Holding On

~ 1 ~

During the first few months of college, I'd say my mother called me three or four times a week to talk about nothing at all. She'd ask me if I'd done my laundry, or if I needed money, or if I'd talked to any girls yet, which of course I hadn't, didn't, and hadn't, respectively. "Do you suffer a lack of interest?" she'd say, to which I'd reply “Stop reading Jane Eyre.”

During the spring of my second year, the phone calls dropped off significantly, but the quality of their content improved in dramatic fashion.

“You remember the drug store on the corner of that street…and the…?” She’d begin.

“Yes,” I’d say.

“Well, it burned down,” she’d say.

“Uh, huh.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well guess what they found!”

“Who?”

“The firefighters!”

And then that would be my cue to sigh because my mom can’t tell a story to save her life. I pull the phone away from my ear to do it, though. “What did the firefighters find, mom.” I’d say.

“Skulls.” she’d say.

“What?”

“Skulls! Human skulls!”

“I—I heard you. Were there people in there when it caught fire?”

“Nope,” she’d say, excited and a little smug despite the macabre of it all.

“So…” I’d say, and huff into the microphone this time. “I don’t get it. What?”

“Nobody died, Jason.”

(like that helps) “Yeah, wait—“

“At least not in the fire, anyway. That old drug store’s been shuttered for years! You remember!”

(I don’t)

“Nobody’s been inside that thing for half a century—since your grandfather was alive.”

At this point I’d be shaking my head and shrugging, speechless—probably unsure if I’m intrigued or annoyed. Entertained, at least, but…come on. “What do you think that was about?” I’d say.

“You can’t venture a guess?” she’d say.

“Mom!”

“Oh you’re no fun.”

Then there’d be a pause.

There was always a pause.

“Mom I have to go to class,” I’d say.

“Alright,” she’d say.

“I love you, mom.”

“I love you too, Jason,” she’d say, and phone calls would go like that.

There were a handful more, of similar type and variety, and I’m certain she made up some of the wild stories that came my way that year…but there were two I know she didn’t. “That old man on Cherry Road died” was one and “Jason, the leaves are falling” was the other.

That was the one that started this all for me. The “Jason, the leaves are falling” one.

~ 2 ~

I was seven when the leaves on the trees in my town stopped falling in autumn. I don’t remember much from that first year, being seven as I was, but I have an image of my father, before he left, standing with his rake in the front yard, staring up at the yellow and orange foliage, all still attached to their branches, swaying in the wind as if they hadn’t gotten the memo.

The thing is: they hadn’t. Or…that’s what the scientists finally concluded. University researchers, ecologists, and photographers—many sent from National Geographic and the like—flooded our little town in the two or three years after that first failed Fall; a small research institute was set up near the high school. It still operates a few weeks out of the year. Or…it did.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

No one noticed until everyone did.

My mother compares that first year to a wildfire, which I like to think is apt. For years, aerial photos of our thirty-or-so square mile town showed a countryside on fire from mid-October to late December, when it would finally snow and we’d get a reprieve from the melange.

It was a tumultuous time. Nearly thirty percent of the town’s inhabitants moved out in the first eighteen months, citing the anomaly as a kind of religious omen. Our little economy might have collapsed if it were not for a brief tsunami of tourism that plagued us. (I say brief, because our town, which I haven’t told you yet but is called Allentown, is kind of a drive. And I say plagued us because “We Don’t Like The Tourists” almost became our town’s motto in 1998. I’m not kidding.)

There was an article in the Times about us, though. That was nice. And our mayor was interviewed on late night television. He has a photo of him shaking hands with a suave blonde gentleman on his wall, right next to his wedding portrait in the front hall. He’ll show it to you if you visit, and though his wife used to roll her eyes, she doesn’t anymore.

Because she’s dead.

(I’m kidding.)

She’s blind.

~ 4 ~

“Really?” I said.

“Uh huh!” my mother said. “It’s Autumn again.”

“Wow,” I said, and that actually turned out to be our last conversation.

By the time I got home for Thanksgiving break that fall semester of my junior year, she’d succumbed in her sleep to the cancer she’d been keeping from me.

I was in the airport when I got the call, standing at the baggage claim carousel with my phone in my hand, trying to order an Uber. The app was being buggy and that’s when it rang.

I don’t remember much after that. I was in a daze the whole way home. I don’t think I spent two minutes in the empty house before I ordered another Uber and went back to the airport…and…now that I think about it, I may not have even gone to the house. Huh.

Like I said. In a daze.

