The Amish Buffet

My father was dying three states east. So everything I owned (“All your unworldly possessions,” as DP kept putting it) was crammed into the back of the U-Haul, in a loose, hasty, let-us-trust-the-gods-of-shift-and-settle way—DP’s fault, as he’d demanded to take charge of that task. I appreciated his compassion, distrusted his physics. Now we were speeding toward Dad’s bedside. Or, rather, speeding was my term, my preference; meandering would seem closer to DP’s conception of the trip.

I knew that thought was unfair, ungrateful. DP was stepping up, in a big and unexpected way. How weird it had been, but also how nice, to glance out the window of my ever-sparser and more echoey apartment—packing tape either snarled in my hands or clenched in my teeth—and see him spinning my lamps like majorette’s batons, hunting niches for them among the bureaus and book boxes he’d grunted up into the truck before it occurred to him that there was a retractable ramp. We’d been together barely six weeks, yet here he was, ditching his dissertation (it wasn’t clear to me how selfless that was or wasn’t) and driving cross-country with me for what was sure to be a wrenching and miserable month of catheter training, teary logistics about casket linings and raised versus flush stones, and poking through the detritus of my pop’s decades of packrattery. And—as much of this out of DP’s sight as possible—all the private anguishes of leave-taking.

I was hoping for a month, just because it seemed a good sturdy length of time, sufficient unto the occasion. But was that love or selfishness? Dad was slipping fast.

DP and I hadn’t talked about what would happen, you know, after, but of course the question was looming. I’d stay on in North Carolina, at least for a while, to take care of logistics, muck the Augean stable of the house, off-load the several tons of . . . “It’ll weigh less if you call it your legacy,” DP said, but what could he know about that? In any event, I was sure I wouldn’t be returning to Boulder and to school, though I’d filed the paper work to make it a leave of absence just in case.

I’d arranged, too, for us to empty the U-Haul discreetly into a storage unit a few miles down the road from Dad’s. I was trying to think of this little ruse as the index of a daughter’s compassion—wouldn’t want to worry a dying man needlessly!—and DP, though when I mentioned this detail he hung his head sideways for a second, brow furrowed, in that puppyish pondering pose he had, was smart enough not to venture a less flattering explanation. The truth was that my three semesters toward the MA, though they hadn’t dimmed my pleasure in studying history, had left me feeling sour and dispirited about the prospects of academic life. I could see how worn and fretful, maybe bitter, I was likely to be even if I was lucky enough to go on to a PhD and publish and get a decent job. Watching my mentors had taught me that for those prone to grievance (and how could I fail to notice that this group included me?), academe is a terrible life, full of temptations to righteous rage. The worst discontent, it turned out, was a hyperarticulate discontent.

DP, though, was one of those relentlessly (after two days of intense proximity, I was mulling pathologically) sunny, self-assured people. He was halfway through a fellowship year, working—with perfect obliviousness to the matters that weighed so on me—on a dissertation about the comic vernacular tradition in American literature, that perennial hotbed of jobs. Once we got to my father’s place, DP would work on his project when he could (he’d tucked his laptop and two boxes of books into a corner of the truck). He might head back west...