Stranger Love

I was in the canned goods aisle when Mom called for the third and final time.

I was expecting the call, but it still made me jump, and I dropped a can of chickpeas, denting the round edge on the hard, white, glistening floor.

I tossed the can in my handheld basket and reached for my pocket. But I stopped.

Hand hovering, like a gunslinger, I let my phone vibrate.

It was merely a courtesy call at this point. I was sure of it.

“We’re nearing the end with your father, Andrew,” she had said in the morning, waking me up before my alarm.

She sounded cheerless and exhausted, minuscule.

“Did you get any sleep?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “At the hospital.”

“That’s—” I sighed. Those were two different answers. “That’s good.”

She relayed what the doctors had said and told me to keep praying.

“We have to have faith,” she said.

I went back to sleep for another forty-five minutes.

“I’ll be there tomorrow. First thing,” I told her when she called again during my lunch break.

“I wish you were here now,” she said.

“You know how work is. Without advance notice—”

This had snuck up on us. He had been sick for years with a soft, unassuming cough that never seemed to go away. It sounded like the shuffle of feet.

This had snuck up on us. He had been sick for years with a soft, unassuming cough that never seemed to go away. It sounded like the shuffle of feet. His more recent decline had been much more rapid and unexpected. Something to do with a spot on his liver.

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s just—”

“I’m sorry.”

She’d usually respond with a quip, like, We’re all just a bit too busy for death. Aren’t we? Or, Sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Businessman, but she only said, “Just get here when you get here.”

She ended the call promising to call again with updates.

***

It was now half past eight. I had stayed late at the office, finishing up an order for a client. I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. Hadn’t switched my brain off for the night when all I wanted to do was relax. But I had to pick up groceries before I could return home. And the phone was buzzing.

I imagined it like a child, running down the aisles, grabbing sugary treats from the shelves, crying when they were put back. Or it was a baby crying in the basket. Making a scene. But no one seemed to notice the tantrum it threw as it vibrated. Trapped in my pocket. Merely tickling my leg.

I took a deep breath.

I needed to absorb this moment.

This momentous occasion.

For any man, post-Freud, this was the moment. For any prince in history. For any man, adult or child, even those who didn’t particularly see eye to eye with their progenitor, this was the monumental moment: the death of his father.

The moment of patrilineal succession. The moment when the heir becomes the inheritor. The fall of a king, the rise of a king. The succession of an empire, of the world.

As hard as I tried to hold onto the moment, to aggrandize, to elevate the mundane into the sublime, all was disrupted when the vibrations stopped. The call went to voicemail.

A few seconds later, I caught myself comparing prices between shades of bean. Even when I squinted, however, I couldn’t tell the difference between them. Dark kidney, light kidney, pinto, black, black-eyed, red. Beans. They were just beans. Only the yellow price tags, the sharp black numbering—demarcation of a sale—stuck out to me.

My father had been quite the amateur economist, and that’s where I got this habit. He was fond of acquiring wealth, saving for saving’s sake, and telling other people what to do with their money—especially and most importantly, you’d better keep it out of the grubby hands of the government.

He taught me how to weigh prices like ancient merchants weighed grain and gold, to silently barter between myself and the invisible hand, to sacrifice almost anything to save a nickel.

He denied me piano lessons so that I’d learn the lesson of self-denial. Mastering the piano takes work, he said, but why play when you can work to get paid? The only indulgences I was permitted came from the library. Reading was considered an idleness, but education, free education, was permissible.

“You have good values,” he told me when I was young. “You’ll go far in business.”

Admittedly I had gone far, overachieving not only in school but later in my career, climbing to a mid-level executive position at one of the largest consulting firms in the South by my late twenties.

I suppose my dad and his values were in part to thank for this.

My inheritance. I owed him my success.

And yet, the thought of saving fifteen cents on my grocery bill evoked more emotion than did the thought that he was dead.

Frankly, I wasn’t in the mindset to care about his passing. There was little to mourn, and much less to miss.

What he didn’t teach held more of an impression on me than what he did.

He didn’t bother to show me how to shave, or what to shave, or how often.

He tied a tie for me once and never again, moving so fast that twelve-year-old me couldn’t keep up.

And when I was very young and wanted to know how to spell something, all he ever said was look it up.

So that’s what I did. I looked things up. First in the dictionary, and then online.

So he taught me self-reliance, in one sense, self-isolation in another. Slowly I learned to solve my problems on my own.

And then there were things he couldn’t teach me.

I rode solo through life, growing into a stalwart figure of independence. I shared less and less of myself with my father. With Mom too. The happenings at school, my opinions, my likes and dislikes. Birthdays and holidays became bland when they didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, how to help me celebrate.

