LES DERNIÈRES PAROLES DE MON PÈRE, L’ALCOOLIQUE

Christmas Eve, 2015. I’m watching the Popeyes Bahamas Bullshit Bowl—Western Michigan v. Middle Tennessee—when I answer a two-one-nine call (Indiana) thinking it’s one of my in-laws. It isn’t. On the line is a mysterious man who says he works with my father. Doesn’t say cop. Doesn’t say attorney. Just says he knows the judge and I had been estranged for years and hadn’t spoken since the death of his third wife. Mystery Man also knows I am the judge’s eldest son, one of three. Says he tried the other two already, sorry about the hour. He stammers. Says my father isn’t well. Says he wears the same jeans and dirty gray Papa Hemingway sweatshirt under his judicial robes every day, and that’s a no-no on the bench. Maybe it’s the sore foot that’s been bothering him? Says the old man’s probably sleeping on a sofa, too sore to climb stairs. In any case, his docket’s a mess and people are talking. Absenteeism. Sloppy judgments. The mayor, a political enemy, wants him out and pronto. Mystery Man suggests the possibility of people going through the old man’s trash looking for scandal. Abolishing his court is on the table. Can I do something? I can tell Mystery Man’s at the end of his rope. He cares about my father for some reason, and that touches me. I lie and say I’ll do my best.

God damn it. Find me two weeks later across a table from my father and the Hatchet, who requested the meeting. Someone had introduced the concept of “blood relation” to her at school, and now she’s obsessed with her Papa Grandpa. At eight, she’s obsessed. She knows her abuela is a blood relation. More confusing is Grandma Jill. She’s a blood relation but Grandpa Bob is not (Grandpa Bob was Papa Grandpa’s college roommate, and that’s a story). Papa Grandpa is who the Hatchet wants to see. I will not stand in the way of my daughter wanting to know her grandfather, so I tell His Honor we’re moving to France in two weeks and his granddaughter wants to grab a burger. Can we arrange a time? We meet at a diner in Hammond, Indiana. The old man, just twenty-four years my senior, looks ancient—eighty at least. And frail. And mean. He’s so mean to the waitress. During dinner, I keep directing the conversation to the little girl coloring and playing sweetly with paper dollies beside him, but he continues with what he wants to talk about, which is how stupid the waitress is and the Law.

Moving Day arrives five days after the diner. A black car will come for us and the pets at two, so we spend our last Chicago morning on last-minute tasks. Cleaning. Packing. Double-checking. The Hatchet, fragile in her what-is-happening-to-everything-I-know-now state, frets about the security of her toys and babies, so Say dispatches me to the Macy’s (née Marshall Field’s) downtown for one last carry-on suitcase. When I return: pandemonium. The black car driver, no doubt trying to hustle an extra fare, arrives two hours early and spooks the cat, which disappears. We have one-way tickets to France and a missing family member. The Hatchet sobs. Say panics. The driver scowls. We move the dog and suitcases to the car, leaving the house completely bare but for a mattress on the floor. Inside the empty apartment, I start checking stupid places. The washer. The icebox. The oven. I hear shouting for the cat outside as I systematically search the house room-by-room, shutting the doors of cleared spaces behind me. Say demands to know why I’m not helping outside. The Hatchet wails. The driver, an asshole, paces. I’m convinced the cat hasn’t left, so I open the closed doors and start clearing again. And again. And again one more time. My phone blows up. Texts from Say. I need you outside! I need you outside NOW!!! The driver joins in. Sir, I’m charging waiting time. Sir, it’s forty minutes to the airport. The flight! I start to sweat. I feel an urgent need to piss. As I wash my hands in the hallway bath, I get one more stupid idea. I open the vanity’s bottom drawer and find the cat. I call the girls, retrieve the soft-sided under-seat carrier from the car, and prepare the medication the vet prescribed for the flight. The Hatchet covers the frightened creature with tearful kisses, then I pry the animal’s jaw and pill her. She sinks her claws into my forearm, drawing blood. Fuck! Foam and spit. A labored, gurgled groan. Nighty-night.

