letting you go, as if she’d just remembered she was supposed to be somewhere else.
Your daughter, who moments before had introduced herself as Irene, the name you gave her, bends down and asks, “You alright, Mr. Solomon?” You sit up straight, or as straight as an old man with scoliosis and arthritis can, and say, “You can call me Stanford.”
* * *
Now let’s say you are a thirty-seven-year-old home health aide named Irene whose father faked his own death, but you don’t know it yet. Today is the day he will tell you. All you know is that he died when you were very young. You have no memory of him whatsoever. You recognize his face only as a young man in photographs. Though your mother always told you your father was timid and spineless, in one photo you remember a square-jawed man with reddish hair, face lightly freckled, dressed in a police uniform, one hand on his gun, his eyes so astute and focused it felt like they were alive and could see into you. You don’t recognize that face when you meet the old man who is your new client, for his red hair is white, and as far as you know, aging after death is impossible.
You do think it’s strange that this man called the agency and asked for you by name. He claimed another client recommended you, which you find unlikely. You do your job, but you don’t make much effort to be nice. You’ve lived in America for seven years and the only reason you came here at all, the only reason you agreed to do this miserable job in the U.S., was to get away from your family. Your brother and your mother. It seems ironic that you spend your time caring for other people’s parents, when you couldn’t stand the thought of doing so for your own.
Your husband left you and went back to Jamaica after the first month in Miami, but you stayed because you have two children who you’d sworn to keep away from the cancer that raised you. Instead you moved to Brooklyn where you had a childhood friend to help you. But Vera, your mother, died just a year later. Sometimes you regret not waiting. You would at least have inherited her house if you’d stayed in Jamaica. Now you are living in a basement apartment with your two kids, working nine hours a day, six days a week, changing colostomy bags and spoon-feeding strangers to stay afloat.
You misunderstand the look the old man gives you when you introduce yourself. You worry that he’s another pervert, that he’ll sneak pinches when your back is turned or when you’re on your knees, bent over cleaning. It happens so often you’re not even surprised anymore. You are grateful that he’s in a wheelchair—at least he can’t sneak up on you—although it means you’ll probably have to help him to the toilet. You might have to pull down his pants for him, which can lead to all kinds of undesirable propositions.
You are scrutinizing his features, speculating what kind of man you have in front of you, when the image of your father, dressed in a tweed suit, too hot for the Caribbean, that he had specially made for his journey away from you, flashes in your mind, but you don’t know why. It is the only photo you have of the two of you. He is standing under a mango tree with you in his arms. That tree became your favorite growing up. That tree became your father. Whenever you sat under that tree, you asked for things, and even though you rarely got them, you still imagined he could hear you.
It’s always been clear to you that your father’s death was the dividing line between hell and heaven. Even if you do not remember much about those days or years before he left, you know you had seen your mother smile, you carry the physical memory of being picked up and held, you swear there was laughter. Before he died, you didn’t know what it meant to be mishandled, to be jerked, to be shoved, to be slapped, to be pinched or even choked by her. You know because you remember the first time Vera did each of these things to you. Each time, afterward, you sat under the mango tree and asked the man in the picture who you thought was dead and therefore held some supernatural power to please