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  Contents

  Dear Mr. You

  Dear Grandpa

  Dear Daddy

  Dear Yaqui Indian Boy

  Dear Risk Taker

  Dear Movement Teacher

  Dear Blue

  Dear Abraham

  Dear Popeye

  Dear Man Out of Time

  Dear Father Bob

  Dear Miss Girl

  Dear Big Feet

  Dear Former Boyfriend

  Dear Mentor

  Dear Young Leman

  Dear Poetry Man

  Dear Cerberus

  Dear Rafiki Yangu

  Dear Firefighter

  Dear NASA

  Dear Mr. Cabdriver

  Dear Orderly

  Dear Storyteller

  Dear Uncle

  Dear Lifeline

  Dear Neighbor

  Dear Gem

  Dear Little Owl

  Dear Doctor

  Dear Gorgeous

  Dear Emergency Contact

  Dear Future Man Who Loves My Daughter

  Dear Oyster Picker

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my mother

  Dear Mr. You,

  Manly creature, who smells good even when you don’t, you wake up too slowly, with fuzzy, vertical hair and a slightly lost look on your face as though you are seven or seventy-five; to you, because you can notice a woman with a healthy chunk of years or pounds on her and let out a wolf whistle under your breath and mean it; because you thought either rug would be fine, really it would; to you who can fix my screen door, my attitude, and open most jars; to you who codifies, slams a puck, builds a decent cabinet or the perfect sandwich; to you who gave a twenty to the kids selling Hershey bars and waited three hours for me at baggage claim in your flannel shirt; you, sir, you took my order, my pulse, my bullshit; to you, boy grown up, the gentleman, soldier, professor, or caveman; to you and to that guy at the concession stand; thank you for lying on the hood of that car and watching stars plummet, thank you for the tour of the elevator cage, the sound booth, the alley; thank you for the kaleidoscope, the get-well tequila, the painting, the truth; thank you for the brown diamonds and blue points; to you, who carried me across the parking lot, to the ER, and up the stairs; to you who shows up every so often only to confuse and torment, and you who stays in orbit to my left and steady, you stood up for me, I won’t forget that; to the one who can’t figure it out and never will, and to the one who lost the remote, the dog, or your way altogether. To you who I’ve tried to understand, so necessary and violent; you who transported, comforted, and devastated, sometimes all at once; I still have what you said was mine, I kept that, along with the memories, despite “memories” being a word I loathe for both its icky tone and wistful graveyard implications, but there it is and here I am recounting them. Some I may get wrong and others I’d love to expel forever, but thank you for them nonetheless, and this,

  this is for you, Cerberus, sweet beast with your many faces,

  and you, Father Bob,

  to the Deer Dancer because he saw me over there,

  to the painter, and the poet,

  to NASA, and to that cabdriver, what can I say but that I was wrong and I’m sorry,

  to sweet Blue and kind Abe,

  to firefighters all, especially that one,

  to Uncle, and the newspaper boy and the goats,

  to Little Owl, what an honor to watch your first flight,

  to Rafiki Yangu, and to my mentor, and my doctor,

  to the ones I never met and the ones I often wish I hadn’t.

  Most of all to you, Daddy. That’s you in me, the far-off gaze. The poems are you, as are the good deeds and the jars of candy I hide everywhere. You are what makes me indomitable and how I know to keep walking when I feel crippled in every conceivable way. Thank you to the actual heavens and after that, and you others who make up my tremendous et cetera, this is

  to you.

  Dear Grandpa,

  The world is at war again. That’s twice now, in your lifetime.

  Your only son has been overseas for eleven months. The last you heard, he and his fellow soldiers were going to make a beachhead landing on the shores of the Philippines. If your boy John was involved you can bet it went off like gangbusters. He is nineteen years old and remarkably good at life.

  If there were a way to spy on him at this moment you’d see a young man wrapped inside an army-issue poncho and sleeping in the corner of a rice paddy. Artillery is firing across the road but that sound is lost in the rain, which falls in thick black sheets, and your boy sleeps long enough for that rain to surround and lift him. When he wakes he is floating on his back.

  He will hit the double decades in two and a half weeks and you have a plan that’s been brewing.

  You go to the only bakery you know, which is two towns over. The woman behind the counter is wiping her eyes on her apron by the time you ask to buy the biggest loaf of rye bread she has. She’s just gotten an earful about your son and refuses to charge you for the bread, also throwing in a few cinnamon buns. You thank her up and down and tell her you enjoy the way her blouse matches her eyes.

  You have a bottle of gin for the drive back but you run out of it around the same time you run out of fuel and have to pull over to the side of the road. You hitch a ride back to the house with a nice fellow, a miner like yourself, and tell him about your plan for your son’s birthday. You are open to strangers. Aside from that it’s a darn good plan.

  In forty-three years, your granddaughter will be found hitchhiking by the side of the road near San Francisco. She will stand there with two young men who’ll encourage her to hike up her skirt and look as winsome as possible by the off-ramp. They will have constructed a sign out of cardboard to catch the eye of someone nice enough to pull over. The sign will say MARIN, PLEASE, WE’VE READ SARTRE. They’ll get a ride fairly quickly from a fellow who sees only a girl with a sign, but when he stops the two boys will come running out from behind a bush. The boys will stuff themselves in that tiny car and thank the man for his generosity before he can protest.

