The ringing phone began to sound like a mad song before someone mercifully answered. Far down the hall, I was in my dorm room that night with a coed, trying to stay focused on her bare skin. Moments later, a rap on my door, a curious pause, and then the knotensified to a thundering, which scared the pirl so that she nearly fell off of me.
"What is it? Im busy. t you see the ie on the doorknob?"
"Henry Day?" Oher side of the door, a voice cracked and trembled. "Its your mother oelephone."
"Tell her Im out."
The voice lowered an octave. "Im really sorry, Henry, but you o take this call."
I pulled on pants and a sweater, opehe door, and brushed past the boy, who was staring at the floor. "Someoerve died."
It was my father. My mother mentiohe car, so naturally, in my shock, I assumed there had been an act. Upourning home, I learhe real story through a word here, raised eyebrows, and innuendo. He had shot himself in the head, sitting in the car at a stoplight not four blocks away from the college. There was no note, nothing explained. Only my name and dorm room number on the back of a business card tucked in a cigarette pack with one remaining Camel.
I spent the days before the funeral trying to make sense of the suicide. Sihat awful m when he saw something in the yard, he drank more heavily, though alcoholics, in my experience, prefer the long and slow pour rather than the quid irreversible bang. It wasnt the drink that killed him, but something else. While he may have had suspis, he could not have figured out the truth about me. My deceptiooo careful and clever, yet in my infrequent enters with the man since leaving for college, he had acted cold, distant, and unyielding. Some private demons plagued him, but I felt no passion. With one bullet, he had abandoned my mother and sisters, and I could never five him. Those few days leading up to the funeral, and the service itself, hardened my opinion that his selfishness had rotted our family to the roots.
With good grace, my mother, more fused than distraught, bore the brunt of making arras. She vihe local priest, no doubt abetted by her weekly tributions over many years, to allow my father to be buried in the churchs graveyard despite the suicide. There could be no Mass, of course, and for this she bore some rese, but her anger shielded her from other emotions. The twins, now fourteen, were more proo tears, and at the funeral home they keened like two banshees over the closed coffin. I would not cry for him. He was not my father, after all, and ing as it did in the sprier of my sophomore year, his death was supremely ill-timed. I cursed the fair weather of the day we buried him, and a throng of people who came from miles around to pay their respects astonished me.
As was the in our toalked from the mortuary to the church along the length of Main Street. A bright new hearse crawled ahead of us, and a ce of more than a hundred people trailed behind. My mother and sisters and I led the grim parade.
"Who are all these people?" I whispered to my mother.
She looked straight ahead and spoke in a loud, clear voice. "Your father had many friends. From the army, from his job, people he helped along the way. You only knew part of the story. Theres more to a salmon than the fin."
In the shade of new leaves, we put him in the ground and covered him with dirt. Robins and thrushes sang in the bushes. Behind her black veil, my mother