You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein Read Free Book Online

big to be lifted into bed by your mother. What did I know? There were no children in my life. “Will you promise me you’ll look?” she asked.
    “Sure.”
    “I mean it, Jamie. We need it in the morning, before the funeral mass.”
    “I’ll look, I’ll look.”
    I did look. I went back upstairs into his bedroom, which still smelled medicinal, the antiseptic fumes a kind of ghostly presence, a reminder of the failure to hold back death. I moved furniture, and pushed aside clothes on hangers, and got on my hands and knees to root through my father’s closet. I found a jar filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. A few boxes of receipts that went back years. Some old hats. A years-old, dusty plaque from his employer—an office furniture company for which he spent the last twenty years writing marketing brochures, catalog copy and annual reports—commending him for perfect attendance. No sick days for Teddy Garner.
    Then, buried deep on a shelf, I found a short stack of Penthouse magazines, five or six in all, dated from the 1980s. I glanced over my shoulder, worried that Nana might be standing in the doorway, catching me with this pornographic contraband. I tucked them under my shirt and tiptoed back to my tiny bedroom. Penthouse had been my porn of choice as a teenager because the “Forum” section, made up of supposedly true stories from readers, was good for at least one bisexual story per issue—my first exposure to man-on-man sex. Sure enough, I opened one of my father’s and immediately found a “letter” from a big-breasted woman recounting the day the pool guy seduced both her and her home-early-from-work husband. The money shot: The stud fucks her husband as he’s ramming his wife. Everyone orgasms together. Crude, but very sexy. Did my father, so revolted by gay sex, actually read this story? He must have, at least once. But it was nearly impossible to imagine: Teddy, in his bedroom, the very room where he told me to keep my private life private, letting his own private thoughts unfold, taboo story in one hand, family jewels in the other.
     
     
    The next morning I woke and shaved my face clean, watching the brown and orange bristles, my scruffy soul patch, slide down the drain. In the mirror, to my own eyes, I looked not so much like a new man as an impostor, trying to pass myself off as the son I was supposed to be. The day was as glacial as any since I’d been back, and the newly shorn spot under my lip seemed to attract the cold the way an open window draws in a draft. All day long, at every step along the ritual path from funeral parlor to church to cemetery, the damp air was an icy kiss pressed to my face, a mark only I knew was there.
    I served as a pallbearer, feeling the tremendous weight of the coffin in every muscle as I joined my cousins lifting the heavy box into the hearse, working hard to keep my balance on the ice-streaked sidewalk. No eulogy was delivered at St. Bart’s, but the priest gave a homily in which my father was referred to as a fighter, a family man, and a son of a bitch. I mean, a son of God. “Son of a bitch” was what I wrote in my journal that night, scribbling furiously, without remorse, trying to fill up the pit in my guts, a throbbing hollow that had grown since I’d gotten here and that now threatened to subsume me.
    I never did find his wedding ring. He was buried without it.
     
     
    In the days after the guests were long gone, the last of Nana’s roast eaten and the last can of carbonated soda guzzled, the folding chairs stowed and the ashtrays emptied, Deirdre kept buzzing with projects. “Take a break,” I urged, but she insisted she was better off.
    “Know your strengths and work with them,” she told me. “That’s my motto.”
    “You’re too young to have a motto,” I said.
    “Jamie, we’re not kids anymore. I have a child of my own.”
    “Yeah, I remember.”
    I hadn’t spent much time with AJ, so one morning I drove to Deirdre’s house