he shrugged it off, leaving his father’s memory to lie forever in his own waste.
“When you came along, I promised myself I would be different. I would take care of you,” he said, his voice stronger.
“You have,” I said.
“I swore you would never be hungry. I swore you wouldn’t ever sleep on the floor because there were fewer bugs there than in your bed. You wouldn’t ever see me drunk. You wouldn’t ever wonder if I was coming home. You wouldn’t ever feel my fists or get my boot.”
“And I never did.” He had kept every promise he had made to himself.
“In order to keep those promises, though, I had to provide. You know why money is the root of all evil?”
I shook my head. “Why?”
“Because if you don’t have money, it affects everything else. It’ll drive a man into the ground if he can’t take care of his own. That’s what men were put on earth to do. Protect. Provide. And I decided I could and would do anything to do that. I’m not smart. I’m not skilled. I can’t build or create or repair. After Bo Johnson laid me flat in the ring . . . and damn near killed me, I realized I couldn’t even fight.”
He stood abruptly, as if suddenly it was all too much. He took my plate and scraped the bones into the trash before he repeated the action with his own. I stood as well, clearing what was left on the table. I didn’t press him or ask for the rest of the story. He was stewing, gathering his thoughts. There was more. I didn’t know how we’d jumped from Bo Johnson to lost bouts and a father’s responsibilities, but I had no doubt it was all connected in Pop’s mind.
“I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t even want you to understand. But you gotta know,” my father said. “You gotta know.”
“What do I gotta know?” I asked.
“You gotta know that I loved you. And I tried to do right by you.”
“Pop? What is this all about?” I was so confused. Of course I knew he loved me, although neither of us had ever been good at saying the words.
He waved me away, waved his words away, like he could erase them from the air, erase the emotion from our throats. “Forget about it, kid. I’m getting old. I’m just glad you’re here. Why don’t you play me something? I don’t get to hear you much anymore. Go on. I’ll do that.” He took my empty coffee cup from my hands and set it in the sink with the other dishes. “Go on. Play for me, Benny,” he insisted.
I sat down at the old piano and ran my fingers up and down the keys, reacquainting myself with them. Every piano is different. The tension, the spring, the timbre. It always took a few numbers to feel at home on a new set of keys, but this piano and I were old friends. With my left hand, I played the opening bars of “Habanera” from Carmen, so distinct and low. Dum da DUM dum, dum da DUM dum.
My father smiled. “That’s it. Play that one for your mother.”
I riffed on the melody, not in the mood for the tempo and intensity of Bizet, and “Habanera” turned into something painfully slow and lonely. I didn’t know French, but I knew the story, and it was damned depressing. Carmen ends up dead—stabbed—at the hands of a man she’d teased, taunted, loved, and then rejected. The whole opera could be summed up in the opening lines of “Habanera”: “If you don’t love me, then I love you. If I love you . . . beware.”
I wrote a song, sitting there, and called it “Beware.” Inspired by Carmen. Inspired by my mom. It needed a horn section to bring it to life, and I scribbled out an entire score in the margins of the Sunday crossword puzzle. I played for so long that when I finally looked up from the keys, hours had passed, and Pop had turned on the lamp beside me. The dishes were tidied, and he was asleep in his chair, his hands folded across his stomach. It was dark out. The winter months made the night come early. I needed to wash up and change and retrieve my car before I went to Shimmy’s, but I thought I had time to close my eyes. I was suddenly exhausted, and the refrain of the