Knowing We’ll Be Mostly Wrong

We never had a meal alone ever, alone just us.We might have, but the memory is gone.When I see you eating we’re never there,me, Gary, or Mum.

It’s always you and Claudette.It’s always late, quiet, no buses.Every now and then a motorbikemuttering up the road.

The rest of us have eaten, done homework,traveled the planet once again through View-Masters,tonged puppy doodoo from the garden,watered the common hibiscus and crotons,washed our feet and gone to bed.

The food has been fridged. Fricassee chicken,or stew beef with carrots, or pig trotterswith broad beans, or macaroni with mince.

You’re too drunk to take what’s been set apart for you,to negotiate each thing without over-knocking bottles,to prime the stove, light each burner,set the knobs correctlyfor the blue beneath the pot.    Yes, somewhere in some other countrythere were microwaves and frozen coursesfor drunk husbands, but when your outside woman didn’t feed youyou were left out on your own.

You and Claudette are pulling at the quilty breadyou’ve brought under your arm,smearing the off-white with pink bully beef,Libby’s or Grace smutted with tan fat and bronze jelly.    She’s twelve and already plumpingfrom eating two dinners, already using nightiesand dusters and house frocks to fog her shape.Your knee is unsteady when she sits.You know you can’t ask her to ease up.You kiss her cheek, hand-feed her,let her bring the raw Scotch Bonnetto your mustache, line it up for you to crunch itwhile she pinches at the stalk.

My son, who’s ten years older than I waswhen I last saw you, will soon leave for school,a downhill walk from the heights of Providence,downtown through its sad reaching for recovery,across an interstate that mainlines to Boston.He goes to Classical High.

It’s the last day of the term.I am up before him as always,and not because I am goodbut because he needs direction,    watching,coaching step by step into the sweet howof simple things, like getting up and getting dressed,keeping track of time, checking off reminders—the small bits of habit that if multipliedcan bring him bounty.

He’s sixteen, but young, tender-hearted,and has just one friend, a good one, has never tried Facebook, doesn’t see the need to tweet,makes elaborate illustrations in Moleskine only,and takes his medication now without embarrassment,no longer uses their official name, just the pills,which make him feel the way he doesafter a hard lap swim—    relaxed, even and balanced,not like he’s about to drown from all this everything,or walk on water firejust to dazzle everybody with his light.

At his age you were farming.In that red ground district that’s all there was to do,spade and hoe and scatter corn to gray pigsand hand off seeds to the wind to do the rest,make rough note of which black goats which boywas herding down which trail toward which common,which shirtless boy, I should have said,because all boys in red ground districtsthen were shirtless and walkedon flat ground with bent kneesfrom the practice of rolling with the hills,had toes spread wide like fingers,and were short for their age.

Your grandson is tall,slender in the way of his mother and her ilk,but not petty and vindictive. Open and forgiving—like you—of other people, but also of himself,which can be its own concern.

This morning, over sugared coffeeconcentrated in a German press,I gazed at my son from one endof a short table covered with a clothdecorated with yellow zigzags,something I picked up at Home Goods because the wood is good, Italian,and he still spills milk and juice.    On this, his last day of schoolhe is happy, not because school...