“We weren’t sure what you wanted, so we just got you money,” became the usual refrain, before I was presented with a card signed LOVE, MOM AND DAD in Mom’s handwriting. I accumulated quite the stack of cards, saving them because I thought throwing them out might signal that I didn’t think they were thoughtful.

Regarding the check in the envelopes, I always felt compelled to say I’d put it away for my future. Most of the time, this was true.

One notable time it wasn’t, I purchased a rather expensive iPod and populated it with music that was distinctly not the classic rock my parents listened to on the radio, favorites of mine being the concertos of Tchaikovsky.

My iPod I kept private. “You always have those things in your ears,” Dad would say, referring to the earbuds he thought were a waste of money. “What could you possibly be listening to?” But I’d never say.

There was a cloud of shame surrounding that iPod, deeper than its relative opulence, even though at the time I didn’t actually know what to feel shameful about.

Maybe I intuited, through a cultural osmosis of some kind, that little kids with overly-sophisticated tastes often grew up to be gay. Not in every case, but certainly in mine. Not that it ended up being a big deal. Not that my parents would have cared. This was the era of Ellen and Will & Grace, after all. Their lingering Christianity was only ever paint-by-the-numbers, with the only strong conviction they held with regard to religion being that they “were Catholic.” So I didn’t foresee any issues on that account. But I simply didn’t feel the need to tell them.

Despite the growing progressivism of the age, however, it was still expected for people in my position to formally come out, society writ large being accepting enough for us to leave the closet yet still demanding that we label ourselves as other, the most pivotal coming out being to one’s own parents.

All this I realized in high school, but I didn’t bother going through with the ritual of announcing my sexuality until college because what was the point? It was an exhausting exercise, not because of any emotional gravity, as one might assume, but because any exertion against the inertia of apathy takes a toll.

“Your father and I will always be supportive no matter what,” was Mom’s response to the revelation. I granted her permission to pass along the news to my father, so he found out shortly after.

I nodded, knowing that she was sincere. She was always one to smooth things over, removing wrinkles with her positive sociability. I knew that she would be there if she could, if she knew how, but I wasn’t looking for their charity. I could manage on my own: I was accumulating my own wealth, didn’t need to be told where to put my money, and didn’t need the government.

All this was to say that, even if he had tried, my father couldn’t have taught me all I needed to know: how to properly remove nail polish from the dashboard of a car, how to stay safe on hookup apps, how to know when it was love as opposed to a nice smile and a hefty bank account.

He wasn’t a macho man or a homophobic prude, but he was raised on Clint Eastwood’s brand of masculinity, one that concealed matters of the heart beneath ponchos, only to be revealed by bullet holes. Any latent sensitivity within him was spent tending to his quarter-acre lawn, buying the same dozen red roses on Mother’s Day, and baby-talking to the dog. He was a slow-talker and a slow-walker and a slow-shooter.

Our gradual evolution into dissonance was caused by little ruptures over time, fracturing into distance and indifference.

Or, that was my reading of him. I suspected there might be other sides of him, but he had never done anything to show me any. I got no insights into him from my mother. Her tendency to smooth things over extended to the large Persian rug she swept things under.

My father and I weren’t diametrically opposed, but we never quite tuned to a common frequency.

Our gradual evolution into dissonance was caused by little ruptures over time, fracturing into distance and indifference. We weren’t driven apart by anything monumental or alarming; I merely floated away, an iceberg detached from the glacier of his influence.

We never were total strangers, mind you. Neither of us cut the other out of his life. But there was a separation.

When we did talk, we only ever talked about his dog. Lucy was her name, as in I Love Lucy, her hair on the redder side for a golden retriever. We discussed everything there was to discuss about a dog, neither of us having the strength to broach weightier subjects. If such a necessity arose, we talked through her, indirectly expressing what needed to be expressed.

“She keeps going,” he would say when I asked about her, his voice slow and crackling through the phone like a December fireplace. “She’s an inspiration to us all.”

Lucy was sixteen and could hardly walk, had to be carried up the stairs and let outside three dozen times a day. The last time I saw her, she was moodier, more agitated, but she was still the same old Lucy, tender at heart and impossible to blame.

In all my visits to them, four states away, I went alone.

At thirty-one years old, I had never introduced my parents to any of my romantic partners. Not that any lasted very long.

But despite the absence of a plus-one, I did not come empty handed. I brought chew toys for Lucy because she had a fondness for destroying things. A platter of snickerdoodle cookies and a bottle of wine for Mom. A faint smile and side-hug for Dad. No resentment, no disdain. Just the memory of absence, which isn’t really a memory at all.

***

That was when I remembered my mother.

I should have picked up, I was realizing. She was really the one suffering.

