Dreams from My Father

man who embraced me now was much heavier, over two hundred pounds, I guessed, the flesh on his cheeks pressing out beneath a thick pair of glasses. The goatee was gone; the African shirt had been replaced by a gray sports coat, white shirt, and tie. Auma had been right, though; his resemblance to the Old Man was unnerving. Looking at my brother, I felt as if I were ten years old again.
    “You’ve gained some weight,” I said as we walked to his car.
    Roy looked down at his generous belly and gave it a pat. “Eh, it’s this fast food, man. It’s everywhere. McDonald’s. Burger King. You don’t even have to get out of the car to have these things. Two all–beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese. The Double Whopper with cheese.” He shook his head. “They tell me I can have it right away.
My way! Fantastic!
”
    He threw back his head to laugh, a magical, inward sound that made his whole body shake, as if he couldn’t get over the wonders this new life had to offer. It was infectious, his laughter—although I wasn’t laughing as we made our way to dinner. His Toyota was too small for his bulk—he looked like a kid in a carnival bumper car—and it didn’t seem as if he’d yet mastered a stick shift or the rules of the road, including the speed limit. Twice we almost collided with oncoming cars; once, at a turn, we careened over a high curb.
    “You always drive this way?” I shouted over the music blasting out of his tape deck.
    Roy smiled, shifting into fifth. “I’m not so good, eh? Mary, my wife, she’s always complaining, too. Especially since the accident…”
    “What accident?”
    “Ah, it was nothing. You see I’m still here. Alive and breathing!” And again he laughed and shook his head, as if the car worked independently of him, as if our safe arrival would be yet one more example of God’s ample blessings.
    The restaurant was Mexican, beside a marina, and we chose a table with a view out over the water. I ordered a beer, Roy a margarita, and for a while we made small talk about my work and his accounting job at a large mortgage finance company. He ate with gusto, drank a second margarita; he laughed and joked about his adventures in America. But as the meal wore on, the effort he was making began to show. Eventually, I came around to asking him why his wife hadn’t joined us. His smile evaporated.
    “Ah, I think we’re getting divorced,” he said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “She says she’s tired of me staying out late. She says I drink too much. She says I’m becoming just like the Old Man.”
    “What do you think?”
    “What do I think?” He lowered his head, then looked at me somberly, the flame of the tea candles dancing like tiny bonfires across the lenses of his glasses. “The truth is,” he said, leaning his weight forward, “I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.”
    For the next hour, he recounted all the hard times that Auma had spoken of—of being yanked away from his mother and everything familiar; the Old Man’s sudden descent into poverty; the arguments and breakdown and eventual flight. He told me about his life after leaving our father’s house; how, bouncing from relative to relative, he had gained admission to the University of Nairobi, then secured a job with a local accounting firm after graduation; how he had taught himself the discipline of work, always arriving at his job early and completing his tasks no matter how late he was out the night before. Listening to him, I felt the same admiration that I’d felt when listening to Auma talk about her life, the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget. Roy’s memories of the Old Man seemed more immediate, more taunting; for him the past remained an open sore.
    “Nothing was ever good enough for him,” he told me as the busboy took our plates away. “He was smart, and he couldn’t ever let you forget. If you came home with the second best grades in the class, he would ask why you weren’t first. ‘You are an Obama,’ he would say. ‘You should be the best.’ He would really believe this. And then I would see him drunk, with no money, living like a beggar. I would ask myself, How can someone so smart fall so badly? It made no sense to me. No sense.
    “Even