Patricia Gaffney by Mad Dash Page A

that’s all this is.”
    “No, that’s not all this is.”
    “Eighteenth Street, the Korean guy. Now I have to go to bed, I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Hang up,” I say, so he’ll know I’m not hanging up on him. A long time ago we promised each other we would never, ever do that.
    “Look,” he says, “I’ll be in the office all day tomorrow. Call me. We can have dinner. Here, not out—I’ll make beef Stroganoff.”
    It’s all he knows how to make. “What did you have for dinner tonight?” I picture him pouring spoiled milk over a bowl of Cheerios. Can he even make a salad?
    “I went out. I had dinner out.”
    “By yourself?” No, I don’t want to know. “We can have dinner,” I say, “but I don’t know when. Not tomorrow. I don’t know when. Tomorrow’s going to be another long day for me. We’ll set something up. Maybe Christmas Eve.”
    “ Christmas Eve ?”
    “I don’t know. Yes, maybe. Okay, signing off. Good night, Andrew. Hang up,” I say, and hang up.
    Well, that accomplished nothing. There are good, sound, solid reasons for what I’ve done, I just don’t know what they are. That is, I don’t know how to express them. It’s like when I try to argue politics with him. I always lose because he knows more and he argues better, not because he’s right and I’m wrong. I wish I could organize my grievances, all the second -to-last straws—the dog was the last straw—and make Andrew shut up through a long, eloquent, uninterrupted presentation. And be convinced at the end, say, “Oh, I see. Yes, obviously, you’re absolutely right.”
    That won’t happen, so my next-best course is to stay out of his way. Dinner—I don’t think so, not yet. I don’t want to normalize things, pour oil on the hinges so they don’t squeak anymore. There’s something the matter with the whole door.
    How humbling. I see Andrew is not the only one who’s horrible at analogies.
     

    andrew

     

    four

    I t was Wolfie, the boy from the next block, who pointed out to Andrew that his shoes didn’t match. “Yo,” Wolfie greeted him on a frosty Thursday morning as Andrew was unlocking his car, preparing to drive to school. “Whassup with your shoes, man. Where your ol’ lady at? She let you go out like that?”
    The incident unnerved him, especially since it was the kind of thing much more likely to happen to his old lady than to him. He went back in the house and changed his shoes—one dark-brown brogan in place of one black one; not that alarming; could happen to anyone—and went on to work.
    Then he forgot about a history department meeting. Tim Meese stuck his head in the door to his office. “Where were you?” Andrew all but slapped his forehead. “I forgot!” Tim was as amazed as he was. Faculty meetings were skull-crushingly boring and frustrating wastes of time, but Andrew never missed them, at least not by accident.
    A little later, Mrs. Melman, his next-door neighbor, called to say that the key wasn’t in the mailbox, so she couldn’t get in the house to let Hobbes out, a favor she’d been doing for him since Dash left on the days when he had a late class. The key, the key…it took him too long to remember: It must be in the pocket of his sweatpants, where he must’ve slipped it instead of in the mailbox after his morning jog. More absentmindedness, but still, nothing to worry about. Just because his father was going senile didn’t mean he was.
    Then, proving things could happen in fours in one day as easily as threes, his car sputtered out of gas at a red light on Sixteenth Street. Evening rush hour; honking horns; the humiliating push from good Samaritans; a ten-block walk, round-trip, for gas in a freezing wind. What the hell? The last time he ran out of gas he was sixteen years old.
    Unbelievably, Wolfie was loitering in front of the house when he got home. He was bouncing the same basketball he’d been bouncing this morning, but he couldn’t have been there all day; he