The phone rang. I knew that it was Roger even before my mother’s voice jumped. The game clock ran down. I watched my mother make eye contact with my father across the room and saw him nod slightly. She signaled for me to come to the phone. I did but I didn’t want to talk to Roger.
He was calling from a bar in Reno, he explained, saying that he’d thought about me the whole game. In the background, I could hear music and a woman calling his name and laughing loudly. We talked for a few minutes, but mostly it was him rehashing the highlights with forced enthusiasm. Across the room, I could see Theismann being interviewed, sweat pouring down his face, a sparkling white SuperBowl Champions cap sitting jauntily on his head. I passed the phone back to my mother and ran back into the living room, sliding into position on the couch.
The next time I saw Roger was Christmas Eve of 1990, when he arrived in a taxi and rang our doorbell like a stranger. It took a second to recognize him. His black hair had turned gray, like my mother’s, and it was well cut. For the first time, I noticed that his left ear stuck out. There were other changes: twenty pounds and a two-inch scar under his right eye. He wore a gray wool overcoat and lined black leather gloves. He carried a caramel-colored leather duffel and a slim silver briefcase.
I was seventeen then and had just been accepted into Yale. My parents couldn’t afford the tuition and fought about it frequently, my mother arguing for them to re-mortgage the house, my father insisting I stay in state. I was preoccupied by this and by the pressing, and somehow not contradictory, questions of whether to have sex with Peter and whether to tell Keisha that I was in love with her.
Roger and I stood in the living room, crowded by piles of presents and a tree weighed down by handmade ornaments. We fell into an easy conversation. That night, he and my mother stayed up late at the kitchen table. She and I got up early the next morning and took a bottle of aftershave from my father’s stack of gifts and a pack of wool socks from my brother’s, readdressing the cards to Roger. My mother raced around the kitchen pulling together a gift basket from the contents of our pantry—an old, unopened bottle of maple syrup, a can of smoked almonds, a box of Darjeeling tea. What the hell is he going to do with maple syrup? she muttered. But she couldn’t help herself and so arranged and then rearranged these items in a wicker basket she’d found in the basement.
That night, Roger and I smoked up in my backyard. I pretended I’d done it before, but when I started to hack, he handed me his beer and said, easy there. He leaned back on his heels and closed his eyes, his head bowed as if he was praying. Behind us, my parents’ house glowed and to the north Durham’s smokestacks and sedate skyline were visible. Standing next to him in the quiet yard, I felt like an adult. He told me about meeting a CIA spook in Panama, about flying first class and sitting next to Joe Thiesmann on a flight to LA. He was wearing his SuperBowl ring and a gold bracelet, he said, shaking his head. Whatever else you do, promise me you’ll stay away from dudes who wear jewelry, he said. That was the last conversation we ever had.
When my mom leaned out the kitchen door to call us in for dinner, she smelled the pot. I was exiled to my room and then grounded for two weeks. Roger called a cab before my parents could tell him to leave. A month later he was arrested in a federal bust and sentenced to prison in Morganton, a few hours west of Durham. My mother visited him on the third Saturday of each month as if they had a custody agreement. She brought him books from the ten page reading list he’d typed out for her. He liked Hemingway, Cheever, Denis Johnson, John Grisham. It was in prison that he converted, the preferred term now for testing positive, as if someone has become a believer rather than a carrier.
Not until my graduation from medical school did my mother tell me that the contents of that silver briefcase—and not a second mortgage—had paid for my first two years of college. They’d paid taxes on it, she insisted. The details were fuzzy.
We are like most families I know, which means that we’re scattered now. My parents, just a year away from retiring, have already purchased the RV that they plan to tour the country in. My brother is married and has a two-year old son. They live in a condo in the Atlanta suburbs, close to his wife’s family. He works for a landscaping company and, once a month, djs at a downtown bar. We talk every few weeks and they’re coming to visit next month. This is not the life I would have imagined for him, which is different than saying it is not the life that I wanted for him. For years, I confused the two, as if these conditions were indistinguishable.
Roger has been dead for a year now. He overdosed near the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park. He easily could have been one of my patients, but I didn’t know he was in the city until my mother called with the news of his death. Emily was out of town and I took a cab from the hospital to the city morgue. An intern escorted me to the viewing room.
He was wrapped in a white sheet and laid out on a steel table. I pulled the sheet down, trying to see his body not as a patient’s but as my own flesh and blood. My mother’s jaw line. My grandfather’s nose. The track marks. Dirt under his nails. The tattoos—the two I’d seen as a child, and another one low on his hip, of a heart, the name Angela in loopy cursive running across it. I nodded and was escorted back out.
By then, he’d been out jail for a few years. Between the time of his release and his death, he was an erratic, fleeting ghost. A year would go by without a call and then he’d be at my parents’ doorstep, either flush or broke, sober or high, healthy or off his meds. You never know which Roger is going to show up, my mother would say in lieu of actually describing her broken heart.
I flew with his body back to North Carolina two days later. Emily wanted to go with me, but I told her she didn’t need to. I meant it and I didn’t. Later, she told me this was the first weekend she spent with the tycoon. My parents got security passes so they could meet me at the gate at Raleigh/Durham. The three of us stood at the window and watched the baggage handlers unload his coffin from the rear of the plane as if it was any other kind of freight. We buried him at a cemetery in Durham. My parents bought their own plots there years ago and insisted on showing them to my brother and me that day, weirdly proud of themselves for such clear-sighted acceptance of their own mortality.
Keisha came to the funeral and afterward, she and I had drinks at new bar in downtown Durham. We talked about her husband and about Emily and she told me that she’d recently enlisted in the National Guard. When she said she was ready to go to Iraq if she got called up, I recognized the look in her eyes as the same one I’d seen on her wedding day. She drove me back to my parent’s house like we were eighteen again, and we sat in her darkened car for a few minutes with the radio on. When she reached for me, I kissed her and for twenty seconds it was as if we were catapulted into a parallel universe in which all the things that keep us apart didn’t matter. Then I pulled back and got out of the car.
This afternoon, I hauled ass to leave the hospital early so I could get home to change and shower before meeting Emily. It meant unloading a few patients on the interns and rushing through their evaluations. Danger Mouse, who yesterday called me a prick when he thought I was out of earshot, got a deserved poor.
She’d asked me to meet her at a new café on Valencia, a place where we had no history. It was nearly empty when I arrived. Emily showed up ten minutes late, wearing skinny jeans with a white tank and a white leather belt. Her hair was pulled back and she had on fire engine red lipstick. She ordered a decaf coffee, sat across from me and tapped her index finger on the wooden table. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
“You look skinny,” she said. “Are you eating?”
I figured I had exactly one chance. “Look, Emily—”
“Have you noticed how Obama always