My son’s cough is red, noisy, and loose, a clattering wagon on its jagged way down, with me all ears to the racheting sound of my child-self in the bed next to Dad, who is tossing and threatening. “Stop coughing,” Dad says. “You’ll wake the dead.” Bat flap and smoke in the dark of his voice make me hold back this need, hold back from Dad, whose fleshy skull clenches every raw cough I cough. I want to be still. I fix on the chafed, pitted folds at his neck with a promise to sleep, as if my quiet could ease and uncoil this turned-away man, but I can’t and it’s out, rude air through the pipes, a dry sound full of rust. Dad says, “I’m too old for this.” He says, “Oblige me,” and I watch the words turn in this room he calls his own. Dad’s porch, sleeping headquarters, off-limits. How did I get here, close enough to smell him? That’s what I want to know: How did I?Rolled, damp toweling—the kind Dad sometimes swipes at me—he smells like that. He smells like shaving water, where he floats his brush and lets me blow apart the suds before he snaps a towel, says, “Out.
