17. About Moving

Don’t feel like going home after my workout in Jim’s Gym just now, and as the library’s open late again this evening, I think I’ll drop in and take a load off.
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The place is empty save for the bespectacled librarian sitting behind the check-out desk over by the exit. The lenses in her tortoise-rimmed glasses are so thick that I think of an owl every time I look at her. An owl with cataracts. I wonder how she can see at all. The tip of her long, pointed nose goes back and forth across the pages of the book she’s holding close to her face. A bony finger, cold as a popsicle, traces a line up my back. It sounds weird, I know, but I’d bet my last buck that she isn’t reading with her eyes. It’s her nose: she’s smelling the words. Sniffing out meaning.

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I turn away, disturbed, and listen to the silence shining out like a flashlight in reverse, lighting up the nothing that’s there in the darkness. I’m slowly coming to realise that this moving to Ireland business is for real. My life is about to change again, in oh so many ways, my independence seems to vanish in the haze. Beyond all recognition.
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Again.
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Help!
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Was I just innocently thinking Dad was working his jaw for the exercise? Yes, and why not? Lost count long ago of all the times he’s said we were going to move ‘back home’. Been saying it as far back as memory goes. But this time, the signs are screaming his seriousness. Already the house is on the market, and just yesterday he gave his boss the bullet. I thought he’d just won the lottery he was so excited.
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‘I just walked right up to the old bastard and told him he was fired!’ Dad wailed. ‘Then I turned my back, stuck out my butt, and sashayed out of his office with this stapled to the back of my jacket!’ He smiled electrically, holding a sprig of dead mistletoe up for my inspection. ‘I’m going to frame it,’ he said.
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We passed each other on the path between the frontdoor and the gardengate this afternoon when I got back from a run. I saw the For Sale sign for the first time. I gazed at it, knocked off balance, and noticed that it was listing to one side. I pointed this out to Dad.
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‘The sign’s about to fall over,’ I said.
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He stopped in his tracks and turned his attention to the wooden stake in earnest consideration. ‘Yep.’ He scratched his head. ‘That’s a bad sign.’

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I thought I heard him snigger under his breath as he walked away. I don’t know where he went… but he’s still gone.

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I don’t believe in shrinks, but – and as much as I loathe to say it and all – I think Dad should be seeing one. I try to talk to him every now and then, whenever he’s around that is, which isn’t much thesedays, and when I ask where he’s going to or coming from, he just says things like taking care of business, tying up loose ends, this and that, you know.

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But that’s just it: I don’t know. Sometimes I want to talk to him about stuff, but serendipitous synchronicity never seems to click in. And, to be honest, I’d be afraid of making him cry. Don’t misread me, I mean that in a selfish way: there’s nothing that’d trigger me quicker than to see tears rolling down his face.
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I cried once already, but I didn’t get it all out. There’s more, I know. I don’t think I’m ready yet. To cry. I don’t think Dad’s ready yet. To talk.

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And there’s nothing but time between us.