Departures

My uncle never did a bad thing to anybody, but one day while he was on his front porch eating an ice cream cone, two men came upon him, pushed him inside, tied his hands and feet, robbed his house, and shot him in the head. He was in a coma for a week. I was nine years old and my father took me to see him that first Saturday he was in the hospital. I remember his forehead was wrapped up and someone had placed a straw hat on top of his head. On the television mounted to the far wall there was a hefty Italian woman stirring a pot of tomato sauce.

“How can he watch television when he’s asleep?” I asked my father.

We heard the toilet flush and out walked Tutti, my uncle’s girlfriend.

“How’s he look?” she said, gesturing to the hat.

“Like a dead farmer,” my father said.

“Whoa, I just had déjà vu,” Tutti said, her hand at her chest.

“Any news?” my father asked.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She could tell my father was unhappy about the hat. “This is just to keep me entertained. I’ve been here for hours. I didn’t mean anything by it.” She took the hat off his head and put it over the lamp on the nightstand.

“What are you two doing this afternoon?” she asked.

“We didn’t have anything planned other than to visit the hospital. Maybe we’ll go down to the beach for a little while. Right, bud?”

My father patted me on the back.

“I would just love it if I could come with you.”

“What if he wakes up?” I said.

“He won’t wake up while we’re at the beach,” Tutti said.

Tutti was from Ottawa. She didn’t live with my uncle. She had a condo in Naples, Florida, provided for her by another lover, a wealthy man who sold Mercedes-Benzes and turned over houses that had been foreclosed on. She was in her mid-forties and had been married to her high school boyfriend, who managed a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. She still saw him, but, according to my father, whose openness about that time, years later, provides most of the exposition here, wanted to experience much more than that man could give. She flew to Canada in the summers and stayed with him for a month or two, and then flew to Boston to be with my uncle in his little cottage near the beach on Cape Cod. Her lover in Florida unknowingly paid for everything. Tutti’s cover was that she was one of the top interior decorators in the world. She had phony business cards and a client list of rich-sounding names. I thought she was beautiful, but I didn’t have much to compare her to. My mother had died when I was three. She was an artist. Her paintings hung in our house. There is one of a cathedral in Mexico that I particularly like and that I have with me still. The cathedral is off to the side of a dirt road. The viewer stands on the road, considering whether or not to enter the cathedral. She died from a brain embolism. My father and I were asleep when it happened. “She died dreaming,” my father used to say. In photographs she was still and easy to forget. But Tutti moved. Her breasts swung. Her skin changed colors. Her hair glowed in sunlight.

by Patrick Dacey, Guernica |  Read more:

Image from Flickr via anyjazz65