I was glad that Lucy was there for Mom tonight. She wouldn’t be sleeping in a completely empty bed.

Even still, in the morning, she would rise to a frigid room, my father not there to switch off the ceiling fan in the middle of the night, as he had always done. She would make up one half of their bed, the other being undisturbed, save the impression left by Lucy, which could be smoothed over with a simple sweep of her palm. She would take up the responsibility of carrying the dog downstairs, taking her to the front door, letting her out before and after breakfast. It was hard to imagine her without the high spirits that I always associated with her, but I was sure that deflation had occurred.

I would call her back when I finished—

“Excuse me, boy,” a short, elderly man said, interrupting me. “Are you alright?” He peered up at me through thick, clairvoyant spectacles.

“What? Oh, yes, I’m fine.” I blinked, my vision clearing.

“It’s just, you haven’t moved in several minutes,” the man said.

“Oh, right. Sorry. I just received some … news.”

“That’s okay.” He grinned. “I only ask because I need some of that right there.” And he pointed to the green beans on the top shelf.

“This one?” I reached for a can.

“How about three of those? Three big ones!” He sounded so eager, so elated by the prospect of possessing green beans.

“That’s it,” he said, as I set the last one into his cart beside cans of cat food and soup. “Thanks, son.”

I smiled as he turned to shuffle away, wondering if I had heard him right: Son?

He let out a loud, wet cough and wiped his nose with the cuff of his sleeve. It sounded nothing like my father’s cough, nor an action he would ever make. Visually, he was nothing like my father, either, shorter by half a foot and blessed with much more hair. But something about him allured me in a filial sense.

As if I were a duckling imprinting upon this man, I turned and followed him.

He was pushing his cart slowly, and with each rotation the wheels chirped like chicks.

I stepped lightly on the soft white floor, feeling like I didn’t belong in his wake but wondering coyly if he might chance it to glance back over his shoulder.

He led me down the aisle, towards the front of the store. Seeing the checkout lanes and the exit just beyond, the realization hit me that my monumental moment was quickly coming to an end.

He led me down the aisle, towards the front of the store. Seeing the checkout lanes and the exit just beyond, the realization hit me that my monumental moment was quickly coming to an end. Time was slipping away, the rite of passage had nearly passed, and yet I had yet to undergo any subliminal transformation. I felt no different than I had when I entered the store, and that frightened me. But I still had time.

In the din of the grocery store’s auditory commotion, against the backdrop of varicolored brand packaging and white fluorescence, my mind raced in search of meaning. Maybe there was some ceremony to be found within the canned goods section. The old man had appeared in the aisle at the exact moment of my father’s passing: the concurrence of these two phenomena could not be denied.

There must, I realized, have been some significance to the old man. It was imperative that this be true.

I quickened my pace, chasing after this stranger of ultimate importance. He had paused, craning his neck in search of the shortest check-out line.

He was never merely an old man seeking assistance, I realized. If that were the case, he would’ve asked an employee for help, not a fellow customer. No, he was infinitely more. He was a heavenly messenger, sent to guide me from one phase of life to the next.

I was meant to follow him, to stand behind him, reveling in his aura, which smelled of an old recliner and bar soap.

As I waited behind him in line, he was to lead me upward to a higher plane of existence, a greater standing in the world.

I was lost in the plaidness of his shirt, faded by the passage of time, flecked with lint and cat hair, stained in hard-to-reach places.

Did he know his role in this, his influence on the future trajectory of my life?

I hoped to let him know.

Briefly, fleetingly, as he gathered the last of his plastic bags, I felt compelled to mouth those hallowed words of gratitude, “Thank you,” and those words of connection, “I love you.”

His not seeing my lips wasn’t a concern of mine. What mattered was that I felt the words.

I felt them.

Whether it was really him I loved right then, I cannot say. But the act, the intention, I’m convinced, carried cosmic weight. It must have, for there was nothing else to possibly say.

He left me at the register, where I began to pantomime the act of checking out. My arms moved items onto the conveyor belt. My fingers extracted my credit card from my wallet. I smiled at the cashier and took the receipt without reading the numbers on it. I played the part of a customer, but my mind was entirely elsewhere. I sought visions of universal truth and enlightenment. Really I was wondering: were the words really meant for him? For my father? For myself? I did not know. Whatever the case, I’m sure that there has been stranger love than this.

Stranger love, stranger times, stranger vibrations.

I was halfway through the parking lot when I remembered my phone, still waiting in my pocket. I looked past the missed call notification, looking rather to book an earlier flight. I half believed it might turn back time, the moment not yet here—Mom still smiling, Dad still breathing, and good old Lucy, wagging enough tail for everyone.