HOW THE BUZZARDS CAME, 2000

I. Death

My father Ed had a plan for death. We fulfilled his dreams on a grassy green lawn on a bleak muggy day, in a cemetery in central New Jersey. The summer that year I was thirteen was hot and unbearable until a layer of chill swept over the sky the morning my Uncle Jonah’s voice twanged a Tennessee drawl over the receiver.

“Is your mommy home?” “No.” I shivered at the unusually cold air, standing in the middle of my bedroom after a late-morning shower, wearing only a towel. “Where is she?” “I’m not sure.” “Leo, your daddy died this morning.” His tone was stark and unemotional.

I hung up the phone shortly after this was said. It was that simple. My Uncle was hours and hours away and I was in New Jersey alone, stuck in between the walls of our house like a single-parented latch key child.

I might have cried or screamed the moment I heard the news, though I don’t know exactly how I reacted. I stood stationary and looked out the tiny window over my bed. The house next door shifted and swayed, as it never had before. I felt dizzy, like I’d soon vomit every inside of my body leaving no possible means of feeling the world around me ever again.

I wasn’t alone. My seven-year-old sister Lila was in the next room watching Saturday morning cartoons. Out my bedroom door and down the hallway. Several steps and the rote interpretation of these familiar movements brought me to my little sister’s arms in seconds that felt like hours. “Daddy died,” I said, stunned.

She wept out loud as if something had hit her in the head from behind. I pulled myself together a little more. Now I needed to take care of the two of us. I held Lila’s hand as if never to let go and went downstairs to the phone list my mother had taped to the wall in case there was ever an emergency while she was out. I called a family friend and my grandparents, managing to squeeze the news out of my mouth, desperately enough so they were soon gathered in our living room, all waiting with Lila and me for my mother to return from the grocery store.

My mother later said that it was “sick” for a grown man to tell a thirteen-year-old girl over the phone that her father had died. The other grown-ups agreed; my Uncle had used bad judgement. He should have waited until my mother was home and let her break the news to the children.

I thought a lot that day about the possibilities of not knowing. How long would I have had to wait in order to know the truth, if my mother had been forced to keep if from me until she could devise a plan to tell me in the right words? It was awful that my Uncle had provided no comfort, but even more awful that my father was dead and there was no chance of reversing it. I decided that I would rather have the truth, no matter how hard it had come.

That day in mid-June, my mother’s friend Claire went up to my room with me, helping me find some warm clothing in my closet that hadn’t been stored away for the summer. The air was so cold and bleak outside that all of the windows in the house were eventually closed. Closest friends and family passed in and out of the doors of our home all day, helping my mother figure out what was to come next in our plans for closure.

My father had always told me that funerals were selfish. Because of this, the little money left after his death was to go to our family. He was to be cremated and spread over his father’s grave. No big ceremony, no elaborate oak coffin, or catered food to eat. Later I looked back and thought it silly, how a healthy middle-aged man could sit next to his little girl and talk of his own funeral plans.

I thought that maybe his refusal to have a funeral held in his name was what was selfish. It isolated our family, reduced our support system in numbers, fed our mourning meagerly with what cookies and casseroles came into our home in return for the few pieces of gossip about Daddy’s death that had escaped.

The day we said goodbye was like the picture my father had unsuccessfully attempted to paint my mind so many times before. Our small congregation gathered at his father’s grave in the heavy air of a rainy morning early in July: Mom, Lila, Grandma, Uncle Jonah, Mom-mom and Pop-pop, Aunt Darleen, and Daddy’s friend from high school, Craig.

Someone mentioned that it was illegal to spread ashes, so my mother and Craig got to work, hastily dragging two brown paper grocery bags out from my Uncle Jonah’s tiny blue hatchback. He had driven all the way from Tennessee with his twin brother’s ashes in the back seat, picking my grandmother up from the nursing home on the way over.

Craig sniffled, claiming the ashes made his nose itch, as he fell to his knees below the huge gravestone and sifted them through the dewy grass with his bare hands. I stood next to my Grandmother, holding on to Lila’s hand. I couldn’t believe that all of that finely textured coal-colored soot was my father. How could his long, long arms and legs, golden brown hair, bony fingers that held cigarettes and books and drawing pens, loud booming voice, and every other part of him all fit into two tiny grocery sacks? Maybe it was all set-up, I thought. Maybe my father had run away and started a new identity and a life of crime like those missing men on America’s Most Wanted.

