DIED 1997
A FEW YEARS AFTER the death of The Carpenter, my sister started dating a much older man, an oddly priggish Vietnam-vet-turned-drug-and-alcohol-abuse-counselor she had met at her twelve-step meetings. I didn’t cotton to him much, and was glad when they broke up. Once he was long gone, I wrote something a little condescending about him in an essay, later collected and published in my first book.
Well, guess what. In the meantime he and my sister made up, got married, and had a child. Without actually reading it, he became aware that an essay in my book mentioned him, and he began to recommend it to his drug-and-alcohol-abuse clients. Finally one came back and said, Isn’t it kind of weird what your wife’s sister wrote about you in her book? So he took a look. There was a showdown between us at the beach club that summer and I admitted that I’d been out of line to write what I had.
My excuses were thin—I thought he would never read it, and I thought he was gone forever—and both turned out to have been nearly true. That winter, with a baby at home and my sister into her second pregnancy, he had a relapse, overdosed, and died. She found him on his office floor. Then a few days later in her mailbox she found something else: a pathetic love letter he had written to another woman, marked return to sender.
The following July, amid much blood and tears, she gave birth to his second son. I stood by, holding her hand, wearing the wristband that said FATHER, so angry at him that I still feel anger now, after all these years. Her older boy, in particular, has his lips and eyes; sometimes a familiar bemused look crosses his face. I want to say, Yeah, I’m bemused too, buddy, but how long do you carry on an argument with a ghost?