Heft (24 page)

“And what about your parents? Do you miss them?” I asked her, to change the subject.

“No,” she said, “they’re being stupid. They don’t like Junior, so.”

“And Junior is—back in the picture?” I asked her.

“
No,
crazy,” said Yolanda. “But. When we got back together for a minute they kicked me out.”

She looked down at her belly pointedly. “And I’m
pregnant.
”

“Terrible,” I said.

She sighed loudly. “OK,” she said.

“OK?”

“OK, I’m gonna get a glass of milk.”

“Good,” I said.

While she was in the kitchen I let down my guard for a moment and opened my heart and let in a great deal of grief that has tagged along beside me for most of my life, and I considered the fact that the men who come to excavate my house upon receiving complaints from the neighbors will find a fat old corpse who has no relations and nothing but a pile of papers to tell them: this was a human being and this was a man with a story.

What Yolanda brought back out was two pieces of chocolate cake that she had found in my refrigerator and two tall glasses of whole milk. She had put all of these things on a tray & she was balancing the tray on her stomach and grinning.

“Look at this,” she said. “Built-in shelf.”

I ate the cake as daintily as I could, but she had brought out dessert forks, and they always look ridiculous in my paws.

Her eyes were heavy by the time she finished.

“Goodnight again,” she said, yawning, and again I told her goodnight, & then I got up and paced for a moment, which for me meant once to the door and once back.

• • •

W
hen I wake up the flashlight’s batteries have died and I
have a plan. It is seven in the morning. I crawl out from under the bed and my spine is as stiff as a broom handle and I’m covered in dust bunnies. In daylight the house looks even worse, blue and abandoned.

I keep the blanket tight around me. I walk into the hallway and confront the closed door to her room. At least the note is gone. A scrap of it is stuck to a piece of tape, and I take it off very gently before turning the door handle.

I have to be very brave to do this. In my mind she will still be there, my mother, turned away from me on the bed, and in my mind I will fall to my knees and shout again. It happens in my mind.

But when I open the door nothing happens. The bedcovers are only a little messed up from where she was lying on top of it, but the bed is made. I see the little bit of vomit on her pillow and look away. I see the Cuba libre, partially frozen in its glass.

She’s gone.

I haven’t really been in here since I was a kid. I stopped coming in here when she got sick. She mostly didn’t come in here either: she mostly stayed on the couch. It used to be a nice room, the only room in the house with a view of the Hudson over the tops of some roofs, but she let it get messy over the years, piles of shit everywhere, laundry everywhere. There’s a little white desk against a wall where she used to sit to pay the bills. I sit down at her chair—it has a crocheted blue cushion on it that her mother made—and open each of the drawers in turn. In the first one there is garbage, mostly. Receipts and stuff. Pen caps, loose paper clips. One picture of her and Dee’s mother Rhonda when they were in their early teens. They are wearing bright red lipstick and pretending to sing into spoons.

In the second drawer, files. I look through all of them, every one in turn, but all they have in them is tax returns from every year up to 2007. In 2007 she made 38,000 dollars total.

In the bottom drawer is a shoebox. Here we go, I think. I take it out. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I take the lid off. There’s a brochure for the University of Phoenix,
An Online Learning Community!
Another for the Community College of Yonkers. Another for the Continuing Education programs of the CUNY system. Most of them look pretty new. I take them out and put them on the desk. Deeper into the box there are older ones. A 2003–2004 course catalogue for the New School. Flipping through it I see that she circled, in pencil, certain courses.
Contemporary Irish Literature.
World Literature I.
Introduction to Psychology.

My whole life these things have been coming for her in the mail. College catalogues, brochures, envelopes with purple writing on them encouraging her to get an accelerated degree
in 2.5 years!
She went to college for one semester. I can’t remember which college, which at this moment makes me very upset. I did not pay attention to her because she talked about it so much, her time at school—she would say it like that,
school,
as if she were so familiar with college that she could afford to be casual about it
—
and how it was the best thing she ever did for herself. I know it was in the city because she said so often that it was in the city. But I do not know which one it was and now I have no one to ask.