Craig handed Mommy what seemed to be a tiny black piece of metal. He then said to her, “You might want this, it belongs to you.” She looked down at the tiny black thing in her hand for a moment as if to hold back tears, then immediately stuffed it in her pocket.

Later she took the tiny black thing to the jewelers to see if it could be salvaged. Days later, she drove the car back out to the store and returned home with my father’s gold wedding band, its burnt blackness scraped off by the jeweler.

II. A Fantasy

Ed knew what he’d done. His mother didn’t seem to believe he’d learned his lesson. The day before he took off, the tension that had been rising between the two of them broke.

“If only your father was here to see what you’ve grown up to be, Edward Frankfurt Junior! He’d have you out of here before you gave your own mother a heart attack!” She shook her long tapered index finger at him. Her other hand smashed aggressively into her soft side as she sat stationary in the big old scratchy chair a few feet away from her son.

It was early June in New Jersey, and the muggy air in the living room hung low with the smell of old books and damp polyester stretched threadbare against his middle-aged mother’s skin. The shadow of the eight o’clock sunset slowly darkened the room as Ed faced his mother in silence. His long legs bent at an angle on either side of his body, bony elbows rested on the crooks of his bony knees, head held in the palm of one hand, cigarette burning down to its resting place between the long fingers of his other.

Ed was only seventeen years old, but he was wise enough to know what he needed to do in order to right his wrong in the best way possible. Did his mother think he lacked the intelligence to get himself out of a sticky situation? He had never displayed his logic in the most traditional, easily assumed manner, but he’d always made sound decisions in the long run.

Ed couldn’t have ignored the fact that what they were shoving into his mind at Plainfield High School had nothing to do with what he saw in everyday life. The every day world was more life-like. It was working at Granger’s Hardware all week and all weekend in order to help his widowed mother keep up with the mortgage payments that nipped their family to the last bone every month. It was reading up on the things he could apply to his future. Books had what Ed needed. High School didn’t. Ed left High School behind three-quarters of the way through his junior year. That’s when the tension between him and his mother was born, where it all began.

Edna Westerly didn’t see the son who passed his GED exams with flying colors, the son who had big plans to move to New York City and pay his own way through art school. She saw a gawky longhaired boy whose judgment was years behind his six foot two inches in height. She saw a seventeen-year-old adolescent who was about to father an illegitimate son. A boy who thought he knew what love-is and was ready to run after a young lady begging and salivating after only tasting love in its nascent stage, feeling love for the first time.

A thick line of perspiration collected above Edna’s eyebrows as she held back her aggravation at how ungrateful her child had been for all he had. She knew in her heart that he was a good young man, but she questioned his carelessness, his lack of logic. If her husband hadn’t died of a heart attack so suddenly and unexpectedly years before, she thought, he would surely have laid a hand down, performed a lecture filled with the fatherly influence that Ed needed to get by in the world. She wondered what a mother could do in such a tight situation, how she could raise each of her three boys to be the kind of man that she saw in her husband; reasonable, steadfast, always knowing what was best for his wife and family.

In Ed’s eyes, the hardest part of this situation wasn’t the embarrassment and fear that everyone in their small suburb would find out. One of his best buddies, Stinky, had already gotten his girl in trouble a few months before. Ed was familiar with the scenario and his friends were behind him all the way.

He could care less what his mother's friends in her newly-adopted Methodist women’s group chattered about in hushed voices when he accidentally walked into the dining room the day before during one of their fund-raising meetings. He could care less when Ma insisted he cut off his shoulder-length hair the week after she joined the group because the ladies were going to start holding meetings at their house, and, “Wouldn’t it be nice to show them your mother has some skill in raising a family?”

What bothered him was the deep guilt in the pit of his stomach, the impassable layer of failure that followed him everywhere he went in his seventeen years. He had been a disappointment to his father and never had a chance to make it up to him. He knew his father had loved him, loved him enough to clench his teethe and hold his breath, keep all of the pain and insult inside himself as Ed spent most of his childhood in a sickbed.

