Everything Changes

father you never were.”
    “Nevertheless, I am.”
    “Well, there’s no need. Believe me, I’m fine. Just fine, thank you very much.”
    Norm takes a sip from his water glass and flashes a small, wry grin. “You sound fine,” he says.
    Before I can respond, the waitress arrives, gingerly setting down Norm’s soup and my salad with the posture of someone inching her head out of a hiding spot, ready to retreat in an instant. “Okay,” she says nervously. “Let’s all try to calm down a little. Family’s family, right?”
    “Penny,” Norm says to her. “I want to apologize to you if any of the remarks I made earlier offended you. That was certainly not my intention.”
    “Don’t be silly, Norm,” she says, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re a sweetheart.”
    We eat in an uncomfortable silence, the only sounds coming from Norm as he aggressively slurps his soup. After a while he looks up at me between mouthfuls. “How’s Pete doing?”
    “He’s great.”
    “I send him a birthday card every year,” Norm says.
    “Well, that changes everything, then, doesn’t it,” I say.
    Norm puts down his spoon and looks at me. His forehead is dappled with beads of sweat, either from the soup or from the strenuousness of making conversation with his bitter fuck of a firstborn son. “This isn’t going very well,” he says to me.
    “No shit,” I say wearily.
    He wipes his sweating pate with a napkin, and then wipes his lips with the same one, and I wonder if he can taste his own sweat. “Listen,” he says. “I am working under the assumption that there must be something we can talk about in a civilized manner for as long as it takes to eat a grilled cheese sandwich, something that won’t get you angry. I’ve struck out so far, so why don’t you give it a shot?”
    I look at my father wiping his soup bowl clean in circular strokes with his onion roll before taking a messy bite out of the roll. I hate that he’s right, that after all these years, he’s just stepped back in and called it so accurately. How can someone so obtuse be so sharp? It’s nothing more than a coincidence, my personal dramas coinciding with his delusion that he can still lay claim to the instincts of a true father. I’m loath to make it so easy for him, to concede that his blind shots have nonetheless hit their mark. There are crumbs on his shirt as well as a soup stain or two just above the upper swell of his belly. The limp dust-colored strands of his hair are askew from leaning over his bowl, and when he grabs another roll, I can see that his fingernails are jagged and bitten. Just like mine.
    “I might have cancer,” I say.

    Somehow, in discussing the potential of death, I end up talking about my life, and within forty minutes or so, I’ve pretty much told him everything, about work, Hope, Tamara. And there they are, my deepest fears and secrets, spoken aloud, laid out before the least likely person to whom I’d ever imagined spilling my conflicted guts. The only part I leave out is my aborted infidelity last night at the WENUS gig. If Norm wants to feel kinship with me over grilled cheese, that’s fine, but I will not let him have
that
in common with me. He listens attentively, his brow furrowed, chiming in only to offer some predictably worthless advice about my situation at work. When I’m done, we order some coffee and sip at it quietly for a while. “It’s probably nothing,” he finally says.
    “Probably,” I say.
    “Listen, Zack,” Norm says, putting down his mug with an air of finality. “I know I’m the last person you want to be hearing any advice from.”
    “Somehow,” I say, “I suspect you’re not going to let a minor detail like that stop you.”
    “I gotta be me,” he says with a smile. I notice for the first time that he has Matt’s smile, and maybe mine, for all I know. “I’m going to admit something to you that I never usually admit, even to myself. Letting my marriage to your mother fall apart was the biggest damn mistake I ever made in my life. I’m sixty years old now and I’ve got a boatload of mistakes to show for it, but they can all be traced back to that one, ultimate mistake. That’s what sent my life down the course it took, and every bad thing that happened to me afterward was a consequence of that one mistake. I know you think you’re in a bad place right now, but I would give anything to be standing in your shoes at this moment. Because you’re still in the before.