That cat comes to in a taxi on the way from Charles de Gaulle. Say’s employer had arranged a short-term rental in the heart of the Paris spiral, and one of her new coworkers meets us at the door when we arrive. We get a tutorial on the induction stove and cookware, then the coworker leaves. Say and I put the Hatchet to bed, and before we go to bed ourselves, Say suggests a quick walk for the dog. I get him harnessed up and grab the new set of keys, which feel as foreign as everything else around me. Outside, I light a smoke, then the dog hunches over, surprising me. I thought he’d lift his leg, for sure, but when did he get a chance to eat in the fourteen hours since I last saw him go? I don’t have poop bags, so I scan the ground for newspaper, discarded wrappers, something. A man yells. He points at the dog shit and gestures to me. I have no French. Impotent. I tear the foil from my cigarette pack, but it’s too small. Surely, he can see it’s too small! The man rages. Yells and cursing now. Fuck! Foam and spit. I start checking stupid places. My pants. My shirt. My wallet. I pull out two bills, a ten and a five—my last two American. The man blanches as I bend over. There. See? All clean.

Vacances de Printemps. Although we arrive in February, homesick Hatchet convinces Say to visit Indiana over spring break in April. I stay home with the pets. An old college buddy will be passing through town on his way to a conference in Germany, and I’m looking forward to the visit. Except it’s not to be. Two days after the girls depart, I receive a Facebook message from my aunt: Your father’s in the hospital, and it’s serious. I stall for three days hoping to see my friend, but finally arrange a last-minute bereavement flight to Chicago thanks to Say’s work. Business class, even—my first time. Before I go, I call my father and speak for less than a minute. I tell him I’m on my way from Paris, then he ends the call abruptly. I have to go now, he tells me. My lawyers are here.

I arrive in Indiana in time to see the old man die. He had lost consciousness while I was in the air, but in his last moments had apparently been lucid enough to express regret and heartbreak over the death of his favorite wife. I’m informed of this when I finally reach the hospital along with the fact that I get to decide when to take the old man off life support. The hospital chaplain provides a copy of the judge’s living will to consider. It’s immaculate. Without flaw. Prose that will cut your eye out. Motherfucker even made it funny. The chaplain smiles. He wants to use the document as an example for other families—with my permission, of course. Of course—and could I get a minute, padre? Of course. I sit alone with the document and the gravity of my decision. A waste of time, really. Unlike his love, my father’s final wishes read clear.

After his memorial service, to which my mother wears white, my brothers and I sort the judge’s stuff, most of it garbage, and divvy up everything that isn’t covered in his will. My brothers let me keep two items from his nightstand: the Montblanc Meisterstück Classique he received upon his graduation from law school at forty (the age I am when I move to France), because they thought it was a worthless ballpoint taken from a bank, and a gold class ring, because he and I graduated from the same university. From cleaning the judge’s duplex, I’m also able to pick details of the last days before his demise. Somehow, despite the alcoholic neuropathy crippling his ability to walk, he was still ascending the fifteen steps to his bedroom. Even in the end, when his feet were the size of footballs. Such agony, that journey. Daggers, every step. And when he summited the staircase? A dozen paces more. I’m certain he didn’t crawl. No, he willed himself, step by painful step, to the easy chair beside his bed, where he could uncork a magnum of California cabernet (backup bourbon on the bureau—I see your moves, old man) and fall asleep masturbating to a collection of boy-girl/girl-girl porn from a starlet who so startlingly mirrors my mother at twenty I gasp and weep the instant I make the connection. The girl also resembles Darlene, my stepmother, and Jenny, my stepmother, and a good portion of the long parade of lady friends he’d trot before us between his many nuptials. But the third wife? Love of his life? The one he mourned on his deathbed? Well, she wasn’t like that petite young thing at all.