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By Root 969 0

to do with what was on my kitchen floor. That floor and its name were mysterious and inexplicable, like love itself, and my heart continued to grow, testing the limits of its chambers. I bent to kiss the floor, put my lips right on the cool, cool tile. You are mine. That was my very thought, to the tile. You are mine, and I love you. But would the tile still love me back after I told it the truth about my past? I could feel the tile shrink from my lips at the very thought. Would my family not do the same? How could they not? Oh, I was afraid, not of one thing, but of everything, even though I'd been full of courage and determination not a minute earlier. I was even afraid of the adobe tile, wanted to get away from it as fast as possible before it rejected me completely. I wiped my lip prints off the tile and got up from my hands and knees just as my daughter, Katherine, walked into the kitchen.

Katherine was eight now, tall and bony, the kind of girl her mother had been ― the kind of girl who in adolescence lived in overalls as she made her trip from tomboyishness to beauty. She'd learned from some television show or her friends to greet people not in the conventional fashion but by saying, "Hey-low," and she said it now, to me, in the kitchen, and I wanted to say back, Oh, dear heart, my first born, I have to tell you something, and you might hate me for it, but even if you do, will you at least promise to never say "Hey-low" again? Instead, I asked, "Where's your mother?"

"She's upstairs, working out." It was that time of day. Anne Marie would be upstairs in our bedroom, in her exercise outfit, all spandex and white strips of flesh and hair piled high and beaded sweat on her upper lip, watching television and pedaling the hell out of her stationary bike. At times I wondered how much longer it would stay stationary if she kept pedaling it that hard. My heart took a sad tumble at the thought of telling her about my true self; and then, since I'm not afraid of the big questions, I wondered if she would have been happier with someone else, someone who wasn't a bumbler like me. There had been no short age of bumbling in our time together. For instance, there was the time when we had dinner with a guy I worked with and his wife, and we got around to talking about Jews, or the Jewish religion at least, and Anne Marie asked the woman (she was an American) if she was Jewish, and she wasn't, and then I said to the guy I worked with, "I know you're not." I said this because he was German, actually from Germany ― his name was Hans ― the implication being that since he was a German he must be a Nazi. Anne Marie pointed this out later on. As I told her, this wasn't my intention, but our guests may have taken it that way: they left in a big hurry, even before dessert was served. After they left, Anne Marie got exasperated with me ― exasperation, that testy cousin of resignation, which is what Anne Marie seemed to feel about me most of the time. I apologized to her. But in my defense, guess what: I found out later that the guy wasn't. Jewish, that is.

But I suppose that wasn't the point. Was Anne Marie happy? Had I ever made her happy? Or did I only make her busy: running the kids here and there, going to work, doing the things that needed to be done around the house that I didn't do ― which (except for the lawn and some bedtime TV watching with the kids) was pretty much everything ― and cleaning up my accidents, so many of them that she didn't believe they were accidents anymore? I was one of the things that kept her busy, all right, me and her stationary bike. Did she recently seem less miserable and weepy than she'd been because she was happy or busy? Did I make her happy, or just busy? Or was there a difference?

"Earth to Dad," Katherine said. She was tall enough to reach up and knock on my head, as if checking to see if I were home, and she did just that, striking me on the forehead, but softly, so that it barely hurt and only for a second. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," I said. "What's your brother doing?"

"He's watching TV