The Wooden Sea

“Please—have a seat.” I pointed to the stool next to mine.

That suit. I remembered so well the navy blue suit he was wearing.

“I just walked in and when I saw you I couldn’t believe it. Because I have a son, he’s seventeen? And well, you look exactly like what I think he’ll look like when he gets older. It’s unca

I poured sugar into the coffee. “He must be a handsome boy.”

My father was a very uptight guy and incapable of saying anything fu

“Sit down before you collapse.” I almost, almost ended that sentence with, “Dad.”

He sat and I slid him my glass of water. He slurped a swallow and shook his head. “You took me off guard. I’m Tom McCabe “

When he put his hand out to shake I said, “Bill Clinton.”

“Nice to meet you, Bill. But I can’t help thinking I should call you Fra

I nodded, smiled, sipped the coffee, and almost choked. “Sorry I can’t help you there, Tom. I’m Bill, married to a woman named Hillary and we have a daughter named Chelsea.”

He drank more water. “Yes, but the likeness is still amazing. Do you mind if I ask what you do?”

Looking down at the counter, I nodded mysteriously and said after a pause “Politics.”

“Really?” He was impressed. My father loved politics. He often read to my mother from the New York Times about the bullshit going on in Washington. Invariably he had a comment on it. “That’s just amazing.” He chuckled and rubbed his face hard with both of his hands. “My son will be lucky if he stays out of jail. Fra

It felt like he’d stabbed me in the heart. But why? I ran the jail now! All these years later I knew I’d succeeded and that before he died, Tom McCabe had been very proud of me. I’d become the kind of upstanding citizen he’d always hoped for. So why did his remark hurt me? Simple: Because no matter how old you are, the relationship with your parents is like a dog being walked on one of those retractable leashes. The older we get, the further we wander. Years later we’re so far away that we forget we’re on their line. Predictably, though, we do reach the end, or they press the rewind button for some reason, and a second later we’re back at their side with a bad case of whiplash and once again hoping for their approval. No matter how strong or distant we are, Mom and Dad still have that power over us and never lose it.

“Maybe you’re being too hard on your kid, Tom.” I couldn’t look at him.

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew my Fra

“But maybe as a kid I was enough like him to know what I’m saying.”

“Bill—”

“Here you go.” Alice put my plate down with a thump. “Anydiin? else you’d like?”

The eggs’ weak yellow contrasted the bark-brown bacon. Haute cuisine a la Scrappy.

I looked at her and smiled. She didn’t smile back. “Anything wrong?”

“Yes, I asked for some hash browns with it.”

“No you didn’t.”

My father piped right up. “Yes he did. I heard him order hash browns.”

Alice frowned and put a hand on her hip that in no uncertain terms said, “You wa

Waving away the potatoes I said, “It doesn’t matter. They’ll just make me fat. But do you mind if I ask you a question?”

Her hand didn’t come off her hip. “That depends. What?”

“Do you know this man’s son? Do you know Fra

Her whole face slowly lifted into a great wide smile. “Sure I know Fra

“Nice? How? In what way?”

“Don’t you know him? You kinda look like him.” She checked Dad to see if he agreed.

“We were talking about him and wondered what other people who know him think.”

“I told you—Fra

“So that’s all, he’s just nice?”

The young waitress squinted across the room to see what her old man was doing. He was still nose-deep in his toilet paper, which gave her the green light to keep talking to us.

“When Fra

Bull’s-eye! Come on, Alice—tell Tom the story.

It looked like she was going to leave it at that so I goaded her on. “Nice? Like what?”

“Like me and my boyfriend have troubles, right? Like we’re not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. Well, one night in here we had this bad fight—” Again she looked up to see what the boss was doing. “And I really lost it. Luckily the place was pretty empty so when I started crying like a hysteric, nobody but Fra

I gave a satisfied hum. “Good story, Alice. Could I have my hash browns now?”

The warmth in her eyes snapped shut like sprung mousetraps. “What did you say?”

Leaning forward, I spoke loud enough so that Scrappy could have heard even if he’d been dead. “I said I want the hash browns you haven’t brought me yet, dear.”

“Wutz da problem?” said a voice like an incoming bazooka shell lobbed at us from behind the cash register. It launched our waitress double time toward getting my potatoes.

In the meantime I began eating the unwholesome food in front of me and it tasted great. After a few mouthfuls, I pointed the fork at my father and said, “Don’t always judge a thug by his cover, Tom. Sometime if you sneak into his room at night, you’ll probably catch him reading under the blankets with a flashlight.”

He gri

We were quiet then but it didn’t matter because it was enough to be with my old man again, drinking weak coffee at Scrappy’s Diner. And morbid as it sounds, I appreciated him so much more knowing what life was like when he was gone. However long this lasted, this dream or nightmare or whatever it was, there was no other place on earth I wanted to be. Sitting at the counter in this dump, convincing my skeptical father his son had good stuff in him and would eventually prevail.

Although more people came and left, the diner stayed relatively quiet. We didn’t talk much while I ate. Alice brought my potatoes but sailed them down the counter at me as if they were a Frisbee. Dad ordered a blueberry muffin and a glass of orange juice from another waitress. When they came he ate very quickly. I was pushing a last piece of toast around the bare plate to sop up whatever last tasties were left. When I was done I looked to the left and saw her coming toward us.

Her name was Miss Garretson. Victoria Garretson. She taught music at Crane’s View Elementary School. Always a little hefty and rosy-cheeked, she had a 24/7 unflagging enthusiasm for her subject and job that invariably turned most of her students off from the force of its wind machine. For three years she had been my music teacher. You couldn’t hate her because kids only hate teachers who literally hurt or diminish them in some ugly way. We just couldn’t stand Miss Garretson’s arm-waving, cheek-puffing glee as she conducted us through Stephen Foster songs, or tingled triangles, shook the maracas. Thanks to her, if I never hear or see another maraca in my life that’ll be just fine. What did she look like? Like a youngish woman who sold bed sheets in a department store and talked about them for too long. Like a secretary in a failing real estate office. She looked like a picture of someone’s aunt.