One Last Thing Before I Go

some time, and getting them through the door is half the battle. He takes a quick shower, tending to his nethers with a bit more care than usual. Once out, he overapplies his deodorant and attempts to make sense of his untamable mess of hair. When he emerges, in boxers and T-shirt, she is lying on his bed, still in her short black dress, aimlessly channel surfing. She takes slow sips of the whiskey she’s poured herself, absently sucking the lone ice cube into her mouth then dropping it back into her drink again. In the blue light of the television she is beautiful again, and he experiences a surge of affection that has no place in these utilitarian proceedings. Although he’s known her for a while, he knows nothing about her. For instance, he made up the part about her being a cheerleader. For all he knows, she wore a scoliosis brace and stuttered.
    She rolls into him as he lies down beside her, either voluntarily or because the mattress has shifted under his weight, and rests her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. He closes his eyes to inhale her shampoo, falling briefly but deeply in love even as he knows that tomorrow, in the light of day, he will have trouble making eye contact with her.
    “You smell nice,” she says, her sung-out voice just above a whisper. “Like autumn.”
    “Irish Spring.”
    He watches her chest rise and fall with her breath, the soft roundness of her breasts gathering at the top of her dress, and he can feel things starting to stir down below. Then she turns her head to look up at him, and he could cry from the desolation in her eyes.
    “Is it okay if we just lie here for a bit?” she says.
    Not really, no
. “Sure.”
    Teenage vampires skulk on cable. Outside, a truck horn blares. He watches Dana’s toes as they curl against his comforter and experiences what might be best described as homesickness, but he’ll be damned if he knows what or where it is that he’s missing. Tomorrow morning, with the skies still pink from the inevitability of sunrise, he will drive her back to the catering hall, where her small car will be sitting marooned in the vast empty lot like something lost, waiting to be claimed. The sight of it will sadden both of them in ways they couldn’t begin to explain.

CHAPTER 8
    “W hen was the last time you emptied this fridge?” his mother, Elaine, says, holding a plastic covered tin of what looks like congealed brain at arm’s length.
    “I don’t know, last week maybe?”
    “I don’t think so,” she says, tossing the container into the garbage. Once the fridge is cleaned to her satisfaction, she will fill it with fruits and vegetables that will slowly go bad until her next visit.
    “Please, Mom, you don’t have to do that.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    Elaine disappears into the fridge, leaving his father and him to make small talk.
    “You getting enough gigs?” his father says.
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s good.”
    “How are things at the temple?”
    “The God business is pretty much recession-proof.”
    “If it wasn’t, that would raise some pretty interesting theological questions.”
    “Would it?”
    Someday his father will be gone, and Silver will still be able to have these conversations, word for word, from memory.
    * * *
    His father, Ruben Silver, is the rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel. When Silver was a boy, he and his younger brother, Chuck, would sit up on the stage with their father during the Sabbath services, facing the congregation. Silver would pretend that his father was their king, and he and Chuck their esteemed princes. Ruben would sing along with the cantor—he had a gruff but melodic voice—and he would put his arm around his boys, pointing to random Hebrew words in the
siddur
, which they would dutifully read aloud to him. At some point, as his encroaching maturity bred a certain self-consciousness, Silver stopped sitting up there with them, he can’t remember exactly when. It wasn’t something they ever talked about. It was just one of those things you quietly outgrow and only realize it after the fact.
    * * *
    His father whistles “Penny Lane.”
    “Whistling,” Elaine says unconsciously. He stops. They’ve been married for forty-seven years.
    Ruben knows many other songs, but if he’s whistling, it’s “Penny Lane.” For all Silver knows, he’s been doing it ever since
Magical Mystery Tour
came out. The first time Ruben heard the song, the opening bars wrapped themselves around his cerebral