Read Online The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper - Free Book Online

toaster just as it begins to burn. I can't remember ever having felt my father's hand before. I squeeze it lightly. It doesn't squeeze back. I hear the door behind me and quickly retract my hand, like a shoplifter.
    â€œHey,” Brad says, coming up behind me.
    â€œHey.”
    â€œHow have you been?”
    â€œPretty good. And you?”
    He sighs. “Been better.”
    â€œI guess so,” I say. We both turn and looked at our father's unconscious form. Brad walks past me and gently straightens the blankets on the bed. He does it slowly, with a good deal of tenderness. As I watch him, it occurs to me that Brad is devastated. In my ambivalence over my own feelings toward my father, I've forgotten that he is someone else's father, and grandfather, and that he is loved. I turn away as Brad finishes straightening the covers, feeling ashamed and more than ever like an interloper.
    Brad steps back from the bed and grins at me uneasily. “So . . .” he says.
    â€œWhat's the prognosis?” I say.
    â€œPretty lousy. They don't know that he'll regain consciousness, and even if he does, there's no way to know what shape his brain will be in.”
    â€œHow long do they think he can just hang on like this?”
    â€œThey don't know.”
    â€œThey don't know much, do they?” I say.
    I look at my father again. He seems drastically reduced, his frame smaller and his color duller than I remember. We've seen each other very infrequently over the years, and I haven't thought to age my mental picture of him. There is no way, in his current state, to assess the natural toll the last seventeen years have taken on him, to see how he's aged up until the stroke. It occurs to me that even though I am finally in the same room with him, I will probably never really see my father again.
    Brad sits down on the windowsill, and I take the chair beside the bed, the vinyl cushion emitting a whistling sigh as my weight descends into it.
What happens now?
I wonder.
    â€œHow long do you plan on staying?” Brad asks after a bit.
    Staying?
“I don't know.”
    He nods, as if this is what he expected, and then clears his throat. “I'm glad you came. I wasn't sure you would.”
    â€œI had to come,” I say vaguely.
    He looks at me. “I guess so.”
    We sit quietly as the conversation limps off to wherever it is that conversations go to die.
    â€œWhere's Jared?” I say.
    Brad frowns and looks away. “I told him to stop here on his way to school, but he's not what you would call reliable these days.” Jared is Brad's son, my nephew, who by my calculations should be sixteen or seventeen by now. I figure this because he was fourteen when he ran away from home, took the Metro-North into Manhattan, and showed up at my apartment at ten-thirty that night, hungry, out of cash, and simmering with righteous anger at the unspecified offenses that had led to this defiance. We ordered in some sandwiches and I made him call his father. Then we watched Letterman, and the next morning I put him on a train back to Connecticut, and that was pretty much that. Brad left me a message the following night thanking me, but I was out, and although I distinctly recall wanting to call him back, I never got around to it.
    â€œWhat's he, seventeen?”
    â€œEighteen,” my brother says. “He's a senior.” So much for my math.
    â€œIs he captain of the Cougars?”
    Brad looks away. “Jared doesn't play ball.” Those four words, layered with the grist of untold tension and regret, indicate that my lame efforts at innocuous chitchat have nonetheless managed to zero in on what is clearly a sore topic, and I resolve from here on in to let Brad steer the conversation. Brad, though, seems perfectly content to sit back and crack his knuckles as he watches the drip of fluids in and out of the beeping and hissing mess that was once our father.
    â€œI read your book,” he finally