Samir Khoury

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You have been dead eleven days and you have not gone anywhere.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the tunnel, not the light, not the accounting. Just the yard behind the triple-decker on Waldeck Street, the storm door with the dent your mother put in it with a laundry basket in 1998, and your father standing in the dirt of a hole he has dug in his own back lawn because the ground at the cemetery belongs to the archdiocese and yours would not.

He is thirty-nine. You were twenty-two. You have had a long time — eleven days is very long, held still — to look at him and count how little of that gap there is. When you were nine he was twenty-six and already digging, already coming home with the knees of his pants gone pale with clay. He has never once in your life exercised. He has the soft ordinary body of a man who lifts for pay and not for the mirror, five foot seven and thickening at the middle, arms that will move six tons of earth and could not do a pull-up. You used to be embarrassed by that. You remember being embarrassed by that and you would trade every clean thought you ever had to take it back.

The ring is yours. It came to you out of a box at a shop on Mass Ave that has since closed, and you paid nine dollars for it, and the man behind the counter did not look at you while he took the money. Heavy, ugly, silver gone grey, a face on it worn down to a suggestion. You wore it for three years and it did nothing but be heavy. You wore it the night the fever took you and it was on your hand when they zipped the bag and your father took it off in the kitchen and set it in the ashtray you both used to use for keys.

Now he has it at the tip of his right ring finger and he is looking down at his hand the way he looks at a coffin measurement, checking the fit, and the overcast light comes flat off the vinyl siding and there is no shadow anywhere on him at all.

Say no, you think, with everything you have, which is nothing.

He hesitates. You see it. The finger goes still at the first knuckle and his mouth does something small and his eyes — hazel, your eyes, everybody always said you had his eyes and you hated hearing it and now it is the last true thing in the world — his eyes go over the hole he has dug. Six feet by three. He has dug ten thousand of them and this is the first one he could not get the walls straight on. There is a lip crumbling on the near side. He noticed. He will fix it. He is a man who fixes the lip.

He believes in nothing. That is a fact about him you always envied, the flat clean nothing where other men keep their God. No prayers at your bedside. He held your hand and said your name and that was all he had and he gave you all of it. He is not putting the ring on to reach you. He is not that kind of man. He is putting it on because it is yours, because his hand is thick and it will not come off again easily, because the alternative is a ring in an ashtray and a boy in the ground and a Saturday morning with nothing in it.

The band goes over the knuckle. His fist closes around it.

And you are in.

It is not a door. It is a coat, still warm from him. It is the ache in the low back, four inches lower than you ever felt an ache. It is the taste of the coffee he had at six. It is his left hand at his side with the plain wedding band on it, still, absolutely still — his hands were always still, they never drummed or picked or worried at anything, and you feel that stillness now from the inside and it is not calm, it is the opposite, it is a man holding himself so carefully that nothing moves. Twenty-two years you thought that was peace. It was a grip.

You feel the crest tattooed on his chest under the flannel where the collar gapes, the crest you got matched to his at eighteen without asking, and yours went in the ground with you.

You feel the thing you did not know about. Low, electrical, a hum along the left side of the skull like a bad fluorescent — the epilepsy he carries and never once mentioned, the pills in the cabinet you thought were for his stomach. He has been driving through that his whole adult life. He raised you through it. He never said.

The fist opens on its own. Your father's hand, spreading open in the grey air, dirt in the creases, the ugly ring seated at the base of the finger.

The eyes above it lift, and they are new.

There is no way out of this. You know that immediately and without being told, the way you knew you were dead. No term, no bargain, no door behind you. You have him for good, and *him* is not the right word anymore, because he is not in here with you. You checked. You are checking. You will check for the rest of a life.

You wanted him back. You wanted him back so badly that eleven days of standing in a yard could bend a nine-dollar ring into a hinge, and now you have his hands and his ache and his hum and his wife on the second floor with the radio on, and his other child asleep down the hall, your sister, eight years old, who will come out at noon and say *Baba* and mean it and be wrong.

You look at the hole. The lip is crumbling on the near side.

You pick up the shovel and you fix it, because that is what he would do, and because you have to start somewhere, and because you cannot yet make yourself turn around and look at the house.