“You shouldn’t forget your father like that,” he said seriously.
“I hadn’t meant to.”
He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a large envelope. “Here, get your papers together in this and mail it tonight.”
I sat down on a cushion and arranged the papers in the envelope, then wrote a short note of apology.
“Do you ever send your papers home?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No one to send them to.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.” It was a simple statement, and he flipped a page of his book as he said it.
“Frank, you never told me!”
“Didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t! I can’t believe you never mentioned it.”
“I would have gotten around to it.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. It’s not a subject I particularly enjoy.”
“But you’ll tell me about it sometime, won’t you?”
“Sometime.”
I always did my studying at the kitchen table so we would be out of each other’s way. But that night I couldn’t concentrate. I could hear him flipping pages in the other room, and I tried to imagine what I would be like if both my parents were dead. Then I realized something else. Frank had told me he was the youngest of nine kids, yet so far as I knew, he had never got a phone call or a letter from any of them during the three months we had been living together. I sat staring at the flecks in the Formica tabletop and wondered how I could have been so blind—and selfish. Although he had chosen to say nothing about his family, why hadn’t it occurred to me to ask about them?
I went to bed and lay there waiting for him. I kept telling myself it was ridiculous to be jealous over something I didn’t know. Yes, I was jealous of withheld information. I wanted to know everything that had ever happened to him. After all, the death of one’s parents was not a casual scrap of information.
I didn’t move when he got into bed. With a short groan he stretched out on his back. We had lived together long enough to have established communication in the dark; I knew that still as I was, he knew I was wide awake and waiting.
“My father was killed in a bar when I was eighteen. My mother died of pneumonia four years ago.” He said it quickly, dispassionately, then sighed heavily to signal me he wanted to sleep.
“Killed? How?”
“He was shot.”
“Why?”
“It was a holdup. When the bartender wouldn’t surrender the money, they shot up the place. My father was hit by accident, along with two other men.”
I was about to say “How did you feel?” but realized how ridiculous it would sound. Instead, I asked how often he saw his brothers and sisters.
“I don’t see them at all. Not since my mother died.”
“Why not?”
“Our house was so small, we spent half our time trying to get away from each other.”