My father died. Heart failure. My father by choice.
Choice father. And a tree fell on my parked car.
The tree could have caused any death, any
destruction. It could have been a child, the intolerable
lick-luck, fate, Chinese puzzles, inscrutability,
intolerable pain. Inscrutable, racist, a canard--
Peking Duck. Yes, let's eat. First the skin
baked into translucency, the remnant fat smearing,
closing over. Then the flesh, elusive in its reminders,
its slow, reflexive pleasures. Then broth made from
what is left. Funeral meats, East and West.

Jingle words like coins, the change, or covering
for dead eyes. Fingers fiddle. Don't pick.
How many times have I told you not to?
Don't pick. But can choose. Cannot choose
the first father, the birth father who killed himself.
Did not choose the second, even prayed.
Cannot choose which death. It could have been a child.
Heads, tails. The owner-chef stands at our table, cleaver
in hand, dicing everything, showering parts into the wok,
showing off his skill. Good luck will come

in the year of the monkey. Seven come eleven.
Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Yes, but the secret is only safe when all three are.
They are. Check the car. Though dented it starts.
Both children answer the phone. We will be
home soon. But words cleave, uncertain,

disconsolate. They are severed but cling together.
As the children will when they go to bed;
they know he is dead. There is too much
we cannot outwit. The check, please. Have
a sugared walnut. It could have been my child.

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Excerpted from I Can't Remember by Cynthia Macdonald. Copyright© 1997 by Cynthia Macdonald. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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