The Birthday
The past tense is an awful thing to get used to; the past perfect is worse yet when it is his birthday. It would have been his birthday.
I forgot.
They came so close together is what it was. I’ve always been fascinated by people who die on their birthdays. Not on the day they’re born, of course, but once they’ve had the chance to grow ripe and then come right round again. There’s a sense of tidiness, the kind of thing that precludes an awkwardness of imagining someone living to be seventy eight and a half, or ninety three and two thirds.
What do you say? Eighty? Nearly eighty one?
Nine days shy of his eighty first birthday. If he was born in the morning, it’s really only eight days then, and very many hours. There would have been a cake. There’s a tray of brownies in our refrigerator, a chimera of three different bakers’ works, heights and shapes all different and jammed angular into the vacancies left in the pan by sorry mouths and hands.
There’s a half-eaten chocolate cake in the garbage can outside his house. Was his house. His breakfast from that morning was still in the crisper drawer when I started a second round of tossing out perishables. The first time, it was only the milk that I got rid of, already then little more than a thin film sluggish around the bottom of the handled plastic jug. The rest could wait until he came home.
The second time, the breakfast went out: the sliver of cheese clinging desperately to the toast, the spear of pepper, the slice of Polish ham he’d eat when he got back. The chicken soup, marked June’s with an expanse of blue tape, should have been gone long ago. I chucked it. A self-contained unit of hummus and crackers I’d left there myself went too, but the nearly-black apricot jam remained in homage to someone else altogether. The rest of the ham and some liverwurst I took home along with three bottles of Magic Hat that I had been supposed to drink once but hadn’t needed to. He wanted to know who would do such a thing as put apricot in beer! I left the chocolate cake.
My father threw it away today because I can’t go back. There’s just one thing I need to get, anyway. In the sliding slotted racks under hanging sweaters and neglected suits, there’s a red tee shirt with big white letters that make the shape of I Am Loved.
Was Loved.
2 months ago