Things I Could Never Tell My Father

You’ll be dead within ten years.

The decades you spent exercising, running forty miles a week, haven’t kept you from growing old, didn’t stop you from having a stroke while eating a liver and onions dinner at Butterfields.

The day I turned 21, there was no way I was driving with you after lunch past all of Rockland’s abandoned storefronts to down a few shots of bourbon at the bar.

When I was a child I prayed each night you would not come home from work.

The sound of your car pulling into the driveway was my least favorite sound.

The sound of your boots on the front porch—those angry stomps to get off the frozen snow—was my second least favorite sound.

Your dead wife and dead son are not waiting for you in heaven.

When you die there is only the silence you’ve been practicing all your life. The same silence I inherited and keeps me returning to your house each summer waiting for words neither of us will speak.

I would have hated you as a young man. I would have called the police if I had witnessed you with a group of friends degrading men in front of their girlfriends by pinning them on the ground and removing their clothes.

When I was home this past August I was sickened by the open wounds on your chest from skin cancer, the watery pus seeping through your shirt.

I would rather grow old in an empty apartment than have a marriage like you had.

I would rather never have children than wake up each morning hours before the ice-cold sunrise—work so late everyone in the house had returned to bed when you finally opened a beer on the couch.

I know you have grown tired—tired of me still waiting for you to be a father.

I don’t ever want you to leave me.