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Show Motherlunge a novel 11 4. Love is Deaf It was the night before my father, seventeen years old, left to drive up north to start college. It was dinnertime, and he was sitting at the yellow linoleum table waiting to be served. His napkin fluttered slightly on the thigh of the leg he was jiggling up and down. Meanwhile his father, sitting across the table, slowly closed his Popular Science and laid it to his right, at the three o'clock position. "Walter," my father's father said, his eyes hard under his tangled eyebrows, "Be careful. Take care of your genetic material." He lifted the saltshaker and shook it overhis pot roast in long, decisive downstrokes. "I know you know what I mean," he shook, now looking down at his meat. "Be careful when you date. Who you date." My father's mother came into the dining room holding a casserole dish between two quilted oven mitts. She'd been humming to show she was busy, but she stopped as she leaned over the back of Walter's chair. His mother spoke softly, straight into his ear. "The important thing,"-he felt her breath right there-"is don't ever make fun of the fat girls." She died of a stroke one month after she said this; it's the last piece of advice my father remembers her giving. |