Free After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey Page B

block. And there was the Monte
     Carlo. That was during high school, the one I crashed. Twice. In six months.
    Finally, she speaks. “Want to see Talbott’s?”
    “What’s that?”
    “A bar up near Evanston. Dad went there during college and sometimes with the guys
     from the paper.”
    We get to the Evanston border near the Howard El stop.
    “There used to be an alley around here,” she says.
    She scans the street.
    “I puked in it once.” She pauses. “Not like I was drunk. I’d gone to the Cubs game
     with Dad and some friends, and I was pregnant with your brother and I was sitting
     in the sun and at some point I said I needed to go home. Dad stayed, and I rode the
     El home—we were living up here—and when I got off, I went into that alley and puked.”
    Suffer in silence. In solitude. In the shadows. Don’t let your weakness be seen. And
     later, maybe, tell a story for laughs. Maybe I’m more her son than his.
    She can’t find Talbott’s either.
    “There used to be a bartender there, Jack Gannon? He was nice. I wonder what happened
     to him.”
    We drive toward the city limits. The sun is bright and hard and I roll down my window,
     let some fresh air in.
    She points to a storefront, a used-furniture store.
    “That was my Laundromat when we were first married. Our apartment was around this
     corner. But you’ve seen that.”
    “I’d see it again.”
    “Really?”
    She pulls up in front of a small apartment building.
    “Which one was it?”
    “The second floor, near the door. See?”
    “Uh-huh,” I say, but I’m not sure. “How long were you here?”
    “A year or two.”
    She eases away from the curb.
    #
    “So who is alive from back then?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “His buddies from back then. The newspaper guys you all went drinking with. People
     I can talk to.”
    “So many of those guys are dead, Mike. Every time I open the Trib or Sun-Times, I see an obit for them. A lot of guys who smoked and drank and beat themselves up.”
    “Someone must be left.”
    “Well, there’s Wiley. Roy Wiley. And Jim Strong, too. Everyone else . . . I think
     they’re dead.” She pauses. “Can you believe that?”
    #
    On our way home, she says, “There’s one more place we can see. Only if you want.”
    “What’s that?”
    “We could go to the cemetery.”
    “That’d be good,” I say.
    I can count on one hand the number of times my mother and I have been to his grave.
     One, the funeral. Two, I was nine and the three of us were on our way home from seeing
     a movie just up the road about people trapped on a sinking ship. The Poseidon Adventure. I hated when we had to go to that theater. Always passing by the cemetery. His cemetery.
     I lived in dread that she’d pull the wheel left and spin us into the cemetery: “What
     do you say we go see Dad? We got some time to kill before the movie.”
    Happened only once.
    She makes the left now, through the green wrought-iron gates. Maryhill Cemetery.
    Part of me can’t believe she wants to do this—see him. But the other part of me has
     one thought: She’s not going to know the way to his grave. She’s been here three times
     in forty years.
    We’re silent. The Buick rolling slowly through the graveyard.
    When she took us here after The Poseidon Adventure, somehow I found the courage to ask her why she buried our father at Maryhill. There
     were cemeteries in our own town. She told me, “He and I always said we wanted to be
     in one of those cemeteries where there’s not all that junk and decorations. Lots of
     cemeteries, they’re full of plastic flowers and gaudy tombstones. So Polacky. I liked
     this place because all you get is a headstone, flush to the ground. Nothing marring
     the horizon. It looks like you’re in a big park.”
    From somewhere I cannot see, the distant drone of a lawn mower and, closer, a cicada’s
     desperate ratcheting.
    I bolt my eyes straight ahead. If she’s going to miss the fork in the road, I