Expiration Date Read Free Page A

reasonably clean—no nicotine buildup on the walls, no grease caked on the ceiling of the kitchenette. Grandpop Henry, it seemed, owned only two pieces of furniture: a big houndstooth couch and the big cherrywood desk. No bed, no kitchen table, no chairs. Guess when it comes down to it, all you needed was something to sit on and something to put things on.
    Still, the room was cluttered, a ridiculous amount of floor space devoted to cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates and shoe boxes crammed with papers. This was what Meghan picked through.
    “What does your grandfather do for a living?”
    “He’s retired. But he used to be a night watchman at a hospital. My mom told me he liked the hours, the lack of conscious people.”
    “Huh.”
    “What’s the huh for?”
    “He’s got a lot of papers here. Newspaper clippings, genealogy charts, handwritten notes. A lot of medical reports, it looks like. I thought maybe he was a journalist or something. Like you.”
    “My grandpop? I don’t think he was much of a reader.”
    “Hmmm.”
    After a while Meghan showed me a yellowed envelope.
    “Henryk Wadcheck?”
    She mispronounced it the way most people do: wad-chek. As in, check your wad. The kids in grade school figured it out pretty quick.
    “My grandfather’s name. It’s Polish. And pronounced vahd -chek.”
    “My, that’s veeeered. So wait—is that your last name?”
    “Technically.”
    “Your name is Mickey Wadcheck? How did I not know this?”
    “My dad played music under the name Anthony Wade. So I adopted Wade for my byline. You would, too, if you had a name like vahd-chek. ”
    Meghan smiled.
    “You know I’m totally calling you Mr. Wadcheck from now on.”
    “Please don’t.”
    Bad enough I have “Mickey” for a handle. The name on my birth certificate is “Mick,” in honor of Messrs. Jagger and Ronson, two of my dad’s musician heroes. You can’t call a five-year-old “Mick,” of course, so it soon became “Mickey.” And my classmates right away thought of the mouse. My childhood was full of M-I-C (see you real soon…gaywad!) jokes, not to mention that horrible stretch in 1982 when Toni Basil totally friggin’ ruined my life. I was ten, and I swore a blood oath to crush the skull of the next person to tell me I was so fine, so fine I blew their mind. The only person who had it worse that year was a classmate named Eileen, who didn’t understand why her leering male classmates were suddenly talking about coming on her.
    “Oh my God—will you look at this.”
    Meghan crawled over and handed me a photo of a man in a WWII-era military uniform. My grandpop.
    “He looks just like you, Mr. Wadcheck!”
    “Don’t call me that. And yeah, I’ve been told there’s a resemblance, but I don’t see it. Maybe if you saw him in person…”
    “Bah. You’re a dead ringer.”
    I twisted open another Yuengling as Meghan picked through another box, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, shoeless. I liked the way her blond hair dangled in front of her face and it didn’t seem to bother her in the least.
    “Did you two used to spend a lot of time together?”
    “Not really. Grandpop Henry’s always been a little weird. Kind of gruff, spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child kind of guy. Imagine Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men. ”
    “I thought you two might be close, considering…”
    She left that hanging midair, waiting for me to finish: what had happened to my father.
    Late one night at McGillin’s Ale House, the oldest continuously operating bar in Philly, I’d told her about what had happened to my dad. She didn’t press, I didn’t elaborate. It had never come up again, until now.
    I took another pull from my beer.
    “Yeah, well, no. I see my grandmother a lot.”
    “Define a lot. ”
    “Holidays? I see her for at least one or two of the important ones.”
    “Thought as much. So they’re divorced?”
    “A long time ago. My dad was ten or eleven, I think.”
    I regretted bringing my dad up,