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Bret Lott Gesture |
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He took the box down from the shelf, found another pair of running
shoes in it, as in every other box he’d pulled down. Eleven of them so far, and it looked in the dark of the top of the closet as
though there were maybe ten or so more. Just shoe boxes stacked on the top shelf, in every one of them a worn
down pair of running shoes, some scuffed, some still with mud in the tracks
of the soles, some with broken laces, some with Velcro straps pulled apart
and put together so many times they no longer held. This was two days after the funeral, his father’s death a surprise: he
was 64, ran four miles every day, and just Sunday evening he’d talked to Paul
on the phone, asked after Kate and David and Jill. His voice had sounded
fine, as predictable as ever: clear, sharp. So normal Paul had thought
nothing of the conversation, merely filed it away as Dad’s Sunday evening
call, him alive and well and two hours north, the words passed between them
forgotten as easily as hanging up the phone. Then he’d gotten the call Monday morning, a doctor from the hospital in
Now here was Paul with these shoes, this empty condominium, his sister
and two brothers already headed back to their lives a variety of states away,
himself and his family left to sift through, report back. He brought down another box, opened it, saw another pair: New Balance,
blue. Then he brought down the next, and the next, as though convinced
somehow one of these might yield something else, some other shard of his
father. Something. But they were all only shoes. Kate sat at the kitchen table, a stack of file folders before her. She
had one open, her fingers moving through the papers, looking for what, Paul
could not say. But she was working, doing something. Gathering information as
though this were her job, and not simply the last evidence of her husband’s
father. David and Jill were at the movies, a matinee, dispatched there by
Kate, David quietly gleeful even through the shroud of grief both he and his
sister wore: though they had both sobbed openly at the gravesite only day
before yesterday, David was in the car before Jill had on her jacket,
month-old driver’s license in his wallet. Paul stood beside Kate, and she looked up at him, tried at a smile. She
picked up her coffee cup, the words Live
to Run, Run to Live: Seniors 10K wrapped around it. She said, “Some for
me?” Paul nodded, took her cup to the counter, filled
it and his too, on Paul’s cup a swirled painting of the bridges from He looked at their two cups, the coffee inside them black, all the more
black for the white insides of the cup, then opened the cupboards above the
coffee maker. There he saw what he’d seen every time he’d ever been here:
rows and rows of coffee cups, each with a different logo or picture or slogan
from 6 and 10K runs all over the South. They were the same cups as ever. Maybe one or two or three new ones
since the last time he’d been here. But they were the same. He stood with his hands on the cupboard handles, hanging on, he felt,
as though were he to let go he might fall away, disappear. This was about his
father, all these cups. He swallowed, said, “Look at this.” He heard Kate behind him turn in her chair. She said, “What?” “These cups,” he said, uncertain as to whether or not he’d spoken or
whispered the words. He held on. He heard her stand, moving toward him. He let go the handles then, and nothing happened. Here he stood. He
hadn’t fallen, hadn’t disappeared. And now he felt Kate’s hand at his back,
felt her lean into his shoulder. His father had begun running a week or so after Paul’s mother had died.
