Leaving Home: Short Pieces Read Free Page A

ethics. It was that simple, he understood now. You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.

    He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died. He regretted the fact that he hadn’t hugged her in front of her friends after her Fall Concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride. He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family. He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.

    Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills. But he had to keep hiking up his pants – they were riding that low on his hips. Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter. It would make sense that he was losing weight – he hadn’t been eating, really – but the belt suddenly didn’t fit at all. There simply wasn’t a notch where he needed it to be; he’d grown that thin, that fast.

    Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place. He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking – around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home. Olaf’s, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.

    He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man’s Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants. He was aware that he hadn’t been to a bar during the day since he’d been a drummer a lifetime ago. There were five people at the bar, even in the morning, and they weren’t the sort of folks you found in bars at night. These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night’s memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.

    Abe climbed onto a stool – and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it. “Have you got Jameson’s?” he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.

    “Nice try, kid,” he said.

    “Excuse me?”

    The bartender shook his head. “You got any I.D.?”

    Abe was forty-two years old, he could not remember the last time he’d been carded. He had grey hair at the temples, for God’s sake. But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual. “I don’t,” he said.

    “Well, then,” the bartender said. “I ain’t got Jameson’s. Come on back when you turn twenty-one.”

    Abe stared at him, confounded. He jumped off the stool, landing hard. The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate glass windows of bakeries, in puddles. When you lost a child, did you lose the years you’d spent with her, too?

    A week after their daughter’s death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her. She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue. She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers, as she folded them over after doing the wash. She’d be in one room and hear the music of her daughter’s voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.

    Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her. He would close his eyes and try to conjure his daughter’s face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the