Joe's Black T-Shirt by Joe Schwartz Page B

far from a calorie conscious meal, but it was certainly food for the soul. The comfort of each bite more pleasing than the last.
    After supper, he had a cigarette. The smoke helped digest the rich foods and made room for desert. Homemade Brown Betty buried under vanilla ice cream.
    “Your father used to smoke. Did you know that?”
    “No,” Mike said honestly surprised. He never knew of Father having any vices outside of working too much.
    “Before you were born, him and his brothers would get together every Sunday. They were all married by then too. We wives would come together in the kitchen frying up chicken and drinking schnapps. The men would be out in the field, shooting targets off the fence line, in between drinks of mason-jar liquor. By the time supper was ready, the whole gang of us were in one hell of a great mood. It would be well after midnight before we would get to bed.”
    Mike listened serenely to the story. He never thought much about his parents as people. The idea that they were young once was intriguing.
    “As soon as I found out I was pregnant with you, I took the pledge. Your father, the consummate gentleman, jumped on the wagon right along with me. Nine months later, you were the center of the universe to us. It wasn’t until your first birthday either of us realized we hadn’t had a drop in nearly two years. I guess we lost our taste for it. Daddy, though, loved those cigarettes. He got the habit in the service. When we met up, everybody smoked except for me, but it never bothered me one way or another. It was when you were five he quit. Seems you wanted to be like him so bad that you took to picking his butts out of the ashtray, pretending to smoke. That broke his heart.”
    It made Mike think as he crushed out his cigarette. He had the habit and couldn’t conceive life without them. The idea that he had been unwittingly imitating his father made him smile. It was weird, especially at a time like this he thought, the things children found in common with their parents.
“He must’ve gained forty pounds quitting, but he did it. I thought his new pot-belly was sexy.”
Mike laughed out loud more from embarrassment than humor.
“Jesus, Mike,” Mother said as her jovial mood turned sullen, “I am going to miss that man so much.”
    He leapt from around the table and he held his weeping mother’s head against his chest. Doing his best to comfort her, he couldn’t keep back his own tears.
    “Me, too,” he whispered resting his cheek on top his mother’s head.
     
     
    ***
     
     
    Father was resting comfortably as the new nurse came in tonight. She was much taller and thinner than the other one, but they had identical smiles. Lips pressed together, raised slightly at the corners, and completely anonymous regarding emotion. It was a smile that said nothing, yet somehow reassured family members.
    His uncle seemed more tired tonight. His usual lively banter had taken a more somber appeal, like jokes without punch lines. Father had experienced a couple of serious tachycardia incidents on his shift. The closeness of his brother’s waning mortality touched a deeply impacted nerve in the man.
    So far tonight on Mike’s shift, all was quiet. The steady rhythm of breathing, the regular measurement of heartbeats accented by the chirps of the ever-watchful equipment was almost lulling. It was business as usual and he could have not been more grateful.
    At a quarter of five, Father came awake with a yawn. A rested man, seemingly invigorated by a good night’s sleep, but groggy absent his ritual coffee. Using a Post-It note to bookmark his place, Mike smiled, glad to see the man he remembered.
“Morning, Dad,” Mike said. “How do you feel?”
“How do I feel,” he said reiterating the question as philosophy. “I feel sick to my stomach.”
“I’ll ring the nurse. It’s probably the new medicine.”
“You got an answer for everything, don’t ya?”
The statement made Mike cringe.
    “You