You Can Say You Knew Me When Read Free

in this?”
    “Not really.” Then, softening just a touch: “Please, Jamie. It’s your turn.”
    Years ago I’d been part of the group that cleared out my friend Paul’s apartment after he died from AIDS, and his mattress was the very first thing we got rid of. Deirdre had put off this wretched task for two days, or three, whatever it had been, even with Nana living here and Andy around to lend muscle power. Why? Because it was my turn, my punishment? I knew how easy it was to slip into an argument with her; I wondered if she’d actually welcome it.
    But I’d sworn to myself I’d get through this visit without incident. I took my place behind the wheel.
    Coping with the smell was easy enough—I opened the windows, gladly enduring the cold air; I lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the dashboard—but the specter of my father wasting away on the mattress now bobbling behind my head was another matter entirely. He’d been a sturdy, almost stocky man—five feet eleven inches, nearly two hundred pounds—but illness would have shrunken him. Again I thought of Paul on the eve of his death, the skin-and-bones appearance; his shallow, dry breathing; the medicated glaze of his eyes as he held on longer than any of us thought he would, longer than we’d hoped was possible. My brain morphed them together, the friend I loved and the father I did not, until a sickly vision floated up behind me—the slate blue of my father’s eyes bulging out from a skeletal face, his cracked lips rasping out one of his characteristic truisms: Responsibility breeds respect. Respect comes from responsibility. Show me one, Jimmy, and I’ll show you the other. Even in death, a lecture.
    My foot fell heavier on the gas, and I sped along the residential streets, gunning through a yellow light, honking at a slow-moving subcompact. I flipped the radio to an all-talk station and tried to lose myself in the angry pitch of political debate. Caller and host were arguing about whether or not Al Gore should distance himself from Bill Clinton in order to win the presidency. I joined in: Yes, distance yourself. Don’t get dragged down by the last guy’s mistakes. Be your own person!
    At the dump I was the third minivan queued up. I killed the engine and watched one, then another, middle-aged woman extract a withered Christmas tree from her vehicle’s rear door, drag it across the frozen ground and, with a scattering of dead needles, heave the barky skeleton into an enormous gray compactor. It was all rather efficient, a timeworn January ritual at which I was some kind of interloper. When my turn came, I felt like the punch line to a comedy sketch: soccer mom, Christmas tree; soccer mom, Christmas tree; gay guy, dirty mattress.
    I held my breath as I catapulted his death-bedding into the compactor’s jaws, grunting “Rest in peace” as it slipped from my sight. I was answered by an uprising of dust that hovered high above before disseminating on the wind, carrying toward me a last gasp of pine.
     
     
    I wanted so badly to sleep, but when I got back to the house I was conscripted into other projects. First, the arranging, and frequent rearranging, of living room/dining room/family room furniture according to Deirdre’s orders, in anticipation of the visitors who would stop by after the wake the next night. Given the number of cobweb-caked folding chairs we dragged up from the basement and wiped clean, it seemed that she was expecting half of Greenlawn. Then we took the van to Big Savers, one of those enormous concrete warehouses where everything is sold extra-extra-jumbo size, a place so antithetical to the town’s Mom-and-Pop main street that it wiped away all my quaint illusions of Greenlawn. Here were the locals en masse—teenage employees speeding by on forklifts, overweight retirees in motorized wheelchairs, four-year-olds scurrying among the free samples as one mother after another shouted “Jacob, put that down” and “Emily, I said