Ed’s logic told him that the years of heart ailments following his fight with a bout of scarlet fever weren’t his fault. How could a little boy be at fault for so much pain and suffering? How could a little boy choose to spend his summer evenings in bed sleeping, holding on to possibly the last threads of his young life? How could he have wished upon himself the sight of his twin brother Jonah outside of his bedroom window cracking a bat to a ball, his own father across the yard grinning ear to ear, proud, as he had never been of his sickly son?

Ed knew that it wasn’t really his fault, but his father’s sudden death when he was twelve had wiped out the chance of showing his dad that he was just as dedicated to him as were his two brothers. Now that Ed’s sickness was years behind him, he was limber and muscular and had the strength and yearning to grab his old man by the arm, take him into the backyard, and challenge him to a game of baseball. But it was already too late. His father’s disappointment in him had surely been carried to the grave. The guilt that Ed’s mother was now impending hung heavy above his head in the silent heat of the room.

Aggravation with the silence in the room exploded against the stillness of Ed’s body, and without thinking he smashed the last bit of his cigarette into the ashtray on the floor next to him and stood up abruptly, “I love you, Ma, but I can’t handle your accusations right now. If you want to make me feel guilty then you got what you want; guilty I’m feeling. But I don’t know what in hell to do about it all. I’m going to my room. I need some time to think. I need some time away.” He heard some of his father in the loud, nervous boom of his own voice, his father when he was hopelessly fed up with someone or something. That scared him. He didn’t need to repeat any bitter patterns of the past. He felt nervous adrenaline rush through his long arms and legs as he strode out of the living room, through the kitchen, and down the long, dark staircase into his basement bedroom.

Once he was in his room, he felt immediately calmed. This was his space, a home that he’d made himself where his mother never dared enter. Upon visiting her son’s new room a few days after he moved his things from the hot stuffy attic, into the cool concrete of the basement, she’d stated that his mess of dirty socks, beer bottles, and over-filled ashtrays was going to keep her away from then on. That was fine with Ed. He needed a space to get away from it all, to think, read, and hang around with his friends.

He threw himself down onto the itchy olive green wool blanket that covered his bed, letting the comfort and familiarities of his surroundings fill his lungs. He picked up a book of matches from the floor, lit a cigarette, and leaned back to think things over.

Martia Palatoni. At first she’d been just a pretty face that kept him hopeful and dreaming the long days and nights of his first month working at Granger’s. She came into the hardware store his second day on the job. She’d approached old Granger with a request to match a salmon red swatch of paper at the store’s paint-mixing station. No sooner had Ed interjected, “I’ll take care of this one. It’s my job, isn’t it?”

Old Granger looked at Ed quizzically; knowing Ed hated working with the beat-up mixer because it was always getting jammed mid-job. “If you say so, kid-o,” Granger said, throwing his hands up in the air and going back to taking inventory as Ed lead the young lady to the front of the store.

Ed wasn’t one with the women. Sure, he’d necked with a few of the neighborhood girls when him and his buddies got together to drink and play spin-the-bottle, but his chunky pubescent body hadn’t made him one to fall for. Now that he’d thinned out and grown his hair long, he pondered the possibility of getting this girl’s attention.

How could he resist? Martia was beautiful. Her blonde curls framed her face, her round thighs hugged softly against her worn out denim hip huggers, and her blue eyes shined brightly into his as she glanced up at him briefly, telling him how much paint she needed. Ed filled her request, trying to think of something to catch her attention, keep her in the store long enough so he could ask to see her again sometime.

He lost his courage that first time Martia visited the hardware store and swore it was destiny when she returned two days later for another batch of the same salmon red shade. This time Ed was in the back room on lunch break, downing his forth cup of thick black coffee that day, when Granger poked his head in, “Your lady wants you.”

“ My lady? I don’t have a girl, Granger. What are you talking about?” Ed took a bite from the sandwich he was eating and glanced up, figuring Granger was getting on his case about not having a girlfriend, as usual.

“ Son, I know you’re on break, but that lady you were making eyes at the other day needs s’more of her pansy pink paint and she says you’re the one who knows how to mix it for her.”

Ed jumped up from his chair, quickly glancing at his reflection in the framed Andy Warhol print that hung crookedly above the table. “Tell her just a minute.”