She was obsessed with college. She was obsessed with educated people. Unhealthily. I wonder for the first time if she dropped out because of me, because I was born. She never said she did. She could have gone back. I’m not prepared to think about it. I put the lid back on the box and leave it there on her desk. Halfheartedly I rifle through a few more drawers, but they are mostly filled with clothes and trinkets. Nothing I need.

Last I open a box on the floor next to the desk and inside is a folder. On it is written
Kel’s 529 Plan.
There are a few statements in it. Apparently there is a college savings account for me someplace that has three hundred and twelve dollars in it. The last deposit was made in 1996.

The other stuff in the box is material from colleges trying to recruit me. That she was well enough to collect these things and put them in here is a shock to me. Some of them are from this year. It brings to me again a vision of what she did during the day, while I was at school and at practice. I shut this thought off.

I walk down the stairs to the first floor and then I open the door to the basement, where there are boxes and boxes of my mother’s stuff that she never looked at or opened.

There is the little carpeted place. There, the couch facing the broken TV. I choose one box and drag it over to this area, and I sit on the couch and break open the cardboard, which is so old and stiff that it cracks like a wafer.

I can see my breath down here. It’s as cold as outside. Weak light comes in through two windows at the top of the concrete basement wall.

The first box has only old clothes in it: bright purples and pinks and greens, colors that my mother must have worn when she was my age. There is a smell of perfume in them and I put them quickly away.

The next box I go through has books in it and nothing more. An anthology of world literature. A collection of some of Shakespeare’s plays. My mother. At college.

I open the third. In it are baby clothes and a rattle and a spoon and bibs. Mine. Some pacifiers, even. A lock of blond hair in a plastic baggie.

I dig down in. Under a baby blanket is a manila envelope, brittle with age, sealed shut. I think it’s what I have been looking for. I open it with my heart thumping.

There are documents in there.

There’s a birth certificate. Mine.

Under Child’s Name it says:
Arthur Turner Keller.

Under Mother’s Maiden Name it says:
Charlene Louise Turner.

Under Father’s Name it says:
Francis Patrick Keller.

I sit.

I hold the thing in my hands. It is relief that I feel. No Arthur Opp. And new information about the man I’ve always called father, whose first name, as it turns out, is
Francis.
I only knew him as another Kel Keller.
Kel
was what she called him. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know when my mother lied: on the birth certificate, or in her final letter to me. At least once, she was lying.

After the other Kel Keller left, from time to time she tried to call me by my real name.
Arthur,
she’d say, when I was misbehaving or on any serious occasion. But I wouldn’t have it. She used to tell me this story all the time as an example of my stubbornness.
You’d point at yourself when you were four years old,
she used to say,
and go,
Kel! Kel!
So I stopped trying.

All of these facts are floating around in my head. All of these memories.

But at least I have new information to use. Francis Patrick. His real name is
Francis Patrick Keller.
I’d only ever searched for Kel Keller.

I stand up and carry the certificate all the way up to my room. I sit at the table that serves as a desk and I open my old laptop, a hand-me-down from one of Dr. Greene’s sons, and turn it on, praying that it’s still charged.

Forty-three percent, it says. Enough.

I can still steal the neighbors’ network. It’s called
The Sappienzas
and I know them as a tight little family, happy and Italian, and I feel good about taking from them.

I open Google. It’s slow.

Growing up, when I searched for
Kel Keller
and only got myself, it was like an echo. It was like sending out a hello and only hearing an echo.

Francis Keller,
I tell myself.
Type it in.

Type it in.

Francis Keller.

There is a Dr. Francis Keller from Texas. There is a 20-year-old Francis Keller on MySpace. A musician.

They are not my father.

I type in
Francis Keller Arizona.

