Dance Real Slow by Michael Grant Jaffe

right,” I say, sliding again onto my back.
    â€œI’m sorry that I made you sad,” he says.
    I do not answer him for a moment or so. When I do, I sit up and reach for his hands, taking them into my own and holding them below my chin.
    â€œSweetheart, it wasn’t you.
Really
. It’s just a bad day. It’s just—” I pause, rubbing his tiny, pink thumb against my lower lip. “It’s just that I haven’t done this before. Being a dad is hard and I’m not sure I’m doing it right.”
    He pulls his hands away and begins petting the back of my head, where the hairline turns to flesh. “You’re doing good.”
    â€œI’m glad one of us thinks so.”
    â€œI think so.”
    I smile and kiss him on both cheeks. “I’m sorry I had to throw out your man-o-war.”
    He shrugs and then looks down at the toes of his sneakers. “Me too.”
    Indeed, being a father is difficult and there are no blueprints to insure that we do not stray, do not wander, misdirecting our children down a barbed, prickly path that they will hate us for, deeply, truly, for the rest of their cursed lives. And forgiveness is foreign. Years after I had left home, while I was in Ann Arbor, Kate asked me why I didn’t talk to my father more? Why didn’t I ask to speak to him after talking with my mother? Why didn’t my mother insist, reaching over on their couch and putting the telephone in his hand. I told her I didn’t know; we were just like that. We had never said much to each other, even during the seventeen years we lived under the same roof. Then Kate asked how about when I was a child, when my father was young?
    There is not much I remember of the time I was very little, I said. And my father was never young, at least not while I was alive. I was born when my father was forty-two, and even my earliest memories of him—reed-thin, his skin red and warm, not the gray hue it would achieve in his later years; white weeds of hair pushing back above his temples, and his hands, the hands he would pass on to me, large and webbed with blue veins—even those first memories are of a man isolated from his family. Of my mother and me eating casserole or cold chicken by ourselves in the dim light of the kitchen and then her taking me to bed, sitting over me, brushing the wisps of hair from my face and telling meabout the time she found me in the storage closet wearing her waxy underwear like a hat, or kneeling on a table, lapping water from my aunt’s fish tank. Later, after my mother had already dressed for bed and then had fallen asleep reading a magazine or watching television, my father would come home. Most of the time he had already had his dinner, so he would sit in the dark at the kitchen table eating butter-pecan ice cream from the container and drinking beer. Often, my mother awakened and went in to ask if she could fix him eggs or a sandwich, but he would just say no, the ice cream was fine. Only once, when I was seven and sick with pneumonia, did he come in to say good night to me. Even then, he stood silently at the doorway, letting the hall light creep in cautiously with the push of his wrist, falling in a narrow block against my face. He was silent for a long time, thinking I was asleep, and then, before turning to leave, he blew me a kiss. I had opened my eyes, briefly, and I remember how awkward and uncomfortable my father looked, blowing a kiss to his only son, as if the act was completely foreign to him. And it was.
    I don’t ever want things to be like that between Calvin and me. But I wonder if my father had the same noble intentions when I was born, only somehow he lost his way. It wasn’t necessarily that things became more important to him than his son, only that he always figured there would be time, time enough to make it up. And, of course, there never is. Mostly, I try not to hold this spacious void of emotion against my