at 2:58 p.m., but I think my mother would like to talk to him. I write down the message.
    All the while, my grieving mother sleeps.
    – • –
    I spend my off-the-phone time in my father’s office, where I find a shelf full of photo albums that span the days when my parents met, long before I came along, to present day. I notice something else: Along about the time that I graduated from Billings West High School in 1987, I started disappearing from the rows of photographs. By the late 1990s, around the time of the “Garth Brooks incident,” I was gone entirely.
    In the past decade of family life as captured by a camera’s lens, the Stanton family is my father and my mother and their trips together (I recognize France and Egypt and London among the photos). Edward Stanton Jr. is nowhere to be seen.
    And yet today, Edward Stanton Sr. is dead, and I am in his office.
    I never really understood the concept of irony, but this situation may be it.
    – • –
    At 4:40, my mother emerges from sleep. She comes downstairs in her robe. She looks tired, which is to be expected. She looks older than she did when she left me several hours ago, which is shocking.
    I tell her about the calls from the media and that they will be back, hoping to speak with her. She sighs. “I’ll have Jay make some sort of statement.”
    I tell her about Jay’s call and request for a callback.
    I tell her that her friends are worried.
    I tell her that I am OK.
    And I tell her good-bye, that I have things to do at home.
    “You’re a good boy, Edward,” she says to me, her thirty-nine-year-old son. “I will give you a call tonight and let you know about the arrangements for your father.”
    – • –
    I thought that I might be able to breathe if I could just get out of that house. But here I am now, waiting to make a right turn at Twenty-Seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and I can’t find any air.
    At Division, where I take a left turn that will lead me to Clark Avenue and home, I feel the tears sliding down my face. Soon, I can’t see the road.
    “I will not deify my father,” I say, but no one is here to answer.
    – • –
    At home, I work calmly and silently in the kitchen, gathering the things I will need. They fit into two plastic bags left over from some long-ago trip to Albertsons. I walk the bags out of the kitchen, out the back door, through the backyard, and into the alley behind the house, where I drop them into the big cityowned trash receptacles.
    It’s the remaining root beer, the salad in a bag, the half-eaten sorbet, the uncooked steak, and every Lean Cuisine meal I bought. I should have known better than to change my routine. The only worthwhile things in life are those that you can rely on. Change brings uncertainty. Change brings chaos. These are things I do not need.
    – • –
    Tonight’s episode of
Dragnet
is called “The Jade Story.” It is the tenth episode of the first season, and it is one of my favorites.
    In “The Jade Story,” which originally aired on March 23,