I Don't Remember

  I don’t remember the last time I saw David. I’ll sure as hell remember the last time we heard from him though; it was the only time that my mother’s gotten a greeting card from a dead guy. I don’t remember exactly the last time that I saw my grandfather either; I’m fairly certain that it was the first floor of Heatherwood (two floors down from where my grandmother and Maureen would die the next year, and year after that). The Caribbean orderly came in to take out the trash, or something like that, and my grandfather said to him, “Isn’t she beautiful?”, nodding to me.

  The last time I saw David though, I have no fucking idea. It must have been late April or early May, whenever Easter was this past year. We weren’t invited to Braintree (I’ve always thought that was a terrible disgusting name for a town); we still aren’t sure exactly who it was that did not invite us.

         They yelled over the phone, he hung up on my mother, and that was it for three months. After that, he started sending her letters. At first it was one letter a week. Then two. Then he sent her two large orders of flowers that were lovely but I couldn’t help but comment, made the dinning room smell like a funeral home. If this were fictional, I guess one could call that “foreshadowing.”

         It was my mother’s birthday today. Yesterday at seven o’clock in the morning, she saw she had two messages from David’s sons that they left around midnight. He hadn’t come home from work. I wasn’t worried, “They each only called once. That’s a good sign; just call back and make sure everything’s ok.” James, the older son, picked up quickly. My mother sat like The Thinker in profile on the edge of her bed, and then I heard/saw her scream; “Your father killed himself.” (I’m not using exclamation points because I hate exclamation points, but suffice it to say, it was a scream.) After my mother hung up, she said to me, “I’ve been worried all week that he would call me on my birthday.” It was still something to worry about though, because when we both got home that afternoon she found a card in the mailbox. It said, “Wishing you nothing but blue skies on your birthday, love David.” It was dated the day before. Did he know what he was going to do a couple of hours later? He probably had some idea; he’d mentioned thinking he had no future to Norm and Jim S. in the past few weeks.

         David’s ex-wife told her later that day that he hanged himself in his friend Norm’s garage. Norm’s in Florida, recovering from open-heart surgery. Maybe Mark P. should have waited a few days to tell him that he might want to refinish his garage, but it’s not the type of news Mark is used to relaying so I’m not judging.



      I just remembered watching an episode of the Twilight Zone, the one about the little town “Whimbly”. David guessed the ending; when the guy fantasizing about life in a simple Main Street, USA, sleepy town, walks off a speeding train in his sleep. David said he had never seen the episode before but I don’t know how he could have guessed that.