It turned out Martia came into the store for paint often. She worked for a house-painting business right around the corner from Granger’s and showed up at the hardware store at least twice a week. Ed awaited her visits; eventually gathering up the courage to ask her to join him for their lunch breaks. Fortunately, most of Martia’s painting jobs were in the neighborhood, and they began meeting for lunch often; Martia arriving at Granger’s wearing old, paint-covered overalls, Ed smelling of the subtle metallic scent that lingered in the hardware store.

Martia and Ed discovered that they had lead parallel lives, being separated by six degrees for the past ten years of their lives. Martia’s family had moved to Plainfield from the Mid-west when she was six, sent her to private school because they didn’t trust the education at a “city school” like Plainfield’s. She lived a ten-minute walk from Ed’s house and had been acquaintances with most of the guys and girls Ed knew of.

It was during their third week of meeting for lunch, getting wrapped up in endless conversation, that Ed offered Martia a ride home on his motorcycle.

“ I don’t know if I can trust a guy who hardly knows me, being straddled behind him on such a nice bike,” was Martia’s response.

Ed tried to keep the blood from rushing into his cheeks, as he looked down at his beat-up sneakers. She had obviously spied him riding his bike, or had apparently been paying attention sometime when he hadn’t noticed, because he had never shown her his wheels.

“ I just figured we live close by, and it’s a shame for you to be walking all that way in this heat,” Ed attempted to sound cool, as if giving a girl a lift was something he did every day, and showing her that no, he was not a jerk. “I’m not gonna try any moves on you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

Martia gave Ed a questioning look that he couldn’t quite make sense of. Did she like him like that? Women were full of mysteries.

It turned out Martia was willing to accept his approach, when he finally became brave enough to make his way towards her. The next few months spent with Martia whirred through Ed’s mind as he lay in his basement bedroom almost a year after he’d first met her in the hardware store. He’d found out what love was for the first time in his life, and he was willing to do anything for this girl, anything to keep her a part of his life forever.

Ed hadn’t planned on getting Martia pregnant. If anything, her being in trouble was a driving force towards the separation of their two lives. Her parents were conservative, to say the least. They didn’t approve of her easy-going, laid-back friends, or her scruffy longhaired boyfriend. She was forced to constantly sneak around in order to see Ed. Her parents hadn’t known that he was her lover. Mr. and Mrs. Palatoni were both raised by strict Catholic Italians, and if cigarettes and dating were trivial, then drugs and sexual freedom were concepts beyond mention in the Palatoni household.

Ed tried to keep a respectable stature whenever he was forced to come in contact with his girlfriend’s parents. He’d part and comb his hair, shower, and wear the nicest clothing he had whenever he came to take Martia out on one of the few dates her parents knew about. The other dates happened when Martia lied to her parents, saying she had to stay late at school to work on the school newspaper. Ed would pull up to St. Mary’s once classes let out, whisking her away on his bike, drowning in utter happiness with her thighs wrapped tightly around him, the breeze blowing through his hair.

Martia kept the fact that she was pregnant from her parents as long as she possibly could. It was as if it was unsaid, but commonly known: she and Ed had little time left together and they were to use their time wisely. Over the last week or so, Martia’s belly began to pucker over the edge of her jeans. The signs of the child inside her were visible and concrete and she finally broke the news to Ed,

“ I’m telling my parents. Tomorrow night,” she looked down at her bare legs and clawed at the grass beside her.

“ What?” Ed got upset. He’d almost forgotten the pregnancy existed. The weather was finally officially warm and they were sitting by the brook at Green Acres Park enjoying the comfort and stillness of the early summer night. When Martia had realized her period was late, her and Ed discussed their options. Stinky told Ed that there was a way to “fix it” so Martia wouldn’t have to have the baby. His ex-girlfriend, Patty, had it done in this kitchen of this lady who was recommended by this old artist guy from downtown. The process was painful and bloody, but Patty had survived.

Unfortunately, the emotional aftershock was so painstaking that their relationship didn’t last more than a week beyond the abortion. Patty had taken off to San Francisco, or somewhere in that direction, and Stinky hadn’t heard word of her since.

Ed had suggested the option to Martia anyway. He figured she needed to know what their choices were. She rejected the idea. She was afraid of her parent’s reaction, but not desperate enough to be found dead in some strange woman’s kitchen, and surely not ready for some stranger to be messing with her “down there”.

