One Last Thing Before I Go

just drugged and hungover. He gets up again, slower this time, and performs a kind of shuffle/stagger into the living room.
    His father is seated on the couch, in his customary all-purpose midnight-blue suit. Casey is curled up on the love seat, eating cereal from a bowl.
    “He’s alive,” she declares dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. Her irony is unintentional, or else she’s so good at it that he’s just a bit slow on the uptake. He can’t begin to remember the last time he woke up to her voice. And the situation is not what you’d call optimal, but still, the happiness he feels at having her in his apartment is so powerful that for a moment he finds himself forgetting that she’s knocked up and he’s down for the count. He wonders why he didn’t fight for this years ago, which triggers a small but intensely powerful spasm of regret. She is wearing boxer shorts, one leg tucked under her, and he can remember watching her at four years old, in a pair of orange shorts, her thin, coltish legs climbing the stairs ahead of him, and wishing she could just stay that way forever. When kids outgrow who they are, you don’t mourn them, but you should. That four-year-old girl is as lost to him as if she’d died, and he’d give anything to have her back.
    “Are you crying, Silver?” she says.
    “A little.” He wipes his eyes and turns to his father, who is looking at him with unmasked concern.
    “I’m sorry I disappointed you,” Silver says.
    Ruben gives him a funny look. “When?”
    “I don’t know. Always.”
    “Silver.” There is a great warmth in his eyes. Silver wishes he knew how he did that. He would look at Casey like that, and then she’d just know.
    “Know what?” Casey says.
    “What?”
    “You were saying ‘Then she’d know.’”
    Shit. He has to get a handle on this.
    “I’m sorry. Just thinking out loud.”
    They’re both looking at him funny now.
    “Are you having another stroke?”
    “Hard to say.”
    His father stands up, taking charge. “Do you own a suit?”
    “No.”
    He nods, as if his worst fears have been confirmed. What kind of life requires no suit?
    “I have some band tuxes.”
    “That will have to do, then.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “I’ll tell you on the way.”
    “Can I come?” Casey says.
    “No.”
    “Come on, Pops,” she pleads.
    Her grandfather looks at her fondly, and if there’s sadness in his gaze, he hides it well. “One train wreck at a time,” he says.
    * * *
    In the driver’s seat, Ruben looks over at the ruffles on Silver’s tuxedo shirt and grins.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Can you tell me where we’re going?”
    “To a funeral.”
    “Who died?”
    “Eric Zeiring.”
    “I didn’t know him.”
    “Me neither.”
    Outside, the sky is cloudless. It’s another scorching day. Silver turns up the Camry’s air-conditioning, and it starts to whine a little. Ruben absently turns it back down. Silver can’t remember the last time he was in a car with his father.
    They pass Kennedy Park, where Silver watches a tall guy in gym shorts pushing his kid in a stroller and walking a large golden retriever. He looks totally cool with it. Silver pictures the guy’s wife back at their house, in paint-speckled shorts, her hair up in a bandanna as she paints a mural on their little girl’s bedroom wall. Her husband has gotten the baby and the dog out of the way so she can work. Later, he’ll drop them off so he can get to his regular basketball game, and on the way home he’ll pick up a nice bottle of wine, which they’ll drink in their claw-foot bathtub after putting their daughter down for the night. They’ve given up nothing in their marriage. His athletics, her art, it all merged effortlessly when they came together. Silver is happy for him, for the life he’s made, for the little girl who will grow up in that home.
    “. . . position on suicide?” Ruben is saying.
    “What?”
    “I was wondering if you were aware of the Jewish position on suicide.”
    “I’m guessing they don’t come down in favor of it?”
    He nods. “No, they don’t. It’s a grave sin. The tradition is that for a person who kills himself intentionally, there should be no mourning rites, no eulogy. None of the honors of burial.”
    “Is that supposed to be a disincentive?”
    “Maybe. It’s hard to know. In the entire Bible, there are only two instances of suicide. The most famous one, which has greatly influenced Jewish law, is the suicide of