His dead wife used to spit. He tells me this on a hot July day on his porch. “Yeah, a whole fifteen feet,” he boasts. He’ll laugh, but I am noticing his large golden cat with her eyes half closed, dreaming in the summer heat behind the open screened windows of his old house.
He collects newspapers, and they lay in yellowed stacks that I can see beyond his open door within the stillness, still ******* with thick cord. Some of them rustle lightly at the corners, swaying up and down as his electric fan rotates this way and that. I momentarily question how fragile they’ve become with age against the hum of blown summer air, but his slow almost-southern-drawl takes me back in and I shield my eyes from the sun with my arm, keys in my left hand, sweat at the back of my neck.
The roof and trees have offered limited shade, and I’ve leaned against the side of the concrete steps to feel the coolness of the bricks against my knee. I’ve meant to go for an hour now, but he keeps me here with a, “Hey, y’know—” and another story will follow.
About his son sometimes, who he always says is also his best friend. I’ve never met him. He’s like a ghost of someone I think I could know but he remains unnamed and I have never questioned it. He’ll continue on —how he wants a new dog but he doesn’t know how his tired self would keep up with a little pup, and his fat old cat —oh, could I feed her this Friday and Saturday? “I might go out and see my son.”
I say that I will with a small pang of jealousy. She curls around my legs in her eagerness, unaware of her master’s weekend absences, purring at her first few bites of small, orange fish-shaped kibble.
When he is tired and doesn’t feel like driving he’ll take the city bus out for his errands and call me with his “cell-you-lar” to see if I can pick him up. “If it’s no trouble,” he says. It isn’t. I’ve taken him home on several other occasions.
His thank yous are quiet, but I feel them anyway. He is nothing like my father but some part of me hopes that when he looks at me he is seeing his son just as much as I am seeing all the years of neglect and false hope all wrapped up in this lonely man.