So she waited as long as she possibly could before she told her parents. She tried to explain to Ed that their time was gold, but he wouldn’t hear it. Surely they’d find a way to be together if they really loved each other. It was destiny that connected their lives so closely, and destiny would therefore keep them together. Ed had learned that life was too short to spend focusing on the worst possibility available. He had watched his father die young, had seen the pain of disappointment, and was not ready to give up on something so obviously positive and tangible in his own life. He wasn’t ready to let go of the girl he loved for such a ridiculous reason. There was no way he would let her parents keep them apart.

The night before, they had sat at the park. Later, when Ed got home he decided to finally break the news to his mother. Maybe she’d understand. Maybe she’d have some advice about dealing with Martia’s parents. Maybe she’d give the two of them money to run away.

Instead her reaction was shock. She didn’t yell or scream when Ed first told her the news. She reacted surprisingly calm in Ed’s opinion. She asked Ed how long they had known and what they were planning to do about it. Much different from her reaction when Ed broke the news to her that he was going to drop out of high school. That night, months before, was filled with enough screaming and door-slamming to make the whole neighborhood believe the world ending. Ed realized his mother was more shaken about the pregnancy than she initially showed him when she ended their conversation abruptly and locked herself in her bedroom for the rest of the night.

Ed had other things to think about and hadn’t worried about his mother’s reaction until she blew up at him when he got home from work earlier the next evening. All day his mind had been filled with the question of what would become of him, Martia, and their child eho would be born in only a few short months. He wished ultimately that her parents would let them get married, but he knew that possibility was meager. Martia was only sixteen and would not be legal to get married without her parents’ permission for almost two years. And besides, her parents had big plans for her: a scholarship fund collecting in the bank downtown, expectations of good grades, and a future at an Ivy League college.

Twenty-four hours ago, Martia had told Ed that she was going to break the news to her parents. Twenty-four hours ago Ed and Martia had shed tears into the grass and exchanged a long, heart-felt kiss that could possibly be their last kiss ever. Ed shuddered as he lay on the bed in his dimly lit room, staring into space thinking these horrible thoughts. He had smoked through his whole pack of cigarettes. He decided that there was nothing left to do but call Martia’s house and see how the confrontation had really gone. Reality couldn’t be as awful as the negativity that was running through his head.

Ed went upstairs to the kitchen to use the phone. Luckily his mother was nowhere in sight. She had most likely gone off to bed early and upset again. He picked up the receiver from where it hung on the wall and dialed Martia’s number. Her father’s voice answered after two rings, “ Hello?” “ Hi, sir, can I please speak with Martia?” Ed stuttered. “ Who is this?” Martia’s father demanded. “ Um,” Ed wanted to make up a story, so her father would bring her to the phone, but he knew he would be angered even more if he caught Ed in a lie, “It’s Edward Westerly, sir. May I please speak to your daughter, it’s very important.” Ed’s heart beat so fast he could hear his own pulse. “ You stay away from my daughter! I know what you’re up to and I don’t like bastards like your kind destroying my daughter’s life! Don’t call here again!” Ed started to interject, realizing that Mr. Palatoni had hung up on him. He hung up the phone and went to sit down at the kitchen table, holding his head in his hands. He could feel tears welling up inside of him, but couldn’t bring himself to cry. He felt sick to his stomach. He had to get a hold of Martia.

He got up and went to the phone a second time. He picked if up and dialed Martia’s number. It rang countless times. He was about to hang up when someone picked up. It was Martia’s little sister, Evie, “ Ed?” she said in a hushed voice. “ Evie?” “ Yeah, it’s me. I only have a second; I don’t want Mom and Dad to catch me. They’ll ground me forever, no joke,” Evie sounded nervous. “ Where’s Martia? I need to talk to her,” Ed pleaded desperately. “ You can’t talk to her. Mom and Dad are pretty pissed. Don’t try to come over. I heard Dad say to Marty that he’ll kill you if you come near her. He sounded really serious; I’ve never seen him this mad. Mom’s sending Marty to her sister’s in Michigan to have her baby. She doesn’t want anyone in town to know about it…” “ When’s she leaving? Can I see her?” Ed panicked. “ Don’t even try, Ed,” Evie raised her voice, “Dad called around and found a plane ticket, her flight leaves early tomorrow morning.” Ed started to sob, “Isn’t there—“ “ Don’t even try, Ed,” Evie repeated herself. Ed heard a man’s voice shouting Evie’s name in the background. “ I gotta go. Sorry!” Evie whispered and hung up.

