Maybe the Moon

towering shelves of pills, while a gray-templed patriarch a la James Earl Jones drones on endlessly about the glories of filling prescriptions. “What did he think of you and the piano?” I asked.
    “Not much. He got better about it later.” He shrugged. “He came to Tahoe, anyway. Heard me play.”
    “Well, that was something.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Something.”
    “At least you know what your father looks like,” I said.
    He hesitated for a moment, apparently confused, then said: “You don’t remember anything?”
    “Well, I remember he existed, but the rest is a blur.”
    “You never even saw a picture of him?”
    “Nope. Mom just erased him after he left.”
    “I see.”
    “And believe me, I looked. I used to dig through Mom’s stuff when she was out of the house. She had this special drawer in her dresser—way up high where I couldn’t reach—with all her letters and snapshots and shit. When she went out shopping, I’d drag the step stool out of the kitchen and play detective.”
    “But no pictures, huh?”
    I shook my head. “The most I ever found was a gift card that said ‘To my darling Teddy.’”
    “That was his name?”
    I smiled. “Her name. Short for Theodora.”
    “Oh.”
    “I used to imagine it was from him. I’m sure it wasn’t.”
    “Do you know his name?”
    “Oh, sure. Chapman. Sergeant Howard Chapman. At the time, anyway. He left the service just before he left us.”
    “Do you know where he went?”
    “No. But I used to think Mom did and just wasn’t telling me. One summer when I was about ten, we drove to New York and visited cousins. It was my first trip out of Baker, so Mom made a big fuss about it. Somehow, along the way, I convinced myself that she’d finally found my father and was bringing me to New York for a reunion. There was no evidence for that whatsoever, but that didn’t stop me. When we got to my cousins’ house in Queens, I even checked the phone books and found an H. Chapman in Manhattan. I was sure it was him.”
    Neil smiled. “Did you call?”
    “Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t have dared. I just thought of it as evidence. In case I worked up the nerve to ask Mom about it.”
    “Did you?”
    “Yeah, but not for a long time. I kept thinking she might spring it on me one night, as a special surprise, when we went out for ice cream or something. We’d get off a bus somewhere and ride an elevator, and there would be the Sergeant. He’d be tall and redheaded and smell like pipe tobacco and be much nicer than we thought he’d be.”
    “What made you think he’d be in New York?”
    “Go figure. It just seemed like the place fathers would hide. Mom was great about it when I finally asked her. She took me to a deli and bought us big gooey desserts and let me drink coffee for the first time. She said she’d brought me there—to New York, I mean—because she wanted me to see where her family came from. She said she had no idea where my father was and that she wouldn’t take him back even if he did turn up. She said he was a bastard and a coward and she was deeply, truly sorry she hadn’t made that perfectly clear to me earlier.”
    “How’d you take it?”
    “OK, actually. It was kind of a relief.”
    “It must have been.”
    “It was the way she did it, I guess—from one grownup to another. She made a rite of passage out of it.” I smiled at him while an old reel played in my head. “You know what else I remember about that night?”
    “What?”
    “Well, Mom went out to flag a cab and left me cash to pay the waitress—one more thing I’d never done before. There was still coffee in my cup, which was Styrofoam, so I took it with me and finished it on the sidewalk while I waited for Mom. I was standing there holding the empty cup and feeling like the coolest person in the world, when this guy in a suit walks by and sees me and stops and stuffs a five-dollar bill into the cup.”
    “Oh, no.”
    “I had no idea what had happened. Not the slightest. I tried to give it back to him, but he just waved me off. I told Mom about it when she got back, and she was furious. I think she would’ve hit the guy if he’d still been around.”
    Neil shook his head slowly. “Did that really happen?”
    “That really happened,” I said.
    I hadn’t told that story for years.

    We polished off a few beers, and then a few more. We got pretty jolly, in fact, escaping in tandem from the debacle of our day. When it started to get dark, Neil