Julia had prepared fanatically, as if trying to impress him or finally say yes, yes, I loved you, love you, will keep loving you.

When I arrived, James, in his mother’s apron, was on a manic upswing, chopping vegetables into fine and finer pieces in the kitchen, carrying snack plates back and forth from the kitchen, asking how I was but lacking the attention span to listen. He was twisting his hair like he used to, and a spray of half-smoked cigarettes kept accumulating on the front porch—he felt, I think, too guilty to smoke the whole thing, knowing this was the pleasure my father had lived and died for.

Photos of my father were everywhere; I could tell Julia wished they always had been, and as such had framed some of them and tried to place others in locations where people put photographs of those still alive: on the refrigerator at a jaunty angle, amid others on the couch-side table in the living room, on her bureau.

I found myself sneering. Hadn’t she been ready? This was obviously an expression of my own guilt for not admitting that his struggle really was reaching its end point. I replayed the last time we spoke on the telephone and attempted to gain some final piece of paternal wisdom. What had he said? And I? And how long did we pause between sentences? And did we laugh?

I tried to tell myself it was a shame, an unfortunate coincidence and nothing more, that the last dialogue I’d had with my father had lacked his general stubborn cheer. He hadn’t even feigned with the “There was something I wanted to tell you but have forgotten.” He came to me as an old man who wanted to talk and me to listen.

There was none of his softness. He cleared his throat and wheezed and began to tell me about the night before my mother died. “There’s no other way to put it, Ida. I had too much to drink. Had too much goddamn liquor. I’d been home all week with you—Mollie was out looking for a job and shopping for goddamn new paint samples for the kitchen even though we’d just—goddamn it we’d just painted the kitchen—and getting coffee with all these new women who went to private colleges in Vermont and had kids around your age—and finally I said, look, I’ve been here in this house all week and I need out”—he was talking too fast and stopped to catch his breath in big gulps, which was exactly what the exercises recommend he not do—“and she said okay fine, you’re right. Okay.

“So we got Julia to come over—her and your mom liked each other all right, actually—did you know the boys were with you the last night your mom was alive? And anyway, Ida, we went down to the Central Club on my insisting. I said, honey, I want a real bar with pool tables and cheap drinks, and your mother said yes even though she didn’t like the idea. That place was pretty bad then, worse than now if you can believe it, and pretty soon after we sat down it was a scary scene. Every guy in the place was staring at her—she was way too pretty, way too smart—and she didn’t like it. I tried to take her mind off of it, suggested we play a game of pool, but your mother … when she was mad like that, she couldn’t focus. She shot a terrible game and the whole time these assholes were starting to snicker, but your mother … she had always refused to let me treat her like a lady, do you understand? ‘None of that Southern charm shit,’ she always said, always pushed the door open for herself, rarely even let me”—he gasped here but in a different way, the kind that precedes a great opening up of the body for a sob—“never even let me coddle her. Ida, are you listening?”

(I was listening, was transfixed. I was also considering what else I had inherited from my father: that insistence that the audience look and listen. How many times had I pleaded to Jackson: Look. Listen. Are you listening? Do you understand? But not stopped to hear his reply. My father didn’t stop either.)

“And so I kept tough on her, didn’t give her any breaks. Pretty much all her balls were on the table and I had three left. She told me she was leaving and I said, hey, come on. Don’t be a poor sport. But she left, Ida, and I didn’t follow her—if I had tried to she wouldn’t have let me, do you understand? And so I stayed, had a grand old time feeling like I was, you know, ‘integrating with the locals.’ Some idiot was impressed by my being a newspaperman, the stories I told him, and he gave me, I kid you not, a hat and a steak. He was a meat delivery guy and his truck was out back, went out there and got me a steak and gave me the hat off his head. Don’t know why about the hat, still.”

My father laughed, here, and it was the closest to the hoot he once famously produced I’d heard in a couple of years, until he remembered what story he was telling, exactly.

“But Ida I stayed ’til last call. I don’t really remember the walk home, quite, but I know I had the mind to put that steak in the freezer and crawl into bed. And that’s it. I remember vaguely that I was looking forward to telling your mother about this guy, about him insisting I take his meat and the hat, that I knew she would laugh at what an asshole she’d been to leave and what an asshole I’d been to stay and get so tossed. I remember planning on a big dinner for the three of us the next night—even though your teeth weren’t ready yet, I remember thinking, yeah, baby’s first steak, and smiling at the future memory.