  In an hour or so your granddaughter will enter a coffee shop with one of the boys. They will have empty stomachs and less than two dollars between them. They have a plan though. The girl goes off to a corner table by herself while the boy scans the joint for someone to beat at poker. She will eat breakfast slowly, setting down her book in between bites of croissant with strawberry jam, only ordering a hot chocolate when the boy gives her the signal that he is winning and they will be able to pay for their food. A man will notice her and attempt to sit across from her, but she will give him a blank stare as she points to the boy, who has seen the man approaching. The boy will narrow his eyes and give him the universal signal for SCRAM, and as the man skulks away she will go back to her book, which is, incidentally, The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre. It will start to rain as the group drives across the Golden Gate Bridge. Your granddaughter loves the rain as you do, the grandfather she’ll never meet. By the time she’s born you are dead and your wife has married your brother. Your granddaughter never thought much about the fact that instead of “Grandma and Grandpa,” it was always “Grandma and Uncle George.” When she gets older she’ll wish she’d met you, as you are the subject of many stories that are told and retold within the family.

  It’s better that you know none of this now thou
gh, as you return home and head to the kitchen. You get a handful of crackers from the bread tin to eat with liverwurst before you set about your business. You put the loaf of bread on the counter and look at it for a moment. This makes you smile. The sight of the bread, and your own cleverness; they almost make your eyes wet.

  You slice the bread through the middle and dig out the guts down to the crust. Picking out the innards, you ball them up in your hand and stash that fist-bread in the icebox for your wife to come across. She may need them as meatloaf filler if she’s short some beef. You are always thinking of others.

  You take the bottle of hard Kentucky whiskey from its bag and admire the label, which is blurry. You nearly fall off the kitchen stool trying to read it. A sip of moonshine from a jar in the icebox feels like a swell idea. You stand with your hand on the refrigerator door and sway, letting the cold out.

  The candle is a problem. You have a heck of a time finding one and have to wake your wife, who swears at you. When you say it’s for the boy’s birthday, she walks to the neighbors’ in her housedress to ask for one. You admire her attack on life, as you watch her heading back up the driveway with a candle stub, highly perturbed. You get a kick out of the whole exercise.

  The candle drips wax around the bottle top and creates a seal to protect the whiskey. You lay the sacrificial bottle in the crust coffin, for the second time thanking the powers that be for making you so goddamned ingenious. Splashing Worcestershire in the remains of the frosting creates a tinted batch with which to spell “Happy Birthday John!” The exclamation point looks like a tadpole but that adds mystery. You chuckle as you wrap it up.

  • • •

  When your boy sees a box with his name on it, he tears it open for any sign of home. He’d been digging foxholes to wait out the night when the first load of mail in weeks reached him by way of New Guinea. The sound of his name being called to receive a package is almost gift enough.

  He digs through the newspaper and finds your cake, by now pitiful and moldy. It’s bald in patches where the icing has rubbed off, but it’s from you so he knows to look beneath the surface for the joke. He unties the twine around the bread and looks inside, letting go a belly laugh and waving his hand up to the sky. The other soldiers slap him on the back and wish him happy birthday while eyeing the bottle’s throat like the slope of a woman’s neck they could grasp with their muddy frozen hands.

  John says a toast to you before passing it around and everyone joins in on the “hip-hip hooray!” The irony of celebrating is lost on those young men who are swimming in mud and sharing a tin of sardines for dinner. They raise up their rifles and fists to the skies, believing they won’t have their last drink in the middle of this paddy. There will be real parties waiting back home and a chance for a fella to put on a clean shirt and tie, hear the ice clink in a decent glass of gin. The day when this is the story told while sitting in a real chair.

  For now they let out their best cheer. It doesn’t rouse you from where you lie facedown on the rug in West Virginia, talking to a son lost too deep in the jungle to hear you. You wonder if they have the same locusts in that part of the world where your boy is now. Locusts. You are fond of the sound but they ruin discovery. The way they rise and fall in the same exact patterns every night tells you what time it is before you get a chance to peek out a window for yourself, see where the moon ended up tacked to the sky.

  Dear Daddy,

  I don’t know his name or rank. He must be dead now.

  It was the Philippines, 1944. Your battalion was trying to divide the Japanese so they couldn’t push the Americans down to the beaches. Wipe them out by the ocean, where their bodies could feed the big fish. Their bones would wash up with photos of their girls from back home floating past. The boots would be gone. During combat, soldiers take boots off the casualties, you told me, since in war all you do is walk.

  This soldier saw you struggling. You couldn’t recall his name, which means the gunshot in your leg was brutal, because you remembered everything. He lost his place in line to find a branch and tied the stick to your leg to get you going again, using your rifle for a cane. You fell back in, began to muscle your way through the thicket. When the pain started to set your guts on fire you slowed but didn’t quit. In the jungle, night is so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face but you could hear the screams of men being bayoneted fifty meters away. The guys at the back of the line were the ones getting picked off first, their bloodlines ending in the brush in the middle of an island they’d never heard of a week ago. Last was not the place to be.

