After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey Read Free Book Online Page A

the war, men came with money, bought out the flock, tore down the church, built
     our runways. Yet the dead remain. Unless you know where to look, you can’t see them.
    Today, still, when I fly to Chicago, I search out the gravestones during my descent.
     Final Approach. A game I play. My landmarks, the graves. Then I know I am home. ORD.
    #
    Jets rattle our kitchen window. In the wake of each departure, the disturbance so
     strong we cease speaking.
    “Hold that thought,” it seems my mother always says whenever I try to speak.
    One day, while I’m waiting for her to cook my lunch, my neat round spaghetti you can
     eat with a spoon, another jet rumbles overhead. My mother slams her wooden spoon against
     the counter.
    “This home is a flight path,” she says, and walks out of the room, the stove untended.
    Eventually, she is drawn to it, to the world of airport jobs.
    O’Hare. A world of transit. Of long-term lots and frontage roads, of courtesy shuttles,
     of men in flight.
    When I am ten, she takes a job as a cashier in the gift shop at the O’Hare Marriott.
     Walking distance from our house. When I miss her, I go to see her. But she is unaware.
     I stand in the lobby, hide behind a column or a wingback chair. Somewhere I can watch
     her ring up people, make change.
    Hertz came later. Her job is to hand out agreements tobusinessmen. Circle the relevants, ask the men if they want additional coverage, highlight
     their penalties for late returns. I become drawn to O’Hare. The Marriott has a shuttle,
     and in the winter, as a young boy, I hitch rides. I make friends with the driver,
     cut a deal to be a porter. Men appear and I carry their baggage. Sometimes they tip
     me. I buy a bad-tasting hot dog and roam the airport for hours, watch jets ascend
     and descend. I come to love the terminal. It feels better than home.
    #
    In the weeks after he is dead, I sit on my mother’s bed and watch as she and her brother
     work their way through my father’s closet. Whatever suits my uncle wants, he hands
     to my mother and she stuffs them in her Glad bag. Black. Huge. The kind you use to
     get rid of the dead leaves. The clothes my uncle rejects, my mother tosses into a
     cardboard box, and a few days later she tells me to carry it out to the front stoop.
    “What are we doing?” I say.
    “Goodwill is coming.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You can wait if you want, but it never comes when it says it will.”
    I sit on the front stoop, my father’s box next to me. Finally a man appears.
    “Are you Good Will?” I say.
    “I am.”
    #  #  #
    Mail continues to come for him.
    ROBERT CHARLES HAINEY
    915 C PETERSON AVE
    PARK RIDGE, ILLINOIS 60068
    I ask why.
    “Junk mail,” my mother says. “Computers,” she says. “They don’t care.”
    For years after, whenever I can get home before my mother, I pluck out the pieces
     sent to him. Bills, newsletters, solicitations. Envelopes with little plastic windows,
     his name framed, on display. I hide them in a blue Keds shoe box beneath my bed. Nights
     when she is not home, I carry the shoe box out to the back porch, bury the letters
     in the bottom of our family’s trash.
    #
    It’s the fall after my father has died. I’m in first grade, September. The air still
     warm with summer’s afterburn. I come home from school. My grandmother is working the
     stove. In the months after my father’s death, she and my grandfather stay with us.
     They want to keep an eye on my mother.
    I hold a picture that I drew that day: two large white candles, one on either side
     of the paper, each attached to a large yellow candleholder. Small orange flames burn
     steady from their wicks. Between the candles there is a coffin, propped atop two black
     wheels.
    My grandmother asks, “What is this?”
    I tell her we were told to draw a picture of our father.
    My grandmother crumples up my portrait and stuffs it deep into the trash. She squeezes
     my arm, kneels down in front of me on the