~ 5 ~

College took on a different kind of meaning after that. I began digging into my classes in a way I hadn’t before. I devoted myself to my craft and wrote tirelessly. I wasn’t there to be free anymore, but to get some goddam work done. I was there to make something of myself.

I lost myself in my studies, and in time, outpaced my classmates. I became an expert; graduation came only after I’d been offered the job of my dreams.

—which I turned flatly down.

“I’ll be a fact-checker,” I told the New Yorker man on the phone. “And nothing less.”

It made him laugh. He’d called because he’d seen some pieces I wrote in our university journal, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be a fact-checker.

So I’m a fact-checker.

I don’t discover facts, report facts, comment on facts, or even think about facts after I’m done with them. I simply check them to make sure they’re facts. I tell my boss which facts are facts and which facts are not, and which facts are alternative facts. There’s plenty of those, by the way. But, it’s not my job to comment on the quality of the facts, or—God forbid—the relevance of the facts, but such is life and such is the life I’ve chosen.

That is, until yesterday, when the lawyer called.

~ 6 ~

When my mother passed away, she left me the house, the car, and a big bank balance locked up in a thirty-year trust. The papers her lawyer sent me after her death included her will, a deed, a title, and a copy of her and my father’s old divorce papers. (She had him wrapped around her legal finger, by the way. A story you don’t hear often enough.) What she didn’t leave me was permission to sell any of it. According to her attorney, my rights to the inheritance were so tightly set that I could either keep the house or relinquish it to the state. Being unable to choose, I hired a property manager to look after the house to one, make sure nothing fell apart too badly, and two, keep the home-owner’s association happy. Little did I expect the only thing to fall apart would be that very arrangement.

“Can’t you just hire another one?” I asked him.

“Well, I could,” he said, drawing it out to make it sound weird.

“What do you mean you could? Isn’t it straightforward? Like last time?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“David. What is it,” I said. “Why can’t you just hire another property manager?”

The lawyer sighed. “Because our contract is up.”

“Our what?” I said.

“Our contract. My contract to represent you, per your mother’s will, expired last week. I’m sorry I meant to call,” he said.

“Well—can’t I just re-retain you? Extend your contract?” I said.

There was a pause on the line and I began to suspect I knew where this was going.

“My fees are quite expensive, Jason.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“But I can put you in contact with one of my colleagues who is more…”

“Cheap,” I said.

“Well—

“No no, you can say it,” I said. “I’m poor as shit.”

Silence.

I sigh. “So what do I do now?”

“The most pressing thing, if I’m being honest, is the HOA.”

“What did the HOA do?”

“They issued you a fine,” he said.

“What the fuck, man!”

“I’m—“

“You call to tell me the property manager walked out, your contract is expired, that you no longer represent my mother’s estate, and that I’m being fined by her HOA?”

“I—“

“What did you even do? For her? For my mom? You have exorbitant fees but you couldn’t let me know any of this sooner?”

“Jason, I’m—“

I sighed, exasperated. “Fuck you, man!” I said, and hung up.

~ 8 ~

When I walked up on my mother’s house after not having seen or thought of it for three years, I wanted to kick myself in the shin because the HOA was right. Goddam them, but they were right.

The leaves.

The leaves, the leaves, the leaves.

Millions of them.

Everywhere.

In the crooks, in the crannies, on the roof, in the gutters, on the lawn. The whole town was a mess of leaves but this was something else. And the overgrowth.

I barely recognized the place for all the wily overgrowth. And did the house look smaller? Like, tiny, even? All swallowed up by grass and vine-shoots, arcing like rivulets on the brick. I stood in wonder and trepidation both.

Getting to the front door was a challenge. Traipsing through the brush I felt like Indiana Jones, cutting my way through a jungle, dodging flying, buzzing things and crunching on the leaves.

When my hand touched the knob my knees went a little weak. Suddenly and powerfully, I wanted to get back in the car and go right back to work. Or to my apartment. Or to the airport. Anywhere but here—but I took a deep breath and pushed my way in.

It smelled like my mother.

It smelled like a book.

It smelled like it was once a home, but a home that somewhere along the way forgot to be a home, and so reverted back to being simply a house. Empty, alone. A place without its people and so, without life. Without a heartbeat.

I stood in the middle of the room for a while before sitting down.

Then when I sat down, I didn’t get up until it got dark outside.

After a few days I decided it was time to find the lawnmower.

~ 9 ~

“Jason Jason Jason!” my mom said on one of her calls.

“What?” I said. I was standing in the hallway outside one of my classrooms.

“You remember the drug store,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And the fire.”

“Yes.”

“And the skulls.”

“Mom!” I said.

She laughed. “Well, I thought you should know…”

I cleared my throat, waiting. I looked at the ceiling.

