it happened, and the neighbors’ windows would light up, slow and weary, like the sighs they were no doubt emitting in their bed- and living rooms. The fights always concluded with my father more amused than angry, delighted at Julia’s easy female temper, and her, livid, slamming things around in the kitchen pretending to be looking for something—but when Thomas was found dead in a flophouse in Oakland when Jackson was eight and James almost seven, it was my father who took Julia to identify the body and bring her glasses of yellowish water as she cataloged the erratic and strange evidence that her children’s father had left behind. Perhaps my father was remembering that it had been Julia who stayed with him the first hour in our house without my mother, who had made him coffee and sensed he didn’t want to talk and instead put on a Neil Young record she knew (somehow) he liked, soft but not so soft he couldn’t hear the generosity of the words: Will I see you give more than I can take? Will I only harvest some?
It was this never-ending series of owe-you-ones that bound them together even beyond the fact of their children’s hips being attached. Because they’d seen each other at their worst, I think, they felt relieved to leave those moments where they were—bury them in the dirt as opposed to making them a foundation. It was beautiful in the sad, secret way illicit affairs are: relationships that choose what to include, that are shaped only by the circumstances the participants experience together. It allowed, from what I can tell, my father to sustain a picture of himself he more or less liked: jaded and cynical but resilient, always willing to tell or hear a good joke. As for Julia, I can’t say exactly what it gave her, only that the times I secretly glimpsed them drinking coffee at our kitchen table, she seemed to hold herself differently, her shoulders lower, and spoke in soft peals I’d never imagined could come from her and found quite lovely.
They had quite a bit in common, given their dead spouses and the children they’d been left to raise alone in a town that had grown to overflow with nuclear families with two Volvos that escorted their sons and daughters to not only baseball but also piano and art lessons. Only my father had learned to laugh at these people, and Julia secretly envied them; she cursed her shotgun wedding to the man who, with the arrival of the second young, grabby boy, ran off quicker than you could say child support.
“Irony” is a word I hesitate to use. My life has been marked, dyed, twisted, by the unexpected or inconvenient, and any safe patterns I could identify would seem forced. In any case, when my father and Julia essentially united after Jackson and I separated, “irony” certainly seemed to be the word the rest of the world wanted to employ. It was something of a concession on both of their parts, but they seemed oddly happy to make it.
Were they dating? I asked. Not exactly. They had simply decided that officially being on the same team seemed to make sense. Julia put her house on the market (it sold in a matter of days) and moved the few doors down into my old bedroom. My father had been diagnosed with emphysema three years before, and the disease was starting to close in. He took the invasion gracefully and with wonder; he was amazed at the ways his body, of which he was so long the master, started submitting to another owner. Julia supervised his breathing exercises, took walks around the block with him, refilled his prescriptions at the pharmacy, grew to love the finicky, aging cat. They cooked elaborate dinners that they ate before the flickering of the Turner Classic Movies channel; she revived my father’s garden while he watched from a chair set up in the sun. They swapped sections of the newspaper over breakfast, they played Scrabble with my father’s house-sized Oxford English Dictionary open and ready. Julia took on the domestic role wholeheartedly as she’d never done before: she sewed new curtains of panels of sheer pastels for the living room, she painted their mailbox yellow, she wore floppy sun hats and made sun tea. Talking to my father on the telephone was like a three-way conversation, him often repeating to Julia what I’d just said, or me waiting