It arrived in a padded envelope in June: a cassette tape, no case, FOR MY SON in ballpoint on the label, and a note from her saying he’d recorded it in a motel in Flagstaff and made her promise not to send it while he was alive. It took me three weeks to find something that would play it. What’s on it is forty minutes of a man clearing his throat and starting sentences over. The part that matters comes about nine minutes in, when he says he’s thought about that driveway every day since 1984, and that he needs me to understand he didn’t mean it as a job — he meant it as an apology he didn’t have the words for, and it came out as an order because that was the only register he had.
He said he’d been twenty-nine and he’d been drinking and he’d already decided he was the worst thing in that house, and that leaving felt like removing a hazard. He said that on the drive out of state he replayed what he’d said to me and knew immediately it was the wrong thing, and that he got as far as a gas station in Indiana before he decided a man who came back after saying that would only make it worse. Then he said the sentence I’ve listened to maybe forty times: I gave you a job so you’d have something to hold instead of me. He said he’d known what he was doing. He said it was the most cowardly kind thing he ever did, and that he’d hoped I’d put it down at eighteen, and that when his wife told him people don’t put those things down he’d had to leave the room.
I was fifty when I heard it and I had a wife in the kitchen and a daughter at university and a back that hurts from carrying furniture up other people’s stairs for a living. I have never once let anyone else pick up the heavy end. My wife had been telling me for nineteen years that I do not know how to be helped, and I’d been treating it as a compliment about my character. I sat on the garage floor with a tape player and understood that the shape of my entire adult life was set by nine seconds in a driveway from a man who was drunk and frightened and gone by the time the tape ran out.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that he apologized to a recorder in a motel room in Flagstaff instead of a phone. I’m angry about it on the days I’m not grateful. What I did was play the tape for my mother, who is eighty-one and forgets most things now but not that Tuesday, and she listened with her hands in her lap and at the end she said, he was always going to say the wrong thing, that was his whole way. Then she said thank you for the shopping lists, which she has never said in forty-one years. I have started, badly and late, letting my wife carry things. She says I stand up about half as often now. It’s the only progress I’ve got and I’m taking it.