“That…” she said.

“Mom…”

“—that the investigation hasn’t revealed anything yet,” she said, and let out a cackle.

I closed my eyes and pulled the phone away, smiling and shaking my head. Then, despite myself, I started chuckling. “Are you kidding me?” I said.

Then it was like someone grabbed hold of my mom’s volume knob and cranked it.

“Mom that’s not funny.”

She just laughed.

“That’s not how you tell a joke,” I said, and we both just laughed.

She sighed, probably with a joyous tear in her eye.

“I have to go back to class,” I said.

“Ok,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you too, mom.”

As I hung up I could hear that she had begun laughing again.

~ 10 ~

The lawnmower was shot to shit, which I probably should have anticipated. I must have yanked the cord a hundred times and primed the pump a hundred more before giving it a swift kick and a growl.

It didn’t growl back, though. It didn’t even purr.

I checked my phone and found an ACE hardware store less than a mile away and decided to walk.

On my way there, I saw something that rang quite the bell.

~ 11 ~

When I was ten, my favorite thing to do was roam the sidewalk like a drifter on my neon-green bicycle with its training wheels long-removed. When I was sat on that thing, and stood up on the pedals, I was King of the Street. I can still hear the gravelly sound it made on the pavement. With a juice box in my hand and a string cheese in my pocket, the road—the world—was mine.

I knew the mailboxes by heart. They were my mile-markers. Two seventy-five with the green metal frame on the rotting wood post. Two seventy-seven made of plastic with little roses below and a gravelly patch after. Three thirteen with the stickers peeling away and the barking dog behind. And then, when the three hundreds were almost up…

Cherry Road.

“Cherry Road is the end of the line, pal.” That’s what my mother used to say. “I catch you anywhere near Cherry Road and I’ll whoop your ass so hard you won’t sit down for a week.”

I believed her.

One or two times I think I got the notion to peek around the corner of Cherry Road, but I never did. I was too scared.

“There’s an old man that lives down that road,” my mother had said. “A bad man, and a scary man, and a bad and scary house to go along with him. If you ever go down Cherry Road, he’ll snatch you up and feed you to his basement rats!”

And I know I was ten, but I believed that too.

Shortly before she died, she’d called me to say that the old man had passed away, but still…I’m embarrassed to say that when I saw the sign for Cherry Road that day on my way to Ace Hardware, I broke into a slight jog for thirty feet or so, until I came to my senses.

~ 12 ~

The row of red lawnmowers outside the hardware store was a welcome sight, but they were all tethered together with an anti-theft metal cord. I took a picture of the bar code and headed inside.

“Well if it isn’t Jason Carver!” a pudgy old man behind the counter said, just before I recognized him as Mr. Sousa, my old shop teacher from high school.

“Mr. Sousa,” I said. “How are you?”

“You know, Jason? I’m really well,” he said. “But I was so sorry to hear about your loss. How are you holding up?”

I smiled warmly at him as if to say ‘thank you.’ “I’m doing OK,” I said.

He smiled and his face filled up with grandfatherly wrinkles. “Are you writing for the New Yorker yet?”

I chuckled. “Oh no,” I said. “But I fact-check for them.”

“Fact-check? What’s that?” he said.

At this I kind of half-shrugged and thought about it. “I help preserve the reliability of other people’s writing.”

“Well I suppose that’s a start, isn’t it?”

I smiled again, this time more relaxed. “That’s what they say.”

A tight, slightly awkward silence passed between us as we smiled at each other, nowhere near a mutual understanding but somehow approximating one.

“What have you come in for?” he said.

“I need a lawnmower,” I said, and showed him the bar code on my phone.

“Oh,” he said, “let me see if I can scan this.” With a little effort, Mr. Sousa scanned my phone and rang me up for the cheapest off-brand push-mower in the parking lot.

After unlocking the anti-theft metal cord from the machine outside, he bid me adieu. “It was wonderful to see you again Jason, and again, I’m really sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And so close together,” he said. “Such a shame.”

~ 13 ~

Later that night, after almost killing that poor thing of a lawnmower with the eight-inch grass, I lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Mr. Sousa’s words. So close together? I thought. What in the world does that mean?

In the morning, I had two ideas. One, Mr. Sousa had well and truly lost it, and two, there was something I didn’t know.

~ 14 ~

My mother’s bedroom was the one room in the house I had very deliberately but also subconsciously decided to avoid.

It felt wrong opening the door and stepping in. The carpet was softer somehow, the ceiling a little lower and the walls a little more watching, like they could see me. The bed was unmade, and this was the most unsettling thing of all. It was as if I was seeing the day she died. Seeing the blanket she disturbed in her final hours—likely the ones the paramedics touched, too, the day they were called when Mom’s neighbor finally became concerned.

