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

linoleum.
    “Don’t ever tell anyone about this. Don’t ever tell your mother what you made. Or
     what I did.”
    #
    How his death hung over that house.
    It’s part of what I know to be true—your absence is greater than your presence.
    #  #  #
    1970. The first Christmas without him.
    Father Clark sets up a Christmas tree next to the altar, blocking out Saint Joseph’s
     shrine. There are no ornaments on the tree, only pieces of white paper, paper-clipped
     to the branches. Like paper snowflakes, waiting to become. After Mass, my mother plucks
     one off. “What’s that?” I ask, and she tells my brother and me that we’re going to
     make a care package for a bum. We all said bum back then. Back then, any man without a home was a bum.
    Father Clark has started a neediest fund and our church has adopted Pacific Garden
     Mission, deep in the city. We sit at the kitchen table as my mother unfolds the piece
     of paper that still smells of mimeograph. She reads the name of the man to herself,
     and then she hands the paper to my brother, who hands it to me. In black ink, a man’s
     name is written. Below are mimeographed purple instructions saying that the best gifts
     to include are toothbrushes, toothpaste, disposable razors, warm socks, knit hats,
     long underwear. NO AFTERSHAVE .
    My brother and I watch our mother pack our gifts into a box. Her fists crumple old
     newspaper into loose balls. Something to preventbreakage. Then she slides toward my brother and me a Christmas card and a pen.
    “Write something,” she says.
    For a long time, I stare at the card, unsure of what to write to this man I do not
     know. I’m mystified at how to begin. “Dear sir”? “Dear Mr. Bum”? I write simply, “Merry
     Christmas.” As I’m about to sign my name, something else trips me: Do I sign “Love,
     Mike”? If I write “Love,” am I betraying my father? Will I anger my mother?
    I scribble my name and poke the card back to my mother. She seals it and says nothing,
     just drops it into the box.
    “Why can’t bums have aftershave?”
    “They’ll drink it. That’s what they do on skid row. Hold this down.”
    I put my hand on the lid as she cuts the tape. I say, “Where’s skid row?”
    “Where bums live.”
    “Why there?”
    “Because they’re lost men.” She pushes our box to the center of the table. “There,”
     she says. “That looks like it will stay closed.”
    For years afterward, whenever my mother drives us into the city and we pass by the
     giant red neon cross-shaped sign for Pacific Garden Mission, I stare at the men standing
     in line, the men waiting to be fed. Their eyes never meet mine. I look at them all.
     I think about what they were. Whom they left behind. I scan their faces, thinking
     that someday I will see my own. That I will see his.
    #  #  #
    Maybe my father knew he would never return. Never walk through the kitchen door again,
     hang his suit coat over a kitchen chair, make a pot, listen to the percolation, watch
     the sun rise, wait for us to wake to find him.
    At some point, doesn’t every man think of not returning?
    The pack of smokes? The carton of milk? The errant errand?
    And if he did return, what would be the same?
    Summer of ’72, an F2 tornado hits in the night, tears a hole in our roof. Rain pours
     in. A deluge. Water runs down the walls, seeps into the floors. We spend the next
     two days, the three of us, ripping up gray, soggy carpeting and the padding underneath,
     dumping it in the alley.
    “We have to get to the floorboards,” my mother tells us.
    A day or two later, men come in. They break holes in the walls. They’re looking for
     rot, they say. “Before you can go on,” one of the men tells me, “you gotta make sure
     your walls are strong.”
    Come the fall, the house is different. Each room, remade. Fresh paint and carpeting
     everywhere. Wall-to-wall is my mother’s mantra. And the shades of the ’70s, shades
     of earth and canned