by Andrew Bertaina

The first time I see my dead father, he’s leaning down at the market, trying to decide which fish to choose for dinner. He is careful in his choosing; his thick fingers move quietly across fish scales.

All that afternoon, I lie in the small cottage I’ve rented, wondering what I should have said to my father. During his final years, a great silence had grown up between us, as a row of cypress, dense between houses. By then, he had moved to New Mexico, and, after briefly taking up with a much younger woman, Linda, with hair like golden wheat, he lived alone at the edge of the desert.

Sometimes, on my birthday, I’d wait for him to call, to remind me that he had some small claim on my life. But he forgot too or didn’t, and upon seeing him, even dead, that hot flash of rage passed through my body.

The cottage is surrounded by a row of Junipers, house sparrows’ rustle between branches. A small window looks out onto the patio, overgrown with ivy. The light is dim and encourages sleep. But I rouse myself and walk down by the sea wall, where a gull tilts in the wind above me, cuts through the bright air.

There is a festival of food and wine by the river. The smell of loam. Families push strollers, pass ice cream cones around, sip on glasses of wine, while the light patterns the water. I think of my divorce, the children safely in the home I’d once shared with their mother. Sometimes I forget them, others, they romp around in my imagination, my absent children.

Even at the festival, I am full of sadness. Several fig trees line the road, traffic buzzes by. I get a cocktail at a bar near the water, finger the condensation on the glass. I wonder if my life is coming together or falling apart. The matter hangs over this trip to Europe, where I’m distant from the children, from the apartment, from the life I’ve constructed. But the answer remains obscure, even after a second cocktail.

I see my father again, a week later, the day I’m to leave the city. In the interim, I have fallen in love with the city, the hillside striped by a vineyard, the old stone abbey where the monks sell beer. The street peddler who plays the violin, the sound, clear as a bell in the narrow streets.

Father is sitting on a bench by the river, watching the current pass. Boats ply the water, sails billowing in the air. I approach him slowly, hoping that I don’t startle the apparition.

Father, I say, touching his shoulder.

He does not turn around, but he reaches onto his shoulder, his thick fingers, his heavy hand, envelop mine. We stand like that for a moment, his hand holding mine, watching the trees across the river, huddling against the sunlight.

On my trip back across the Atlantic, the answer finally comes to me. I sit with it for hours, comforting as a father’s hand.