Standing there, I was instantly unsure of why I’d gone in, and so I was making to retreat…when I saw it.

Her tattered paperback copy of Jane Eyre on her bedside table, bookmark in place.

Something inside me gave.

I slumped onto the ground and sobbed, unable to move for the better part of an hour.

When my breathing slowed and I dried my face, I stood, picked up the book, and went back into the living room, closing the door behind me like it had done me wrong.

~ 15 ~

It was nearly ripped to shreds; I’m not sure why she never got a new copy, all those years. The pages had yellowed quite dark near the edges and the spine was a crackly mess. There was no thumbing through it, so I gently opened it at random intervals. Every other page had something underlined or scribbled in the margin.

There was Jane with her aunt. And Jane at the school. And Jane with Mr. Rochester.

The plot gets fuzzy for me after that.

When I got to the bookmark, I noticed that it was an envelope addressed to my mom…from someone whose name I hadn’t thought of since I was a boy.

~ 16 ~

Other than the image of my father with his rake, standing under the orange trees waiting for leaves that year I was seven, I don't have many. Or, I don’t have many I can put completely together.

There’s one where my father had gone out into the snow to feed the ducks or pigs or something. I think I’m in the kitchen, eating peanut butter off a spoon, looking out the window at him. Cheering him on. Oh! My mother had given me a cookie to give him when he came back inside. That just came back to me.

There’s one where I’m sitting on a blue plastic stool next to him while he sits quietly in a chair and thinks, but that’s about all I have for that one.

But what links these three memories, which aren’t great, I know, is that I can never see his face. I just can’t see my dad’s face.

That changed when I read his name on the envelope in my mother’s book.

~ 17 ~

I didn’t want to open it, but I had to.

Thanks to the paperback, it had held up rather well, but I was still careful not to move the paper too much. I slowly pulled back the flap, which had been taped once upon a time.

But it was empty.

I looked inside it again and again but no letter appeared. Baffled, I replaced the makeshift bookmark and paperback down, defeated and perplexed. I sat there at the kitchen table for twenty minutes, at a loss. I thought about going back to Ace hardware and asking Mr. Sousa what he’d meant, but something held me back. I wanted to look for the truth, but I didn’t want to look too closely.

But as fate would have it, I had to go back anyway. Later that afternoon I discovered that I really had killed the new lawnmower.

~ 18 ~

“Jason?” my mother had started once.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think you’ll ever stop talking to me?” she said.

“What?”

“Like if something bad ever happens, do you think you could ever blame me enough to stop talking to me, like I did to my mother?”

There was a long moment of silence on the line after that.

“Mom you’re not Grandma Lorna.”

Another moment.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mom are you OK?”

She had sighed. “Yeah I guess so.”

“Because you’re nothing like Grandma Lorna, Mom, that’s ridiculous.”

“OK,” she said.

“Alright,” I said. “Well I have to get to class. I’m giving a presentation.”

“Oh what are you presenting?” she asked. “It’s a workshop. I’m reading a poem I wrote. Ok but I have to go.”

“Oh ok. Love you.”

“I love you too, mom.”

~ 19 ~

Dragging the dead lawnmower back to Ace had me looking like a complete idiot. The only thing could have made it worse was if it had been smoking. (Which it was, by the way, before I left the house.) I tried to ignore the cars driving by and not think about what they would be thinking, laughing probably, watching this kid barely grown, a very new and very destroyed push-mower in tow. It was embarrassing.

When I got to the store, Mr. Sousa wasn’t there. Another employee, about as old as Mr. Sousa but a woman, helped me exchange it, the warranty less than a day old. I don’t think she was judging me but I couldn’t tell.

On my way back, I noticed something new.

Taped to the pole of the stop sign at the intersection of Cherry Road and Mulberry Avenue, was the hastily-printed announcement of an estate sale. 331 Cherry Road.

It made me stop for a second, and then something clicked.

I let go of the mower and sprinted home.

~ 20 ~

When I tell people that I work for the New Yorker, they seem to be impressed at first, if not a little annoyed, like maybe I’m bragging, which, I guess I am. A little. When I follow up with “I’m a fact-checker” for the New Yorker, they go one of two ways. They either get really bright in the face like they ‘get it’ like ‘of course’ and ‘that makes more sense because, I mean, look at you’ or they scrunch up their face like they’re saying ‘that’s a job?’ (Nine times out of nine those people follow up their scrunched face with “That’s a job?”)