Fifteen years ago, back when Paul and Kate still lived in But then they had visited him in Then, abruptly, Paul’s father stood, said he had to get to bed, that he
couldn’t be late getting up tomorrow morning to run with his friends. He’d
given Paul a hug, and disappeared down the hall. And Paul had thought this was nice, his father’s having friends he
could do something with. Next morning he’d heard sounds from the kitchen, he and Kate in bed in
the spare room. He’d gotten up, seen it was There sat Jill and David—they were still little then, David six, Jill
four—at the kitchen table, before them bowls of cereal, his father in the
middle of the kitchen, stretching. He had on Dayglo-orange running shorts, a
white t-shirt with the stylized figure of a runner on it, all blurred blue
angles and lines, in a circle around it the words Run for your life! He had on a pair of running shoes, what looked
in the light like an elaborate scheme of red and white leather pieces slung
low about his feet, the soles broad and rolling high at the toe. He was smiling at the kids, said, “Now this is to stretch the quadracep,” and he bent a leg at the knee, reached behind
him and grabbed the toe of the shoe. “You do that so when you’re out there
running, your body’ll be ready for the work. No
surprises to your body that way,” and Jill had giggled for some reason,
kicked her legs beneath the chair, her spoon tight in her hand. She hadn’t
even seen Paul come in, nor had David, who only dug into his bowl of cereal—it
looked like box granola, as far as Paul could see in the kitchen light—and
took a mouthful, chewed. His father had glanced up at him, nodded, still smiling, then let go
his leg, bent the other leg at the knee, reached back with the other hand and
pulled at the toe. “Got to bend so I won’t break,” he said, and nodded once
more at Paul. Still Jill giggled, still David ate. Neither of them saw him,
only watched their grandfather stretch. And now Paul, standing in the same kitchen his children had eaten in
that morning ten years ago, their grandfather before them in a strange outfit
that bore no resemblance to anything he had ever seen his father wearing,
Paul wondered why he had never asked after this hobby of his father’s, why he
hadn’t at least inquired of him that morning who his friends were, or every
Sunday night phone call from then on out asked why, why he started doing
this, running? Of course it would have to do with his mother, her death. He knew this,
figured all these years it was something to do to fill the empty void of time
his life must have then encountered, the time Paul himself knew well enough
was already consumed by itself in a way that seemed in fact to deny time:
here was his son, sixteen and driving already, when in only this moment he
had been six years old, his daughter four, the two of them watching their
grandfather in a house dark save for one light above this kitchen table, him
warning them to bend so they wouldn’t break. He looked at the cup in his hands, at the white inside of it. The black
coffee there swirled with the slightest movement of his wrist, and he
wondered what he knew of his father, what he really knew. And things came to him. This: his father driving the family out to This: one evening when Paul is seven his father comes home from the
newly-vacant house two doors down, his right hand wrapped in the tail of his
white shirt, that tail brilliant red with blood, his left hand holding it
tight; with him is Mr. Jensen from the end of the block, Paul’s best friend
Steve’s dad, who’d had in mind to swap out the garage door springs from the
empty house for the old rusted ones in his own. Now his father is hurt, he’s
trying not to cry, Paul can see in his eyes as he stands just inside the
kitchen and holding that shirt tail too red, Paul and his brothers and sister
moving back and away from him while Mr. Jensen and Mom hover around him,
Paul’s mother peeling back the tail to take a look, silent the whole time
while Mr. Jensen keeps saying I’m
sorry, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. Paul’s mother’s face reveals nothing
at what she sees and what Paul cannot, his mother and father and Mr. Jensen
then leaving for the hospital, Mrs. Jensen showing up a moment later with
Steve, all of them puzzled, even Mrs. Jensen, as to what to do next in an
empty kitchen. That is when Paul looks down at the linoleum in front of the
sink, where the three adults had stood, and sees three thick drops of
brilliant red blood, a perfect triangle of his father’s blood. And this: his father stands at the stove in the kitchen of that same
house in Buena Park, poking at the pan of burning scrambled eggs, the smell a
thick and ugly reminder throughout the house that their mother is in the
hospital, Paul’s baby sister born just the day before. But his father is
here, smiling with the pan in hand and scooping up the blackened stuff onto
their plates. His father, making dinner. He feels Kate’s hand on his shoulder, the two of them side by side at
this kitchen counter, and he looks a moment longer at the coffee, swirls it
again with the slightest movement of his wrist, a world of movement in this
small cup, and he turns to his wife, meets her eyes. She says, “It will be okay,” and though he knows the words to be
hollow, he knows them too to be the best ones available, the truest lie he
can hear right now. He shrugs. He thinks of the shoes, of all these coffee cups. He thinks of his mother, and of her smiling in the smallest way each
time Paul’s dad honks the horn, the corners of her mouth turned up only a
fraction there in the dark of the tunnel. And he hears the instant of sound the horn makes,
the echoes of others behind and around them. Small sounds, inconsequential. But
there, real. He sees his father running, and running, and begins, this moment, to
understand. He says, “How long before the kids get back?” and before Kate can
answer, before she can leave his side to find this morning’s newspaper, a
paper delivered to the home of a man no longer alive, his father, Paul begins
to line up stories to tell them of his father’s life, and hopes in the same
instant, though he knows it may be a chance as slight and ephemeral as an
instant of sound echoed off the walls of a tunnel, that his children might
have already begun forming their own stories of him. He will make them dinner, he decides. Perhaps scrambled eggs. It is an empty gesture, he knows. A move that will serve only as a
symbol to himself: his children’s father, making dinner in his own father’s
house. But what more can he provide? What else is there left to do, save feed
his children, and begin now to grieve? |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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