  The commander ordered a brief stop so the soldiers could rest. Not sleep, but have water or stare impassively at their wounds and one another. Smoke. As the hundreds of soldiers sat, you kept walking until your back of the line became the middle. Dragging your leg, you were the only one walking until you’d blown all the way to the front with a bullet in your thigh. When the commander ordered everyone up they began to pass you again, pushing you to the rear until another stop was called, but you limped through that break too. You dragged yourself by soldiers sitting on their helmets chewing tobacco, sharing a pack of Life Savers. Some had their heads in their hands while standing otherwise at attention. They were arrested in space with nowhere to go, looking like the statues that would one day represent them in public spaces, with plaques describing this battle and their bravery.

  This went on an entire day longer, with you managing to hold the middle by not accepting the back. Your hand was melded to your rifle and aching like the dickens but you heaved onward, kept not taking that break. At some point when you still hadn’t died, trees cleared and there was legitimate light. You were medevaced out, only to be back in combat a month later with your first Purple Heart, which you said you never understood. You’d ask, “Why do they give you a medal for being dumb enough to get shot?”

  Months later, you were shivering under a blanket in Manila, thinking about getting home in time to call that girl about a date for New Year’s. You hadn’t stopped thinking about her since that day at the bank. She’d floated over with a note from some other gal. Her eyes were so brown. She had skin that looked like a bowl of fruit with cream painted on top, and seemed as though she might stick by a man, but quietly, with a little orchestra of sighs and run-on sentences. You asked someone what her story was. Apparently she was going to Averett College in the fall, and you remembered that while you were sitting by that campfire in the middle of war a year later. You wrote her a letter by the light of that fire, on the top of the page scrawling the words FROM SOMEWHERE IN THE PHILIPPINES.

  Thirty years later, my teen European-tour-to-meet-boys fell through when my friend’s parents said no. I was devastated and you couldn’t bear it. You sold or mortgaged something and booked a family Euro-tour—not my dream, but you were so happy to give me this trip you couldn’t afford that I acted excited, hoping there would be a boy on a train who would not know English and kiss me, but there were no cute boys. There was only a man on a pier in Monte Carlo who thought I was a prostitute, but the trip had moments. You and I woke early in Amsterdam to go to the diamond factory to get Mom a ring. Once there, you pushed me (“Pick one for you and your sister, please, I want you to”), so I picked the smallest, praying it was also the cheapest, but you insisted on a bigger one. We took a boat back to the hotel and I remember your face looking out over the water. I could see all the weight on you. You were dreaming and planning, brimming with if-onlys.

  • • •

  Going up Sixth Avenue in a taxi, your grandson said, “Mommy, aren’t there so many amazing things in the world? Aren’t we so lucky to be alive?” That’s you in him, Daddy. He’s so like you, full of extremes and heavy on the dream space. Both kids put their fists up for each other and I know that would make you happy. I try to teach them pacifism but sometimes it’s only halfhearted. “Lady, this outfit you are running here is a bunch of bull,” you said to that librarian who accused me of lying about how many books I
’d read. “Mean lady, you are the f word,” Will said to the woman in the dog park who called me stupid for leaving the gate open.

  My children may never see me hunched over a checkbook and sense my mounting panic, or come home late and find me in the street armed with a shovel as I take the driver of a car by the neck when liquor is smelled on him. They will watch me make much of their victories and hold a grudge until my last breath if someone treats them cruelly. This is your family I am running here. I can’t take credit for more than remembering to point to you when I do something right and for continuing to put one foot in front of the other when I lose heart.

  We all miss you something fierce, those of us who wouldn’t exist had you not kept walking when an ordinary person would have fallen to his knees. To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.

  Dear Yaqui Indian Boy,

  Where did you go?

  Did you fly away and leave the barrio? Most Yaqui Indians never move away. Hard life had pushed your people to the ghetto of that ghetto where I went so many days after school. I learned your streets from the window of a lowrider, the hydraulics making the car hump the pavement while we listened to Earth, Wind and Fire or the Sugarhill Gang. You must have heard us as we rode by, with Gloria and Alicia shouting, “HOTEL! MOTEL! WHAT YOU GONNA DO TODAY? (SAY WHAT?)” Arturo would drive us. He’d poke Sammy Z in the ribs and say, ai, chécalo, look at those. He’d point to the girls’ asses bobbing up and back to the music while they stuck their heads out the window. The boys had their hair greased back and their chinos on, and the girls shellacked their feathered hair so hard with, like, a half bottle of Final Net each, they said. It would blow up from the wind in two flat pieces like horns, and their jeans? Homegirl could work some camel toe. They knew they were foxy. Those asses would never be so titanic again in their lives, you could serve a whole flan off those culos and it wouldn’t even jiggle. My friend and I would sit between the other girls, embarrassed but thrilled, whispering about Sammy Z while mouthing to each other, Órale vato! Que barrio!, but not loud enough for anyone to hear us.