You Can Say You Knew Me When Read Online Free

It hurt because we’d been through this before, when I was a teenager and he’d first discovered my sexuality; after I got out of college, finally able to admit to myself what I was; when I decided to move to San Francisco, hoping he’d understand; and then long-distance, over the phone, in smaller doses. I’d been “coming out” to him for most of my adult life.
    That night I told him he wouldn’t hear from me until he’d changed his mind. What I actually said was “Until you stop being so fucking closed minded.”
    All this came roaring back to me after I got off the phone with Woody. I was sitting in a nook in the upstairs hallway, in an armchair next to a small wooden table—the “telephone table” we called it, a name that had always sounded sophisticated to me, something out of a Rosalind Russell movie. I glanced toward my father’s bedroom. An eerie, vertical slice of darkness floated between the half-open door and the frame, beyond which I could see our penultimate argument in pantomime: me, pacing uneasily, wearing shorts made from cut-off Army fatigues, a sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with a random high-school sports logo ( WOLVERINE WRESTLING ), silver rings on my fingers, silver hoops in my ears, a fresh tattoo inked around my bicep, the whole look an ironic pastiche of the very masculinity that he embodied. I must have appeared so adolescent to him. Clownish. Gay. Sitting tensed on the bed, he was intimidating and solid: freshly showered, his clean white T-shirt snug across his barrel chest, his freckled and furry arms, his clenched fists. I saw each contour so clearly. He was dead, but his presence was stronger than it had been for years.
    I walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open, flicked on the light. Medical supplies—pill bottles and swabs and a thermometer—cluttered the dresser. The bed frame, devoid of its mattress, sat empty in the center of the room, a fuzzy coating of dust on the brown rug beneath. In a span of five years, my father had been transformed from that imperturbable figure arguing rationally from the foot of his bed to an emaciated shell withering away under the covers. Perhaps he was already heading into dementia the night we’d fought—plaque forming along his nerves, the viral conspiracy to bring down his brain fomenting deep within.
    A couple of months after that, he called me in San Francisco to chat. Literally, just to chat. For small talk. When I brought up the subject, he seemed perplexed, as if things between us hadn’t gotten so heated. “I consider that matter settled,” he said, as if reviewing a policy dispute with a co-worker. It was all I needed to end contact, once and for all.
    But now I wondered, when he’d made that call, had he literally forgotten the previous argument? Was he, in general, beginning to forget? It was only six or eight months later that Deirdre first started reporting Dad’s strange behavior—how he’d begun repeating himself, misplacing things, losing his sense of direction and time.
    Her reports continued, always worsening, and Deirdre began urging me to come home. She had always been like our mother in her willingness to compromise for him, to build a game plan around his inflexibility. “You’re his son,” she would inevitably say. But I couldn’t come home. I wouldn’t. I had stopped caring, had stopped making myself crazy because my father disapproved of me, and this stopping had unburdened me. Case closed.
    Long before my father died, I’d made peace—not with him, but with our estrangement.
     
     
    And yet.

2
     
    N ana woke me the next morning with a hand on my shoulder, an urgent whisper in my ear. “Up, Jimmy, up!”
    The sky was still dim outside the window. Nana had a sympathetic, silvery glow about her. “Mass is at eight. You’ll take me, then?”
    “What time is it?”
    “Seven. But the driveway’s covered in snow. It could use a good shovel.”
    “Okay,” I groaned. “Will you make me