After Lydia Davis
1.
Every time his father spoke, he had questions. Primarily, which parts of the stories were true and which were false? A narrative based on a true story is a wonderful promise for people who believe in Jesus or Tom Hanks, but he was less interested in this muddled middle ground. He wanted verifiable truth or delicious lies, and to know the difference. There is infinite combinatorial explosion when multiple people tell a story and infinite doubt when only one person does. Like, for instance, the story of his father’s father walking into a bar where his father’s mother sat with her boyfriend. The boyfriend’s name happened to be Joe, so his father’s father played a song on the jukebox, Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),”—which begins with the phrase Goodbye, Joe, you gotta go—and hovered over their table with a giant shit-eating grin on his face, and said, Well, Joe, looks like you gotta go. Although his father’s mother, like Hank Williams, died of a rare cancer at age twenty-nine, before the legend reached his young ears, before she could wave her hand—blithely as she does in those Super 8 home movies he restored and digitized—to dismiss the bloviating of her men. Oh, dear, oh, dear, he imagines she might have told him, if she’d had the chance, that she had replied: I’d half given up on you by that point. You were late is what you were. So late you almost missed me.
2.
After his father’s mother died, his father and his father’s brothers told his father’s father, for the first time, about when they were teenagers and one of his father’s brothers found his father’s father’s gun and, playing at violence, nearly shot his father with it. He described the moment before he was nearly shot through the eye by saying, You know, I could see that barrel. You probably think I’m crazy, but I could see it pulsing, and I just knew to duck. There are more stories like this: near accidents, actual accidents with near fatalities. They reveal to him the unlikeliness of his very existence. At his father’s father’s funeral, his father remained stoic. Afterwards, his father and his father’s brother told stories, old ones: the RV his father’s father had driven as his daily vehicle, which he turned over in a ditch one night, drunk, then enlisted the help of a local farmer to turn back onto its wheels by tractor and chain, by which point he had sobered up, so he finished driving home. And the bottle of Jack Daniels in his father’s father’s desk, the last of many bottles discovered by his colleagues, the one that finally got him fired, two months before he was to retire with a full pension.
3.
Two weeks after the burial, when he emerges from his basement room to make a sandwich, he finds his father weeping on the couch while watching a football game. Before he can offer any words of comfort, his father wipes the tears from his cheeks. I’m fine, he says. Don’t you dare worry about me. You need anything? Your mother cut up some watermelon from the garden earlier; you should go try a wedge; it is absolutely exquisite.