Running for my mother’s house that day made me feel, for a moment, like I really agreed with those first people, the ones who found it reassuring and life-affirming that I hadn’t found too much success.

With my heart pounding, I burst into the house and made for the kitchen table. When I pulled the envelope from my mother’s book, I looked, this time consciously, at the address.

331 Cherry Road.

~ 21 ~

Standing in front of the house I now knew to be my father’s, I found myself in a place I’d never been but always dreamed of, and so I cried.

Growing up without a father is fucking hard.

All the other kids had dads. All the other kids had Dads. I had my mom, yes, and I love her, but moms aren’t dads.

Camping trips, for instance, are tragic without a dad that’s yours. When all the other boys have their dads there, and some of the dads are nice to you but you can tell it just isn’t quite the same and that of course they prefer their own sons…and at the end of the day, they’re not your dad and they never will be your dad because you haven’t got one and no one is going to give you one.

Or when your boss becomes your stand-in dad. Or your professor. Or your coach. Because you’re always looking for stand-in dads, even though you try and try and fucking try not to.

Some stand-in dads manage to last a little while, but again, just like the camping trips, you can tell it just isn’t the same thing, and you can tell that you just don’t have their ear. Or their heart. Not really. You can call them but they’ll never call you to say

Hey champ, how are you holding up. How are things. Let’s get a beer.

So you ask yourself how you’re holding up. And you say, ‘well, as good as can be expected.’

‘Without a dad.’

~ 22 ~

“Are you ok, dear?” the lady asked. She had walked up on me and caught sight of my tear-streaked face. Hastily I wiped my cheeks.

“Yes, I’m ok,” I lied. “Thank you.”

“Are you here for the estate sale?” she asked. She was dressed up like a realtor and had a lanyard in her hand with a key.

“Umm,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Well I’m not entirely certain, and I’m sure you won’t have reason to believe me, but I think this was my father’s house.”

~ 23 ~

Soon after the lawyers got involved, the estate sale was cancelled and I was named executor of not my first but my second estate. It took some investigating, and yes, some earnest fact-checking, but when it became clear that I was my father’s son, everything he had went to me.

I sold it all.

To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered. Whatever the reason my father had for being so close, and yet so invisible, all those years, I didn’t care. I was broken for the lack of him and the sudden appearance of him fixed nothing.

And now that I look back, I appreciate anew how my mother championed me along. My mother who gave me the grape juice boxes and robitussin. Who snuck money under my pillow when I lost a tooth. Who wrote “from Santa” in curly lettering on all the gifts under the tree each year, even when we had so little.

She wasn’t a dad. That’s true.

But she was one hell of a Mom.

~ 24 ~

I write for the New Yorker now. After a few more years of goddam fact-checking (I’m being facetious, I effing loved it) I finally told my boss I wanted to do what he’d tried to hire me to do in the first place.

The first story I sat down to write was about those leaves that never fell.

But wouldn’t you know it.

It wasn’t in any of the newspapers, the journals, the scientific reviews, nothing. It never happened. There was no institute set up by the high school, Google Earth didn’t pick anything up, and our mayor wasn’t interviewed on television. (His wife is blind, though. Go figure.)

~ Epilogue ~

“Jason,” she said. I was sitting in the courtyard between classes and wasn’t in a hurry, for once.

“Hey mom, what’s up?”

“You remember the skulls.”

I exaggerated a sigh. “Not this again.”

She laughed. “No, no, I learned my lesson. That’s not how you tell a joke,” she said with a mocking inflection, laughing again.

I waited.

“Well, they’ve done an entire excavation of the place where the drug store used to be. The whole intersection has been dug up. It’s pretty annoying, actually…”

I cleared my throat.

She continued. “Initial carbon dating of some of the bone fragments put the site at somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years old.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yep.”

“Have they found anything interesting?” I said.

My mother gasped on the line. “That’s not interesting to you!?”

“Well, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Mom there’s old bones in the ground all over the planet.”

There was a pause.

There was always a pause.

“Eh, I guess you’re right,” she said.

“But ‘skulls’ was a good start,” I said.

~

It is mid-October and I am seven years old. I am in the yard, rushing up to my father from behind; he stands with a garden rake in one hand, fallen leaves all around, whirling in the wind. When I get to him I poke his thigh and he turns around, but it isn’t my dad. It’s my mom.

“Oh! Mom! Can I help you rake the leaves?” I say, but I notice she is crying. “Mommy what’s wrong?”

She doesn’t answer, and I start to cry too.

She kneels, and I wrap my arms around her neck. “I miss him too, mommy.”

And a million leaves flew back into the trees and refused to come down until we could hold onto him no longer.