Ed stood stunned in the corner of the dark kitchen with the receiver in his hand until the operator’s recording came on the line. Ed hung up the phone. He knew what he had to do. He went down to his room and packed up his small green army sack with the minimal amount of clothing he would need. He wrote his mother a short note and left it on the dining room table for her to find the next morning:

Dear Ma,

I am going to be gone for a few days. I have some business to take care of. I’m sorry I disappointed you. I’ll be back as soon as possible. I love you.

Your son,

Edward Frankfurt Westerly, Jr.

Ed grabbed his helmet, strapped his bag over his shoulder, and set off to Stinky’s house to borrow some money and crash for the night. He planned to take off on his bike as soon as the sun came up the next morning. He was sure he’d catch up with Martia, somehow.

III. On Death

Did you feed my cow?
Yes ma’am.
What did you feed her?
Corn and hay.
Did you milk her real good?
Yes ma’am.
Did you milk her like you should?
Yes ma’am.
How did you milk her?
Squish, squish, squish.
Did my cow get sick?
Yes ma’am.
Was she covered with the tick?
Yes ma’am.
How did she die?
Mm, mm, mm.
Did the buzzards come?
Yes ma’am.
How did they come?
Flap, flap, flap.
How did they come?
Flap, flap, flap.

I always wanted to know why the cow had to die like it did in that song we always sang. My mother seemed to think the song was a fun game; and in a way it was, listening to her sing the way she sang in that strange accent that was only hers for the cow song. As if she was an old woman from down south who had left me to take care of her cow for the weekend.

I imagined a fat white cow, mottled with black spots, like the milk cows I’d seen on television. I’d love her and pet her and feed her hay whenever she felt hungry. We’d run around and play on the lush, green, lawn that went on for miles and miles.

But then she would get something called “the tick” that I’d never heard of before. She would die, roll over onto her side into the lush, green lawn. The sky would turn gray and the air a dampish bitter cold as it was in my worst dreams and days I just wanted to stay in bed and sleep until the sun came again.

I would think about my cow’s death with a bitter feeling in my stomach. My five-year-old mind would wander and I would forget to answer my mother’s question.

“Did my cow die? Did my cow die?” She would repeat herself until I was brought back to earth, her voice growing louder and sounding a little annoyed, as if I was the party pooper ruining all the fun just before the song was to end.

“Yeeeees maaaa’am.” I knew how to say the words without thinking. It was as my nighttime prayers came, or later, in grade school, the “Pledge of Allegiance”. I never knew I had the choice of not singing anything I was told to sing, until Jamie Stebber came into class at the beginning of second grade.

“Why does she sit, doesn’t she have to stand?” I asked my teacher. “Her religion is Jehovah’s Witness, they don’t believe in saying ‘the Pledge’ because it uses the word ‘God’,” my teacher replied.

I started hesitating when standing up from my desk everyday when the teacher called the salute to the flag, looking around to see if the other kids noticed, testing their reaction. What if I didn’t use the word ‘God’ anymore, would they ask me questions if I decided to sit as the whole class chanted to the flag around me?

I still stood for years after that, too scared making an obstacle of myself would ruin my good student image and call attention to my best friend and I whose desks were placed strategically at the rear of the second grade classroom. There, we were able to spend hours drawing dirty pictures based on her descriptions of what she’d caught on the Playboy channel while her mother and father were out at work, and still hold our standing as the best A students in class.

I knew about death. One sleepless night I sneaked downstairs and joined my mother and father as they watched Romeo and Juliet. After ten minutes of watching Romeo poison himself, dying over Juliet’s still body, I ran to bed shaken. Back in bed, I promised myself to never sleep as Juliet slept when she was dead: flat on my back with my hands folded on my chest.

