Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [188]
By midmorning he’d be done. He’d count how many words he’d gotten and record the number. After each total, whether it was fifteen hundred or fifty, he wrote: Thank you.
My father would then transfer back to his bed. He’d dress in workout clothes he’d tossed there from a drawer, transfer once again down into his chair, an act he did countless times every day and every night, one that required strong upper-body muscles, and he’d put on some Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Waylon Jennings and he’d sing and shadowbox the air, he’d lift light dumbbells, he’d strap his surviving leg to his weight bench and do abdominal crunches till his muscles burned.
Crippled or not, he was still living the rituals he’d established for himself since he was a young man, but what was different was how he was afterward. Gone was that subtle look that his time with you was something to do between writing sessions, that you were a pleasant or unpleasant distraction. Now, when he spoke to me, usually looking up into my face from his chair, his thin hair clean and combed back, his beard nearly white now but trimmed as neatly as it had always been, he looked directly into my eyes, and he did this not just when he was talking, but when I was too, and it made me want to tell him more about myself. It was as if he’d been gone for thirty years and had finally wandered back home, and now was the time to know each other while we could. Now was the time to do things together.
We did, too; for ten years nearly every other Sunday, Pop would host a family potluck dinner at his house and we grown kids and our girlfriends or boyfriends, later our spouses, and then later our kids, would come share an afternoon together, eating chili or stew or fried fish or something from Pop’s grill out back. Jazz or classical would be playing on his stereo, little children running around our feet. Three of them were mine and Fontaine’s, and at age five our oldest, Austin, liked to push Pop in his wheelchair all the way up and down the hall from his bedroom back to the dining room. Sometimes Jeb would sit in the corner and play a piece on his guitar. Somewhere along the way he’d gotten into the New England Conservatory of Music, and he lived in Boston and had a German girlfriend who sang opera. Then more years passed and he was married to Victoria, a pretty young woman he’d met while she was babysitting our two half-sisters, Cadence and Madeleine. If it was a weekend when they weren’t with their mother, then the girls would be there too, sitting on the couch reading books to the younger kids or outside on the swing Jeb had built.
Pop had begun to worry about the possibility of a house fire. If he couldn’t get to the front door and the staggered ramp down to his car, how would he get away? So Jeb and his carpentry partner, Bob, had framed a long deck off the small one in the rear. It ran the entire length of Pop’s wading pool and because of the hill Pop lived on, the end of this new deck was fifteen feet off the ground and they built a square sitting area there with room for a grill. We called it “the Cajun Boardwalk,” a nod to our Louisiana roots we four adult kids had never lived, and every Sunday that we gathered, if the weather was good, just about all of us would end up out there. My mother would come, too. She’d moved up from Florida and now lived with Bruce in the woods of western Massachusetts. Over the years she’d gained a little weight and her hair had begun