" EXTRACT from: Under Our Roof published by Penguin Random House
" When my husband, PJ, is away, I sleep on his side of the bed, nearer the door, as if to stay at the ready through the night. One weeknight at about two in the morning, my cellphone rang on PJ’s nightstand. I didn’t know the number, but it appeared to be local. For most people, a call in the middle of the night is the reason for anxiety. For a worrier like me, those calls are a different kind of jolt—an excuse to race through every worst-case scenario I can muster. I hesitated. Did I want this surely bad news? Still, I reached for the nightstand and picked up the phone. I worried about all my sons—Pat and Alex included—but Harry, the middle child, was different. Nothing was going well. His hygiene, the state of his room. Most of all, I fretted over the way he’d been changing ever since high school. Six years earlier, Harry had bounced—I mean literally bounced—into St. Joseph’s Preparatory High School in Philadelphia. He was short for his age and young for his grade, yet larger than himself in enthusiasm. At 103 pounds, he went out for the football team as a freshman and made it. Everyone makes it in the first year. But once he got there, Harry became the life and the heart of the team. Then things began to change. Friends changed, and so did his habits. After four years, the boy who’d bounded through the doors of high school nearly had to be dragged across the graduation line. Harry was pale and sickly—his affect flat and tired, his teeth looking lousy. I challenged him: Why so tired all the time? Why couldn’t he get anything done? We sought counselors and expensive testing, desperate to find out what had happened to our joy-filled kid. And Harry and I fought constantly. I would warn him, irrationally, about what would happen next if he didn’t clean up his act.
Tattoos became a thing. He got his first in the months after graduation and hid it under a T-shirt all summer. Something about live today, die tomorrow, with a cross and a crown.
About the tattoo, Harry knew I was not pleased. Yet there was one tattoo—Harry’s second—that I could not object to. I remember him coming into the kitchen one evening to confess that he’d gotten it. “Oh, no, Harry,” I said. To me, it was just further proof, permanently in ink, of Harry’s lost wanderings. But when he removed his shirt, I saw that he had gotten three initials inscribed on his upper back in an ancient, Bible-like font: WRD. Walter Richard Dean, “Wally,” was my uncle and the boys’ great-uncle. A Roman Catholic priest for fifty years, he was my dearest friend and lived with PJ, the boys, and me in his final years. So this was one tattoo—the only one—that I did not argue with him about. Layered over the fatigue and sickness and ink were the stories. One wild story after another told with a skill that would’ve made Harry’s Irish grandfather proud. The police pulling him over. Excuses for this delay here, this loss there; coming home after a semester at the College of Charleston because the place was too cliquey. And the story, years later, of his daughter’s lost baby shower money, $800, evaporated with no explanation. Harry searched his truck and couldn’t find the cash. I insisted he looks one more time. He went out to look and came back crying. I was crying too. When I did Harry’s wash, inevitably a lighter or condom or something equally troubling would bubble up out of his pockets or call my attention as it banged around the dryer. It all comes out in the wash—that’s what I would think as I furiously folded his clothes. Before Harry, I had no idea what that expression meant. Leave it to Harry to show me."
| AUGUS T 202 1 • HOL A SOB E R |
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online