It’s Halloween, my favorite holiday, but I am not up to the task. Frank has a “meeting”; he said he was sorry to miss the trick-or-treaters, and then he laughed and said I never let him answer the door anyway, so I would probably enjoy the solitude. I have left a big basket of candy on the porch with an electric jack-o’-lantern, to give enough light for their coming and going, and have chosen to sit here with just the street light coming in the window. It’s easier than putting on my usual witch garb and cackling through the night, oohing and aahing over the various costumes, especially the little ones’. But it’s easier to just drink a glass of wine or two, and have a cigarette or three or four, and listen to the laughter, the mothers admonishing not to take too much, those who are regulars wondering where I am this year.

Not only did Frank suddenly forget that he had a “meeting”—on a Saturday night, no less—but I also got a note from Jeff today. It seems I am not the only one having trouble communicating with their father. He wrote:

He talks about the Titanic when I want to talk about school and what is happening in MY life. Who gives a shit? It sank. That was then and this is now. He is the iceberg. He is an asshole in the middle of an ice cold sea and it would take more than a cruise liner to chip the surface. You say you’ll talk to him but you haven’t yet, so just forget it. Okay? Just forget it, Mom.

I read his note, and I felt sick, like such a failure, and I thought immediately of a saying about taking an axe to the ice. Something I heard at one of those awful faculty parties I attended with Frank one year or another. One of those where I smiled and was polite and tried to hear something that interested me without drinking too much too fast or chain-smoking, while secretly wishing I could find an escape hatch. I recall that the person who wrote about the axe also wrote about being a cockroach, which is what I feel like tonight, hunkered down in the dark here and dreading the bright light of truth. What breaks the ice?