I had fantasies some nights when sleep would not come to me. I would wake up in my fantasies and the world would have ended. At first this would be a marvelous thing, I would run out to every toy store in town and take whatever I wanted, as if I had won one of those Toy’s R Us shopping sprees they’d advertise on TV. Then, the reality would hit me. If everyone died, I would be alone. I pictured myself standing in the darkness on a jagged rock, surrounded by the only life that remained, a few deer, some dogs. No one to talk to. I spent nights with this image in my mind, sometimes never sleeping. Sometimes resulting in tears that I couldn’t explain to my tired, awoken mother.

My father, Ed, worked late into the night as a psyche nurse. His arrival home at the end of each night throughout my childhood was a savior to the insomniac I was as a child. My half-sleep head-full of thoughts was comforted by the tired click of the front door opening at the bottom of the stairs every night at eleven-thirty p.m.

Sometimes I would fall back into sleep at that sound, my fearful thoughts finally somehow comforted by his arrival. The night was a lonely time, and once Daddy was home, I knew there was life downstairs.

Sometimes he’d tell me what he did every night when he came home from work. He’d make a TV dinner or a can of chili in the new microwave and sit down in the TV room to watch television. He said he wished that the rest of the family were awake so he’d have someone to welcome him and sit to talk for awhile. He said that my mother went to bed late for an adult, and should rather be up to say hello to him when he came home from a long night.

I spent time with Daddy on Saturday mornings when I was growing up. A throaty groggy voice would call out my name early in the afternoon, “Can you get me a cup of coffee, Leo?” my father would call out from under the covers.

I disliked getting coffee for him, it burned my hands and smelled awful as I carried his mug from the kitchen at the back of the house, up the maroon-carpeted staircase to his room trying not to spill the thick black liquid out of the mug and onto my hands.

By the time I had his coffee ready for him, he would be sitting on his side of the bed in his vertically stripped pajama pants, knees bent angular, looking out the bedroom window onto the front lawn, morning cigarette in hand. I never wanted to stick around because his morning-smell bothered me, stale like sweat and cigarettes smoked on his shift the night before. He always made me sit down. This was quality time for him and me.

In his nightstand was everything of material value he’d ever owned; jewelry, diaries, old letters from old girlfriends. One Saturday he opened the drawer and pulled out an intricately carved wooden box. Inside were two gold pocket watches, what he called “watch fobs”. He said to me, “I had to fight to get these watches, my brother Jonah wanted them but once my father died I was lucky enough for them to be passed on to me. Someday these watches will go to you and your sister.”

I didn’t care much about some big, clunky pocket watches, but I knew they must be important because my father spoke of them so dearly. He told me about his father, how tall and lanky and handsome he was, how similar he looked to his father these days. Daddy said he was afraid of reaching that age his father was when he died, he’d never expected to live past it.

He told me about his job. He worked with the “crazy people”, as he called them. He said that on full moons, the people on the ward would get even crazier. They had a special room in the Veteran’s Hospital he worked at, walls painted the brightest pink available. They would put the craziest of the patients into the ‘pink room’ on full moon nights.

It made sense, why I liked the color pink so much. Not because ‘pink is for girls and blue is for boys’, as my mother would say, pointing at a beautiful evening sunset. The color made me feel good, made me happy.

And, I always had an explanation for all of the mishaps that seemed to happen in my life later on, those nights I’d look into the Manhattan sky and realize the moon was a full plump tomato.

I was never allowed to visit my father at work. Such a place wasn’t safe for a little girl. I remember the first time I was able to see my father on a floor built for crazy people, only, this time he wasn’t playing nurse.

It was a secret that he was put up in that room, a secret to my friends and the other kids I saw every day in the seventh grade. It wasn’t as if they’d kept up an interest in my family anyway, once my father became sick and stopped working, starting acting strangely and stopped showering, making my house an embarrassing place to bring friends. He was smart enough to put himself there, he knew well enough where he was, being trained as a nurse in the field. It was hard seeing him up there, in that room with people he didn’t seem to belong with.

He wasn’t in there for very long, in and out in a week from what I could tell, though the vacation’s length was hard to calculate. The week was calm for my mother, sister, and I. There was no yelling, no strangeness in the house, just an uneasy waiting for things to go back to normal.

My father taught me what buzzards were. He had an occasional pastime of drawing small complex drawings in thin windy lines of black ink. His favorite to draw was one of a huge bird, heavily cross-hatched with lines until its feathers looked thick and dark. He wrote under the bird in his small shaky penmanship: When someone dies, the buzzards come.