The Old Man

When you’ve known someone for such a long time, as I do Alex, you begin to forget the little things about him that you one found unavoidable. Like the little scare above his upper lip. Thinking about it now, I remember how I loved to kiss that scar, to taste it with my tongue. But after a while his face just becomes another face. Don’t get me wrong, I still love him. More than I could ever love someone. More than I’ve ever loved myself. But still, you see that face everyday and it just becomes, I don’t know, almost a part of you. Like, when I look at Alex I’m looking at myself. You just take things for granted.

When I arrived at the hospital that night I remember the first thing I noticed was that scar. How bright it looked compared to the rest of his pale face. I walked into the waiting room and he looked up at me, those sad, doe eyes that were pleading for me to take away the pain. I went to him as I always do when he needs me. And I held him and let him cry to me. I tried to take away his pain. The nurse said his father couldn’t have any visitors at the moment; it was too late and he was sleeping anyway. So Alex and I sat out in the waiting room alone but together, unsure of weather we should stay or go.

I never knew his father that well. He and I just didn’t really get along. “The Wife.” That’s what he called me, much to Alex’s displeasure. “he’s not my wife Pop. He’s my…” and the sentence would trail off and everyone would pretend that they hadn’t noticed. After the stroke, after we had opened up our house to him and he had seen me as more than “The Wife” he began to call me by my name. I became his personal servant: “Ryan do this, Ryan get me that.” I didn’t mind. It made Alex smile. He’d still call me “The Wife,” but now he smiled when he said it. Sometimes he’d wink at me with his good eye to show that he knew. I’d smile back, not quite sure I got it, but I’d smile anyway because that’s polite, and it’s Alex’s father.

But I’m getting off the subject. I was talking about those little things you forget to notice. Like the scar. Like the wink in the old man’s eye. That night, after we go home from the hospital, Alex and I got ready for bed. I pulled off my pants and undershirt and laid down on our king size bed in my boxers. I watched Alex as he washed his face in the mirror. He caught me watching him and got embarrassed. I smiled, and saw my smile in the reflection.

He finished his bathroom chores and came to me, turning on the light beside the bed and turning off the light that hung from the ceiling. I took his bare chest in my arms and hugged him. He looked at me and smiled a sad smile. I will never forget what he said to me then. Looking at me with those lost eyes, “It’ll never be the same.”

“What’ll never be the same?” I asked.

“Everything,” he replied and then was
lost in a mass of exhausted cries. It’s hard to almost lose your father. I did what I could for him then. I did my best.

The weeks that followed were harder in ways we had never anticipated. We were fine at giving him his meds and taking his blood pressure. We became pros at doing his insulin shots for him and checking his blood sugar. All the stuff we thought would be so difficult was easy as pie. The hard part was the silence: the three of us in the living room watching “The Maury Show”, not because we wanted to, but because it would fill the void. Alex became self-conscious about “us” or “the relationship” as it was now termed, around his dad. And I felt like a stranger in my own house.

Those first few weeks, before he could really speak and when Alex had to go back to work and I was left alone with the old man, were the worst. I’ve never been much of a talker, and now I had to hold up two sides of the conversation. I’d talk about what I was reading in the newspaper, and then I’d look at him for some kind of sign that I had found something that might interest him. He just stared at me. He never smiled.

Once his therapy got underway (both physical and psychological) he began to open up. “I don’t give a damn about that Bitch Joan Binea. Tell me about the game last night.” But then one day he took me by surprise. He looked at me right in the eye for one thing, that was something he never did, and then he said my name, “Ryan, tell me about my son.” Those were the words he said to me. ‘Tell me about my son.’ What do you say to that? What did he want to know? I was silent, dumb struck. But he filled the silence again, saying more in one moment then he’d ever said to me before or after.

“I know you and I don’t get along all that great. But you gotta see things from where I’m coming from. I never expected my son to be a…a…well, one of those. I was expecting a big wedding and grandkids and cards at Christmastime tell me about the little brats’ school plays and little league games. I never thought my son would be gay.”

I have to say, I did smile is spite of myself when I heard him say it. It was probably the only time in his life that he ever spoke that word, and when I told Alex later that night he started to cry. But me and the old man talked that day about a lot of things. I told him how Alex and I wanted have a wedding, or something similar, but we didn’t know how the family would take it. How we wanted to adopt a kid one day. Make him a grandfather. We swapped stories about Alex and I showed him pictures we’d taken from our trip to Disney World. For the first time I felt like me and the old man were part of the same family. I finally felt accepted into his life, and in turn into his son’s. I looked at him that night as I was getting his bed time insulin ready and I said to him, “Today’s been fun Mr. Breen.”

And he looked at me and said, “Call me dad.”

It’s the little things you forget first: the scar, the wink. But it’s those little things that are the most important.