Sonja finally showed up, emaciated. She’d been sick. An accident. Too many sleeping pills. Three days in intensive care.
“I’m too hard on myself,” she confided with a show of weariness.
“Not to mention everybody else.”
“Why should I always be the one who suffers?”
“Guess what? You’re not.”
“I’ve done a lot of thinking,” she said, “and I know what’s at the bottom of all of this.”
“What’s that?”
I was curious.
“It’s a certain individual.”
I shot her a look.
“Oh not you,” she said. “Someone else.”
“Who?”
“You’ll find out,” she said smugly.
Then she ran to her desk.
I walked over and told her she was fired.
“I’m not surprised,” she said.
Then, out in the hallway, she said: “But you should have done it sooner.”
Then: “You should have never hired me, you know.”
Then: “Do you really think there are such things as casual relationships? You think what’s between us is casual, so casual you can get rid of it by just firing me? Do you really think once I’m out of here I’m gone? Goodbye? So long? Guess again. Haven’t you ever heard of DESTINY?”
Then: “Oh, God! If you only knew what was coming. You poor thing. Goodbye.”
When I walked back into the boiler room I was greeted by applause.
“Good riddance,” said Denise. Marie hadn’t said a word to me for weeks, from the time she’d made that weekly arrangement with Fat Jack and thought that I had set her up, or maybe I just thought so. But now she said: “Finally!” Mona congratulated me. She said I had done a smart thing. I wasn’t so sure.
* * *
I went to visit Dad and we both sat in the living room of his apartment in Avondale listening to the ballgame on the radio. Keeping score as he was (was he in remission?), and depleted from illness as he was, he hardly knew I was there, and of course I wasn’t offended. In fact I was comforted in that at least this much hadn’t changed; there was still baseball, and still Dad listening to it on the radio, keeping score as if his life depended on it (and maybe it did), puffing away at his old briar pipe.
He wasn’t always an old man. You tend to forget that about old people.
I remembered his taking me to my first ballgame, up in the bleachers, when some burly son of a bitch accosted him about his pipe (which wasn’t lit), saying, just as we were sitting down, “Hey stupid, you’re not going to keep puffing that pipe in my face all game long, are you, stupid?”
Dad ignored him.
He still hadn’t lit up and never would, in public.
“You start puffing that pipe and I’ll shove it up your ass, stupid.”
Dad ignored him.
The guy got up to leave after the seventh inning.
Dad nudged me and said, “Time to go.”
Which surprised me. Dad would never leave until the last batter was out. Turned out we were following the guy down the steps, outside, into the parking lot and even into his car, which was where Dad grabbed him by the neck and began choking him until and guy turned red, white, and blue. Dad kept whispering, “Never ridicule a man in front of his son.”
Now Dad said, “Nothing’s as bad as it seems.”
Was he talking about the game? The Reds were winning.
“So long as you’re alive,” he said, “nothing’s final.”