My wife, Colleen, was in a flurry, flying around the house like a tumbleweed as if she had no time to prepare for something important. I sat in my customary chair, looking up from my book with amusement.

Colleen stopped in front of me and said, “Seriously?”

“Sorry?”

“You have about three minutes to get ready. You want to change clothes, I’m sure. You look like a slob right now. And you can kill that beer but no more for you. Dinner’s in half an hour and I want you present for it.”

Okay. I gleaned that we had a dinner guest coming and I must have completely forgotten about it. We weren’t much for entertaining. Dinner guests were rare and not much appreciated, though Colleen sometimes got obligation bees in her bonnet and booked occasional intruders to salve her conscience. I went along for the ride, mostly for PR purposes. And to keep her happy.

“Who’s coming again? I know it makes me a crumb bum, but I can’t remember—”

Colleen stopped in front of me and parked her hands on her hips, aggressively akimbo. “You’re kidding me, right? Stan? No gaslighting tonight. I. Can. Not. Handle. It.”

I was in deep trouble. Honest to God, I couldn’t remember who was coming over. I hoped it wasn’t the neighbor couple again, the Swansons, who always spoke of their exotic travels and made us feel like common serfs. Or Colleen’s sister, Nancy. She never did like me and never would. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “My brain’s getting—porous in my old age. Who’s coming?”

“Our son,” she said through her teeth. “I’ve told you over and over this week. Tim’ll be here any minute—he’s overdue as it is.”

You see, the thing is, I hadn’t been aware that we had a son. And that his name was Tim introduced another whole level of mystery for me.

:::

This Tim fellow seemed hale and well-met enough to me when he arrived, but I swear I’d never laid eyes on him before in my life. He looked a bit like me, I have to admit, with the same deep eyes close in on an aquiline nose. He’d be losing his fair hair eventually, too, I could see that. His voice was low and suede-like, as people always described mine. Yet this lad in his apparent mid-twenties was a complete stranger to me.

Naturally I was gobsmacked. Only two or three possibilities could explain what was going on here.

One, I was experiencing an early episode in the downhill slalom toward Alzheimer’s. The spongey section of my brain that must have contained all the information I’d collected about Tim over the years, from birth to teaching him how to ride a bike to telling him about the birds and the bees—all gone. Like that horrifying moment when you realize your computer’s hard drive is wiped and you have no backups. I tried not to stare at him but caught myself staring anyway, hoping for a blast of recognition, some kind of jolt, but nothing came.

Two, Colleen was playing some kind of sick joke on me. This would not be like her, but it was possible that a formerly buried resentment over never becoming a mother had boiled up inside, and she’d recruited this young man to impersonate a son we never had just to demonstrate something to me. How great a mother she’d have been. How hollowed out she was without children—though I’d have to push back on that and say it wasn’t I who kept us from it. I never objected. It just never happened for us, and we never pursued the popular ways to help nature along. Fertility treatments. Tricks with turkey basters and thermometers and meds. We didn’t talk about it. We took things as they came, and here we were in our fifties with an empty nest.

Three, and this possibility bothered me even more than Colleen’s potential trickery: My own mind was exploring a world in which we had had a child, a wonderful son, a chip off the old block, source of much pride and cause of even more anxiety—for his welfare, his happiness, his safety. Sonless, I’d inserted a son. Somehow aching inside over the absence of an heir, my genes dying on the vine, I made up this Tim out of nothing but secret want. And I loved him. I could see, as the two of us hugged and patted backs the way fathers and sons do, with that satisfying manly clap, that I had needed him all along, and I wasn’t whole without him. And with that came the understanding that I would never be whole. My repressed desire to raise a son was standing up now, in my face, and showing me how there was no meaning in the life I’d actually lived.

Tim looked at me with his head cocked, still grasping both my arms. His eyes, the same hazel as mine, went into me deep.

“You okay, Dad?” he asked. “You look a little bit shaky.”

Colleen came over and placed sweet, nurturing kisses on both our cheeks. “He’s fine. He was just telling me the other day we don’t see enough of you, and he’s touched that you came.”

I stood back to look at them both, flooded with hope that this was the true thing and I had only been toying with its opposite, just to see.

Kevin Brennan

is the author of eight novels, as well as stories and poetry that have appeared in many online and print journals. A Best Microfiction nominee, he’s also editor of The Disappointed Housewife, a literary magazine for writers of offbeat and idiosyncratic fiction, poetry, and essays. Kevin lives in California’s Sierra foothills, where he cavorts among the pines and writes anomalous indie songs for his wife.

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