The Notch

by Sarina Bosco

“I don’t have a lot of time left,” my father says, standing to the side of a gravel trail that used to be a rail road track. He could mean any number of things, saying this: he doesn’t have a lot of time left for this particular walk. He doesn’t have a lot of time left to live. He doesn’t have a lot of time left to do anything leisurely in general. He doesn’t have a lot of time left today, before he has to go home and do yard work.

I’m twenty-three, a new homeowner, and suddenly terrified.

It’s one of those days where the sun is pouring lazily through the trees, where damselflies are lighting on the ferns and water plants around us. My dog, at our feet, sits with his tongue lolling out over his teeth. I look at my father and I’m not sure how to respond. For years I’ve harassed him about the smoking, the overtime at work, the lack of wanderlust.

And it’s the simple way he accepts the truth and speaks it, aloud, on a morning in late June that has brought me to a halt. Until now I’ve been hurrying to live my own life. To get out on trails, cultivate gardens, write, visit different states, meet people who inspire me. I realize that soon I’ll be watching someone who is close to me slip away.

He takes out a bent cigarette and lights it up right there on the path, with rock faces that have shuddered out of the Connecticut earth surrounding us.

I think to myself that I’m too young to lose a parent. I think about a lot of things in quick succession while wrapping the leash around my palm: all of the house-related tasks I don’t know how to do yet, like cutting moulding at angles or putting up the porch railing. How the back of my thighs burn from yesterday’s run. The fact that I don’t have, and haven’t had for a long time, a significant other. Whether or not that makes my father sad. How I want to show him before we leave this place the old planks on the trail from when the train ran through, and the mountain laurel, and the stream where they release salmon. I think about the family plot out in Wethersfield, with the ugly Alberta pines flanking the headstone.

My dog walks over to my father, panting, and nudges between his calves. He bends to rub the dog’s ears and smiles so that the cigarette hangs off of his lips. I watch the smoke dissipate just above his head, filtering the sunlight, rising up among the cliffs and pines.

*****

Eight months after moving into my house I start calling him for recipes. Shrimp scampi, chicken cordon bleu, chicken francaise, zucchini chips, paiche fillets. Afterwards I check the length of the calls – two minutes and forty-seven seconds, one minute and sixteen seconds. My repetitions of “Okay. Okay. How much though? Okay” seem to last much longer than that.

He never does give me exact measurements, just estimates. “I don’t know,” he says, laughter carrying up the end of his words, “whatever you think. Whatever looks like enough.” And even though that is how I’ve always cooked, I suddenly crave more precise instructions. I want a language of teaspoons, cups, ounces, minutes on the timer. Not the inexactitude of “whenever it looks finished,” which is something I’d say to my mother when she asks how long until the muffins or croissants or pies are done.

I’ve always been better at baking things. Barely mixing ingredients together and watching them rise under heat. But my father lives by taste, by the subtleties of texture and red pepper flakes in pasta dishes. The instinct I’ve watched in him has only just started to well up in me, and I call him impulsively to make sure it doesn’t collapse when my mind is away somewhere.

“How long on each side?” I ask desperately, and on the other end, he laughs.

*****

When he came home from work I would put my feet on his and we would dance to the Beatles. To Huey Lewis and the News. To Prince. To whatever was on the radio that night.

*****

We go fishing out near Groton on party boats, paying too much money to catch too little fish. We never win the pot and sometimes we go home empty handed and sunburned.

When the boat begins its choking purr, my father heads to the bow and points to the left, far out ahead of us at a low green building. “Your uncle worked there,” he says. “Painting submarines.” He tells me about the time they flew to Block Island drunk, in my uncle’s plane, and the goats that he owned, and the tarantula that he kept in a shoebox when he was out at basic in Texas. My uncle lived on a boat for a long time and married three women, one of whom was black. They would go out to clubs together. He tells me all of this and more while we barrel out into the ocean, as though the words were landlocked until now.

Back home he’s silent again as he scales and fillets the fish on a tree stump outside. Inside I dig into an old box of photos and find them. My uncle, tall and broad and dark-haired, with my father’s arm around his shoulders. Both of them smiling, cigarette smoke tinting the air around them.

*****

He tends to forget about how his actions will affect others, and the consequences they will bring. Two years before my prom, he cut down the cherry tree in our yard. We all listened to the chainsaw that day and felt the limbs getting lobbed off as if they were our own. There would be no more milky petals raining down at the end of spring. No more mocking bird nests. No more flaking bark and caterpillars making their way, impossibly slow, to the highest branches.

*****

Toward the end of my childhood I cut the top of my knuckle open trying to carve into an apple tree with an army knife. It wasn’t an uncommon hobby for me, but this time, the bark bit back. The knife snapped in on itself from where I held it at an improper angle and crunched down to the bone. I ran to the house screaming and trailing blood.

I remember losing my breath while thinking about stitches and alcohol that would sting and having to survive the car ride to the hospital. And then there was nothing but my hand under the cold water of the faucet, my father’s huge palm around my wrist – his voice somewhere to my right, unfazed by the event. “Put some duct tape on it,” he said. “Maybe a popsicle stick to hold it straight until it heals.”

*****

His father died in February, my birth month. I didn’t cry at the wake and neither did he. The men at the funeral home accidentally shaved off my nonno’s mustache, and so they made a fake one to replace it. It was waxy and the wrong shade of grey.

Standing in front of the casket greeting relatives I’d never met, we made jokes about priests and the devil.