“Only, Ida, I didn’t hear her. I was sleeping off the cheap whiskey the steak guy bought me and I didn’t wake. The only time in her life your mother actually needed me, actually called out for me, and I didn’t hear her.”

I was touched that my father had come to me and not Julia. Touched that he saw me stable enough to take this, digest it, and still love him; touched he was still able to laugh about the hat and the steak; touched by how clearly I was a combination of the both of them; touched by being a part of a real live, honest-to-goodness family made of bloodlines and shared genetics who did not up and go whenever they felt like it except when death gave them no choice. When I went to respond, though, my father stopped me.

“Dear heart,” he gasped, “I shouldn’t … I shouldn’t have talked like that so long. Gets my blood pressure high and my heart sad. Tired, now. I’ve got to get off the phone, okay?”

He sounded panicked. I wanted to tell him I loved him and ask where Julia was, whether he was all right, but he was already gone. I almost called back several times that night, but part of the deal between us was that mostly we pretended the other was fine—it helped us believe it to be true about ourselves.

I was replaying this conversation for perhaps the twenty-second time that day when Jackson arrived. He was dressed far too well in clothing I’d never seen before, and it pained me to think of him in that dressing room across the country, turning his cheek under the flattering lights, strolling out to show Shannon the precision of the wool slacks and the softness of the sweater. We locked eyes and I was the first to break and turn, but he crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me, and I let him. I remained in the pocket between his shoulder and chest too long, taking pleasure in the fact that his scent had not changed.

There were still three hours before the Ceremony of Life Julia had planned. Jackson suggested a walk and I obliged, seeing as Julia’s buzz was pretty thoroughly terrifying and evidence of my father was everywhere. We walked past the park where we had smoked pot for the first time together, in the rain under the shelter of a slide long gone and replaced with one of bright plastics; cut through the playground and kicked the sand in defiance. It was bright and ninety degrees and the moments rippled into the next unnaturally. Sensing my discomfort, Jackson pulled out a pair of sunglasses and placed them on my face, and under their costume my eyes became oceans. We didn’t speak as we crossed by the picnic tables, although Jackson did stoop to see whether the words he’d engraved with his knife remained on the underside of one of them, and though he didn’t tell me what he was looking for I knew what it meant when he nodded with satisfaction.

Like always, we were headed for the river. It smelled especially strong in the heat, and we walked the lengths of the docks sneering at the tourists, who were out on the decks of their yachts on chairs of stretched pale pink linen and cherrywood. My father had always joked about buying a shitty boat to park next to theirs, naming it Privilege and barbecuing discount chicken wings and publicly drinking the cheapest beer available all day long and being just unyieldingly friendly to all of them.

Instead of talking about my father, though, Jackson and I talked about him. About how he started having sex with other people and not coming home to Shannon and telling her the sleepwalking had started again and he didn’t know where he’d been those times she woke up to find him gone. About how she’d been unbelievably forgiving and sympathetic and offered to give up sleep to watch over him or maybe find them a house in the country and invest in very complicated locks. About how she had listened and nodded while he talked about me and asked questions and tried to believe his reflections on our disintegration were healthy, even integral. About how when he started pushing it and even going so far as to steal Shannon’s car in the middle of the night and fuck this bartender with a long black braid in the backseat and purposefully come all over the upholstery and feign complete wonderment, Shannon just, well, took it, and started buying literature about sleep disorders and highlighting the texts in neat, cheerfully colored lines and joining online discussion groups. About how finally he slept with one of her best friends, a blonde with decent breasts but a slight limp from some growth disorder or another, and while following this instance he offered no apologies or excuses or displacement of blame, Shannon even tried for a little while to convince herself and him that he had slept through it. And so when he got the news about William, he said, that seemed like a pretty good reason to pack up and return to the familiar part of the country.

Ida, he said, upon waking from his story, I miss you. And I couldn’t say anything, because he’d offered the words I’d needed for so long, only now they seemed hollow and extra, now they floated in front of us with neither a home nor a future.