And Sons by David Gilbert

waiting—“Goddamn it!”—waiting for those vents to defrost the despair of last night. It was a lovely bit of writing, Jamie recalled, as he watched the physical record of his sleep melt under that rising Vermont sun. He wondered which of those drips belonged to his dreams and which belonged to his father.
    “I need to see you.” That’s what Dad said on the phone, his voice catching with improbable yet unmistakable emotion, like hearing a middle-of-the-night train whistle in Manhattan. “I need to see you, you and your brother. I want all of us together again, not like old times, of course. I’m not pretending there were old times to be had, though there were more old times than you care to remember, but how about new times, the three of us, you and me and Richard, and Andy, of course, you need to get to know Andy better. He’s a sweet boy, a caring boy, a good boy, hardly a boy anymore but a young man, a young manwho needs more family than just me. Whatever happened between you and us and me was hardly his fault.”
    “Um …”
    “Please.”
    “Ahh …”
    “Please.”
    Unlike his brother, Jamie had constructed a pragmatic relationship with the old man, even if the fix was rather leaky. They talked maybe six times a year, which seemed right for the both of them, and once in a while they shared a meal but always under an air of formality and obligation, as if documents were to be signed after dessert. Maybe Jamie would have preferred a closer bond with his dad—we all have our optative moments—but in his heart he understood that the man was ill-equipped for the task. Being a good and attentive father was neither in his nature nor in his nurture, and that was fine, even a relief as he became older and feebler and there was no reciprocal pressure on Jamie to be a good and attentive son. Jamie didn’t suffer over the relationship, not like Richard. Plus Jamie had his mother. Isabel quite obviously favored her youngest, who was the spitting image of her own adored brothers and a happy reminder of her scrappy male-dominated childhood, right down to her own mannish mother, a swimmer of some renown. Yes, Isabel saw in Jamie a certain charm she admired (whereas Richard just exhausted her) and with this maternal affection securely in pocket, Jamie the boy often preferred his father’s absence, not only as a means to spend more time with Mom, but also as a means to a greater end, which were those novels he admired from an early age, first as mysterious totems with a strange, tangible mass, their smell and touch evocative of stubble and cigarettes, all those words inside with their slow hatchings—d-o-g in
Ampersand
, h-o-u-s-e in
The Bend of Light
—until whole paragraphs were born into meaning, their exact significance unclear but the hope of significance present in their cries and squirms, in all those paragraphs and all those pages that pointed both to the future and to the past, the length growing longer as Jamie hit his teens and imagined writing a ten-page term paper fifty times over—what Herculean effort lay bundled in those books, his father’squiet yet aggravated labor, and when Jamie in his late teens, early twenties, sat down and read all the books, they were better than any bullshit father-son bonding even if he only grasped half of what was being said, which became clearer over subsequent rereadings and opened up deeper understandings and engendered a different kind of awe—how funny and smart his father could be, how human, how moral, even after he carelessly broke Mom’s heart and rubbed all their noses in his bastard namesake, regardless, the books, these amazing books, they spoke to Jamie and he knew they would continue to speak to him, the author a far greater father than the man. Plus the residual fame helped with a certain kind of girl.
    “Come and visit, please,” his father said. “I’m feeling … like dust.”
    “Like dust?”
    “You know what I