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By Root 1238 0

good at was observing, explaining and rendering opinion; they became historians, lawyers, writers and clergy. They were good at being fussy, particularly about the past; like their forefathers, they tended to see the world as degenerating the further it got from the plain and simple. They were America’s anchors, its grown-ups, its chaperones on the great global field trip into the future. You could almost feel bad for them, trying to be the voice of restraint in “the country of the future,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. Here they were in the most relentlessly forward-lurching nation the world has ever seen, trying to remind people that it doesn’t always get better—sometimes it gets worse. By the same token, it’s hard not to see them as the people in the movie theater shushing everyone else, even though the movie is Cannonball Run II.

You can get lost in thoughts like these while stocking cat food, but the good thing is that you’re accomplishing something at the same time, and if it’s a good night, when you’re done the hours have flown by and it’s time to go home.

SOMEONE SLIPS INTO the store today while I’m back in the grocery shelves eating a bag of chips. Hearing street noise come through the door, I turn, but whoever it was seems to have poked their head in and left, as customers sometimes do. (What are they looking for that they don’t see in one split second?) It’s been a slow afternoon. I go back to the chips—sampling the inventory is one of my other ways of passing time—until I realize, some ten minutes later, that whoever came in is still here and has been in the store the whole time.

It’s my father-in-law, Edward, a ghost if ever there was one. He’s an air-conditioner and refrigerator repairman.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I exclaim upon locating him in the stockroom. He’s lying flat on his back with his entire left arm up inside one of the KustomKools, as if he’s delivering its baby. He smiles wanly and declines to shake my hand, apparently because while my hands are covered with junk food crumbs, his are covered with engine grease.

“You want me to turn off the refrigerator?” I ask. There are spinning fans in there and red-hot coils, but he wants me to leave it on, because he would rather risk losing a fingertip than raise the temperature of the bottled water a couple of degrees.

When he’s finished Edward comes up to the counter with his dinner, a box of powdered doughnuts and a foot-long barbecue-flavor Slim Jim, which, like me, he has taken from the shelves. Unlike me, he insists on paying, with a twenty that he refuses to accept the change from.

“So where are you coming from?” I ask him.

But Edward is already gone, apologizing profusely as he backs through the door. “In a hurry” he says, giving me the both-hands-on-the-steering-wheel signal and an enthusiastic grease-covered thumbs-up. Then he gets in his brick-colored Econovan, which always looks as if it’s got barbells or rocks inside, and drives off squeakily toward Manhattan.

And thus concludes one of the most extensive verbal interactions I have had with my father-in-law in months. And I live with the man.

Before we got married Gab told me her father was an enigma.

“No one in this family knows what he does all day, where he goes, who he sees, how he makes money. All they know is that he works,” she said. However, within a few years I felt like I had a handle on my father-in-law. Edward is an artist trapped in an air-conditioner repairman’s body. His medium is music, specifically sentimental old Korean war ballads, which sound like Bing Crosby crossed with a samurai movie sound track. He loves to sing. He will sing at night after he comes home and has eaten a bowl of ramen while sitting on the floor. He will sing on Sundays, after he deliberately locks his cell phone in the Econovan so he can’t hear his clients’ calls, while lounging around the house in a pair of oversized flannel pajamas. He will sing in the car, since that’s where he spends most of his time, and hone his technique by listening to tape recordings of himself that he makes