Marty says he had a rough time telling Dad, as he puts it, “about the more treatments.” When he talks to me in the driveway after the cake, Marty looks like he’s falling through the ice again, into the cold place where no one but Dad wants him. “He was disappointed, but he kept telling me not to feel bad,” Marty says. “He was worried more about me.”
Throughout Dad’s sickness Marty has seemed convinced that Dad was always thinking about him. His money problems, his business schemes, his trauma over the divorce from Aunt Stephanie…I got the idea that Marty was kidding himself, feeling all this sympathy from Dad that couldn’t possibly have been there. That he was filling Dad with intelligence and other good qualities, like a little kid confiding in his teddy bear.
But along with the quiet and calmness that seeps into the house, something else seems to be happening for real. It’s like Dad was a snow globe that had no top on it, and all the stuff that was inside had somehow disappeared. Now it’s as if the top has been put on and something is falling to the bottom, settling and collecting, flake by flake. Some recognizable stuff that can only be called the Spirit of Dad.