Free You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon

his father. They would have had a steady, quiet, gently melancholic relationship, Jonah imagined. They wouldn’t have been close, but he would never have felt unloved. Mr. Knotts would have been the kind of father who hovered, awkwardly tender, at the periphery of a son’s life, attentive and formal in a folding chair at a band concert, lingering for a moment before he turned off the light at bedtime, the kind of father who closed his eyelids lightly as he kissed his child’s forehead, the kind of father who would clear his throat often and grow misty-eyed. It would have been, what?,
lasting,
Jonah thought.
    Mr. Knotts watched as Jonah stowed the urn containing his mother’s ashes—her “Cremains,” the man at the funeral home had called them—into the passenger seat of the car. Perhaps Mr. Knotts knew that Jonah had not given his mother a funeral. Who would have come to it, after all? There were no relatives, no friends. There was no reason to waste money on a casket and a gravestone and all the rest that the undertakers had tried to sell him.
    But he couldn’t tell this to Mr. Knotts. “Who doesn’t deserve a funeral?” Mr. Knotts would wonder, though he wouldn’t say it. Mr. Knotts would identify with Jonah’s mother, of course. His eyes would grow gloomy and distant as he reflected upon his own funeral, presided over by his weeping children; his own gravesite, kept neat for years and years by his children and then by his grandchildren. He wouldn’t speak of it, but the sight of the urn created an awkward space in the air into which all of these feelings rushed and solidified.
    “Is that your momma?” Mr. Knotts said gently, and together he and Jonah stared at the urn that had been balanced on the passenger seat.
    “Yes,” Jonah said. And he wanted to come up with some sort of explanation. He wanted to say that she wanted her ashes sprinkled over some beautiful landmark, like the Grand Canyon, or the Atlantic Ocean. But he couldn’t force the lie into his throat.
    “Yes,” Jonah said. “That’s her.”
    “God bless her,” Mr. Knotts said. “Poor woman.”
    “Yes,” Jonah said.
    ——
    In the weeks and months after he arrived in Chicago, Jonah found that he remembered that moment frequently—the two of them, he and Mr. Knotts, standing there looking at the urn, at his packed car at the end of the long gravel drive that led to the now empty house.
    It could have been a nice memory, he thought, a
conclusive
memory:
God bless her, poor woman.
    But then he would also recall the way he’d stopped the car along the side of the road, only a few hours after he’d left Mr. Knotts behind. His heart was beating furiously, and he’d stumbled out of the car with the urn. He’d dumped the contents out into the weeds in the ditch.
    Jesus, he’d think, as he sat in the dining nook of his efficiency, as he walked down a busy Chicago street, as he stood in line at a movie theater. Jesus, why had he done that?
    He didn’t know. Something had come over him, he guessed. A fear, a panic. He had been driving without thinking for a long while, his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes on the white lines on the road, dashes he was feeding into the body of the car like he was playing a video game. And then he had become aware, for the first time, of the music emanating from the radio. It was a wispy, somnambulant rock song, a high-voiced choir of men sighing disconnected phrases: “Time . . . to the sea . . . good-bye my love . . .” and his skin prickled. He was aware of how light-headed he felt.
    The sun came out from the dark clouds with a kind of insistence, almost violent. There were stubble fields lined with barbed-wire fences and telephone poles on both sides of him, and he let the car drift slowly, ten miles per hour, on the berm for a while before he stopped. The tires went kathump, kathump against the uneven gravel shoulder and he thought he might be having a heart attack. There was a soft explosion