No one said anything about the gun that had been dismantled all around Nonno’s house – how he had begged for it those last days, how he had shouted for help escaping Mussolini, how my father sat at the edge of his bed at home afterwards quiet for a long time.

*****

Three years into college the cherry tree climbed its way across my skin, up the left side of my ribcage, in ink. He refused to look at me for weeks. I tried to explain to him that those were the roots – the actual roots. Still decaying somewhere near a huge rock in our backyard, but I needed them. I needed to know where and when things began.

*****

What I like about the family plot, or the cemetery in general, is all of the flowering trees. That makes visiting bearable. While Nonna cries and weeds around the headstone my father and I walk around admiring trees we can’t identify. We find abstract gravestones – huge cubes balancing on their corners, intricate geometric designs folding in on themselves – and ignore the angels gesturing dramatically to the earth and whatever is left beneath.

My uncle – the one who drunkenly flew planes - died when I was two. He came back from cancer once, but it got the last laugh in the end by riddling his body and taking him quickly, within months. I imagine that my father was just as silent and solitary at that time as he always has been. When I was younger, I’d ask him carefully if he wanted to go to the cemetery and visit his brother. “No,” he would always say, shuffling around to find his shoes, “he’s not there. Just dirt.”

*****

I stayed with the boy I went to prom with for four years, well into college. In late May of my senior year I put on a long white backless dress and we stood side by side over the stump of the cherry tree, unbalanced on the roots erupting from the ground. Our mothers chatted happily on the lawn while our fathers cracked open Budweisers. Mine left his beer on the porch and went in the house for the old Olympus. The sound of the shutter was louder than anything that day, shattering through the coming dusk. I looked down at my bare feet and remembered that the little white flowers didn’t grow here anymore, too delicate for anything but deep shade.

I got the cherry tree tattoo a week and a half before leaving that boy and driving through two states to go to another college. It wasn’t long before I knew that there was little chance of me ever getting married.

*****

Earlier that day, before I talked him into a walk, I turned the corner of the fence to find him down on one knee in my backyard. He was bracing himself against the earth and breathing hard.

When he stood and realized that I’d seen him, he tried to smile. “What happened?” I asked.

“I wasn’t watching where I was going and lost my balance for a second.” He sauntered off while pulling a pack of Mavricks from his shirt pocket.

It’s strange, the vacuum that erupts in your chest from seeing your father brought low by the simplicity of gravity.

*****

He tends to forget, so I remind him. “Aren’t you lucky –“ I begin.

Lucky I’m pretty. Lucky I was a good student, got scholarships. Lucky I’m not one of those slutty girls. Lucky I’m responsible, that I can take care of my own house, that I can take care of myself. Lucky I’m healthy and don’t borrow money from you.

I list all of this because he forgets sometimes, and because once while he was pumping gas he told me that having kids really just sucks the money and the life out of you. I remind him because I’m trying to apologize for that. Watching him sit with his wrists resting on his knees, his head bent low, inhaling as though trying to catch his breath – I’ve always felt like I was the one to take it from him.

*****

I drive us back to my house from the trail, with my dog in my father’s lap panting happily. He’s covered in a slick of sweat and clearly tired out, but also clearly happy.

"Want something to eat?” I ask, pulling into the driveway. “I have chicken wings, and coleslaw that I made yesterday. I put julienned beets in it.”

“No,” he answers, already digging in his pockets for his keys. “I’ve gotta get home and finish the schedule for work.” He eyes the front of my house where we’ve been pulling out the crippled boxwoods and then looks over at the mound of hostas near the mailbox. “You really should get in there and weed,” he comments, opening his car door. “And you should rake the rest of that dirt over the trench in the backyard. I’ll bring over grass seed sometime this week. I might still have some hay, too, in the shed.” He says all of this while lowering himself into the Toyota and slipping another cigarette from the pack that always appears in his hand. “I’ll call you later this week and let you know when I’m free. Maybe we can bang out the rest of the stump over there.”

“Ok,” I answer. The dog is pulling on the leash, making it bite into my palm. He starts to back out toward the street and I suddenly want to ask him how to make clams casino, even though I don’t eat shellfish. Or maybe orzo, or risotto, or anything that would be trying enough for him to have to spend a while explaining it. I want to copy down every word of every recipe he gives me, or better yet have him write it out. His letters always have an oddly sober flourish to them, beautifully shaped for someone who didn’t speak much less write English until he was almost ten.

He taps the brake before pulling out and drops his chin, waving at me through the windshield. I wave back and feel much smaller than I have in a long time.

In the house, where I have more dishes to do and dinner to give the dog, I find my work schedule. Maybe we can get out again later this week. But even as the thought forms, so does the doubt. There is barely time, as it is, for two minute and forty-seven second phone calls. It could be a week or more before I see him again, and in that space it could happen without me even knowing it. I could be at work the next time he falls to his knees, and it could be something much worse than imbalance. His heart giving out. The tar in his lungs finally catching up to him. A clot in his veins, which have always been bulging and bruised under skin that gets thinner every day.

I stare out across the pines that border my back yard and the unused field beyond, flowering cigar trees breaking across its surface. In my mind I see him on the trail again – how his shoes rest on the gravel. The stains on his shirt, the way the breeze stirs what hair he has left, the wrinkles that form at the corners of his eyes just before he speaks. I see the way the cigarette hangs lightly from his fingers and the glint of the sun on his glasses. I try to burn it there – to put it into some kind of mental photo that I can come back to.

I want to remember when the world tilted, and I saw one person’s end coming long before I’d even started toward my own.

The knowing changes everything.