*
A race car driver killed by his lawn mower. There must be a joke in there somewhere.
*
The pair of high school students next to me on this PATH train know so much more about life than I do.
“I was trying to be, like, hyper-rational,” says the first girl. “And explain to him that he can’t treat me this way.”
“That’s smart,” says her friend.
“But all my human feelings got in the way,” says the first girl.
“That happens,” says her friend.
*
There’s a voicemail on the house phone from That Home informing us there’s been an incident with my father. My mother’s still at botany class, so I call back. As it rings, I crouch down on the floor like I’m about to pee, some atavistic instinct that it’s safer down there. By the time I get transferred to the nurse practitioner, I have my forehead bowed to the floor too. I rock back and forth on the balls of my feet and hum softly until she comes on the line.
She explains briskly that my father managed to squirrel an old credit card away and has ordered hundreds of dollars’ worth of products from daytime infomercials to That Home.
“The packages have been arriving for the last few days,” she says. “It’s against policy for patients to receive mail that’s commerce.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned in your voicemail,” I say very quietly into the floor. “That the incident with my elderly, infirm father was one of fucking commerce.”
*
I drive over to That Home and find my father cowering alone in his room like a dog that’s eaten the birthday cake.
“Hi, Pa,” I say softly, kneeling beside his chair.
He’s clutching the end of the curtain and rubbing the nubby corner back and forth with his thumb. Sunlight flocks through the window. I put my hand on his arm. He jerks it away.
“You’re not in trouble, Pa,” I say.
He fumbles to get a better handful of the curtain and tugs it slowly across his face.
*
The stuff he bought has been confiscated and held at the nurse’s station. Confiscated? I want to yell. He’s a doctor! He went to Princeton!
I borrow a pair of scissors and slice open packages in the lobby. There’s a retractable cane, a hair crimper, two calligraphy sets, something called the “Fat Blasting Magnet,” a purple neck pillow in the shape of a panda, and a scratch-proof saucepan.
“I’d advise you to return those,” says the nurse.
I lug the boxes out to the car and sit in the front seat filling out return labels. There is, understandably, no box for neurodegenerative disease under “Reason for return,” so I go with “Product did not meet customer’s expectations.”
I sit and watch the sky turn gray. A nurse in lavender scrubs steps out for a cigarette. A knot of pigeons corkscrews into the air. I grab the panda neck pillow and shove it under my arm.
“He’s keeping this,” I say as I march past the nurse’s station.
*
Frank and I are working late, supposedly on the presentation for this real estate company.
“This is bad, but not as bad as my first copy job,” Frank says. “It was for a Chinese restaurant. So many wok puns.”
“Like ‘wok ‘n’ roll’？” I laugh.
“All the obvious ones had already been taken,” he says. “We were resorting to things like ‘Chip off the old wok.’ ‘Laughing wok of the city’ …”
“‘Between a wok and a hard place.’”
“See, you’re a natural,” he says. “I wanted the tagline to be ‘Don’t be a woksucker,’ but they didn’t bite.”
Frank lays his hand, palm up, on the desk. I think about kissing it. Just those two parts of us, my lips and his palm, are in communion. I sit on my hands, but my head keeps tugging forward like it’s trying to bob for apples. It’s listening to my mouth.
*
Levi calls to tell me he’s working on a solo album about his breakup. It’s called Table for One … Not by the Window.
*
I find this line of poetry by Sáenz and email it to my mother:
I want to dream a sky / Full of hummingbirds. I would like to die in such a storm.
She replies:
I think I’d rather die in my sleep like Auntie Louise.
*
“But are these concepts ownable?” asks the real estate client in pinstripes. “Are we using language and phraseology that’s indigenously ours?”
“I’m going to have to stop you at indigenous,” says Frank.