Monday lunch

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 Monday lunch 

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I told Uncle Albert. He looked at me and then out the window above the kitchen sink. We were eating soup and sandwiches after my Monday appointment with Dr. Feight: tomato soup and egg-salad sandwiches.

     “The card you showed me from Jack,” I said.* He looked away from what little he could see from the window, the mold growing on the west side of Dennis Day’s house; he looked toward me, but he didn’t look at me. “It was a year old,” I said.

     “Was it?” he asked, but an empty question - he knew it was.

     “Yes,” I said anyway. He took a big bite of sandwich. I ate a couple of spoonsful of soup.

“You . . . ,” I started a sentence I wasn’t sure how I was going to finish, so I stopped for another spoonful of the soup. It was out of a can, but it was good.

     He was chewing as slowly as he could. He swallowed. “What?” he said. “I, what?” Then, he did look at me. “Did you talk to Feight about this?”

     “Yes,” I said.

“What did he say?” Uncle Albert said.

     “He didn’t say anything,” I said. “He almost never says anything,” though sometimes he does.

     “Well, what do you say, then? What do you want to say?”

I wanted to say that I was angry and sad and frustrated and imploding with all of it, the frustration, the sadness, and the anger, that he’d been hearing from Jack for I didn’t know how long and he hadn’t said a word about it. And I wanted to say, “It’s a year old, for God’s sake - have you heard anything since? Why did you show me a card that was a year old?” But:

     “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I want to say.”

The soup wasn’t that good. And the sandwiches weren’t as good as usual. I think I forgot to put pepper in the egg salad.

04.05.18

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 * See here.