Nothing. Back.

On the third page there is a link to a hardware store in Queens. No explanation. I click it, and it takes me to a page with a fat smiling man with one arm wrapped around a trophy and another wrapped around a kid. His son, probably.
Connelly’s Hardware,
it says.
Family-owned and operated since 1983.

Farther down the page there are photographs of happy customers interacting with happy employees. Even farther down there are pictures of a softball game. Team Connelly’s is playing Team Mike’s Auto Parts. All of the pictures have captions identifying the players.

The very last photograph is a group of men in a bar. They are standing next to each other and each one is holding a beer. Under the picture it says
Jim Laughlin, Chuck Caliendo, Francis Keller, and Pete Howell after the game.

I can’t see their faces well. It’s dark in the picture. But the man they call Francis Keller looks like he could be the same man in all of my photo albums. He’s wearing a cap. He’s skinny like my dad was in the pictures I have of him. He’s got an arm around the shoulders of the fat man next to him. He’s grinning, I can see that.

He’s wearing a Connelly’s Hardware T-shirt.

I’m still wearing the same clothes I was wearing yesterday. I haven’t showered in almost a week. I’m still wrapped in a blanket and shuddering with cold. I drag the tips of my fingers across my face and feel nothing.

I turn off the computer. I stand up and my knees feel wobbly and wrong. It feels like days since I’ve eaten a meal.

I make myself walk. Into the hallway. Down the stairs. I shed my blankets at the base of them.

I check for my wallet in my back pocket. I open it: no cash. I need gas for the car. It’s part of my plan.

I have been in charge of my mother’s money since she got sick. She gave me her ATM card so that I could walk to the machine and get whatever I needed, whatever we needed. Her disability checks went right into her bank account. The food stamps arrived in the mail. I got used to spending almost nothing on us. I got used to earning money in other ways. I’d deal a little weed when things got very bad. It was easy in Pells. I could get it easy in Yonkers, and then just charge a little more for my friends at PLHS. But doing this made me scared because of baseball. And all I spent money on was the electricity bill, the gas bill, gas for the car. She spent money on her rum and her junk food, the only stuff she ever left the house for. And to feed myself I lived off others, off of my friends and their parents. The credit card that Trevor or Kramer or Cossy would slap down at the end of a meal out—we went to one diner a lot, we went to Applebee’s for a joke sometimes—became something we didn’t acknowledge. My mother’s disability checks were enough.

But now that she’s—

What will happen.

My cell phone rang over and over again yesterday and I never answered and I won’t listen to the messages either. Two calls were from her social worker. I won’t listen.

I drive to the gas station on the corner, walk inside the little store.

Frank the owner raises his eyebrows at me.

Where you been? he asks, and I shrug and say nothing and pray that he won’t ask the next question he always asks—
How’s your mother?

He doesn’t. He leaves me alone. Maybe he’s heard from the neighbors. I stick my ATM card—
her
ATM card—into the machine, not looking at the name in raised letters on the front of it, and take a deep breath.

I know exactly how much is in there since I posted bail. But a large part of me hopes for a miracle.

I request twenty.

The machine spits out a bill and a receipt. On the receipt it says there are eleven dollars and sixteen cents left in her account.

I give the twenty to Frank, put some gas in the car—squeezing the trigger over and over again, waiting for the last drop to fall out—and then get in and go.

Historians debate about the meaning of the word
Arizona.
It may mean The Good Oak Tree. It may mean Place of the Little Spring. It may mean nothing.

In my boy-imagination there were campfires in a great open desert and there were cowboys around the fire and my father was one. Kel Keller, like me. He was one of the cowboys, his horse was tethered to something behind him, he was singing old songs with the other cowboys and thinking of his faraway son. In my boy-imagination he got drunk sometimes and told his pals about the kid he’d had and left. The desert was cold at night. In my imagination. He wore a horse blanket. In the daytime it was so hot that he saw things. Saw me.