A Delivery

Abstract

A Delivery Nicole Cuffy (bio) THE CALL His face now is rough, his forehead lined, and there is an indigo ring around his deep brown irises; his fingers have curled like the roots of an oak tree, his moustache and the minute stubble on his chin have dulled to silver. When she looks at him now, she sees two men: the warm, familiar face from childhood, jovial and fresh, and the new face, no less warm, but, at times, only just recognizable. Like looking at an archetype, the type of wizened black man photographers love to capture in close-up, black-and-white portraits. The other day, he called her, and she got the sense that he had nothing and everything to say. That he had called her to see if he could, if she would answer, expecting nothing, because it was him, her father. She'd been sitting at the window that looked out into the sad, shared patio, with the broken flagstones dyed, by rain and time, some shade between brown and green and gray, and the wrought iron gate with the bent spike that made it somehow piteous, like a knight with a soft silver sword. When you were sad, looking out there made you sadder, but in a way that was strangely beautiful, the way that your own blood could have a slightly satisfying taste when you sucked it from a fresh wound. Hearing his voice, she'd begun to think about her own mortality, and his. How time passed beneath your notice, even though your entire life was about time. And she missed him, though they weren't very far away from each other. That wasn't it, wasn't how she missed him. She missed the version of him who'd wake her up in the middle of the night, peeking into her room in his white underwear, checking. And she'd pretend to be asleep but keep one eye slightly open because his dark presence in the darkness of her doorway blocked out the darkness that she feared. That was it, really. He stood between her and fear. And now that they were so much older, she was more aware than ever that time had been passing all along and was closer than ever to taking him, and she didn't know what she was going to do without him. For a brief moment during that call she wished that they were the type to say I love you. They never had been, though they found other ways of saying it that weren't words, weren't speaking. He asked her to drive out with him to deliver the secretary desk—her mother never liked to go to these things. He didn't need her there, of course; these deliveries were routine for him. What he didn't say was that he wanted her there. A little drive, like those late-night [End Page 178] drives they used to take when she was a colicky baby. He wouldn't say he just missed her. It wasn't their way. When she said yes, she hoped it was enough, that he understood that it was yes, and thank you, and all the other things. ROAD TRIP It took her a train, two buses, and nearly two hours to get from her ivy-choked Greenwich Village apartment to her parents' White Plains colonial, with its canary yellow dining room and mismatched linoleum tiles in the kitchen. Now they are driving with the windows open and the air conditioning on. She knows he hates this—he is viscerally opposed to waste in any form—but she also knows he is tolerating it because she can't stand the harshness of air conditioning alone. She has one hand out the window, and the wind that smacks her palm is damp, assertively hot. It is record-breakingly warm, and she is trying not to mention global warming because if she does, her father will accuse her of "getting all worked up." And it's not that he doesn't believe in global warming, but that he's more afraid of her anxiety about it than he is of...