Editor’s Introduction

The Square Root of Negative 1

by Frank Diamond

Tattoo squints at my driver’s license, squints at me, squints at the license again and now I’m wondering if she’s on some power trip.

“That is me,” I point out.

After two beats, she smiles. “Happy birthday, Juan” . . . more squinting at the card . . . “Garcia.” Then as if it’s her final answer: “Juan Garcia!”

I tell her, “Three months ago; that was my happy birthday.”

I am 22 years old.

“Belated, then.”

Professional cheeriness. I call this bartender, who I just met, Tattoo (in my head, not out loud) because she’s inked up like some biker babe. Blonde and really hot like those girls can be, and with attitude like those girls can also be. Calls me “hon” as if I’m in kindergarten. She can’t be that much older.

I ducked into the Carefree Copilot Bar & Grill a few minutes ago just as a spring shower started, and she’s right there wiping down the counter, wearing a yellow T that accents her goods.

Nice. Nice. Nice.

The bar sits on Grant Avenue, near Northeast Philadelphia Airport. Every now and then a plane roars by either taking off or landing.

It’s 2:41 on a Wednesday. That’s what the scroll above the tap handles say. And there are not many people about, which is what I hoped.

Now, Tattoo hands me my license and asks, “How did you know Connor?”

I maybe should have expected this. Any dude who practically lives at a bar like Connor McDevitt did, who goes there so much he gets a memorial plaque screwed in on the back of a stool — one of only three such in the place, BTW, in a big-ass bar that’s been around for something like 90 years, before the airport even — well, then, the help and regulars will know all about that guy.

Right?

Connor McDevitt never told them about me. They know he killed somebody in 2011, of course. They know that that somebody was Papi — Alberto Diego Garcia. They long ago stopped wondering whatever happened to the victim’s 7-year-old son. Me.

“That’s a shame,” they might have said at the time like you do about sad stuff you hear once and never think about again.

Now, I say to Tattoo, “I only just learned that he’s gone,” which doesn’t answer her question about how I know him, but she don’t notice.

She leans over and whispers “around two years ago” as if it’s his wake.

I flat-out asked Tattoo about that “in memory of” stool first thing when I came in. (I found that quirky little tidbit in the comments section under his online obituary.) That’s when Tattoo started with this “hon” bullshit.

“Can I see some ID, hon?”

“Juan,” I said, but I don’t think she heard.

Whatever.

I smiled like how you might do when meeting, say, some third cousin once removed at a clan picnic.

Now, down at the other end, the kitchen door bangs open and somebody yells something.

I don’t hear what, but Tattoo turns about and shouts, “got it!” and that ends the interrogation. At least for now and, I’m hoping, for good.

“Follow me,” she says.

I do. She struts behind the bar, and I shadow her from the customer side. She stops and points to the stool, then reaches over the counter and puts her hand on top of the chosen chair. The tattooed cross on her forearm stretches.

“Here,” she says. “Now what can I get you, hon?”

She’s in a hurry. Keeps glancing over her shoulder toward the kitchen and probably thinking about whatever goes on in there.

I order.

“Sorry. What was that again?”

“Just water and a pint of” . . . I’m about to repeat Coors Light when she says, “Smithwicks?”

Smid-iks.

She winks.

Down boy.

“Yes, please,” I say, remembering that that’s what Connor McDevitt drinks.

Drank.

She disappears into the kitchen to do whatever, and I whip out my cell and Google Smithwicks. It’s an Irish Red Ale. Humm. We’ll see.

Tattoo comes back and hustles me up my beverages.

“Menu?”

“Please,” I say.

She slaps it down. The overheads ghost in the lamination.

I didn’t drink much to speak of before college — my mami, Mrs. Isabella Garcia herself, made sure of that — and I still don’t.

Alcoholism runs in my family, and I don’t want to die drunk and face down in a snowbank like one of my uncles.

I look around, seeing if I’d ever want to take a date here. And I will date again. Eventually. But my last serious girl dumped me cold and not that long ago. I still miss her.

“Get over it!” Mami ordered, as if I could flick a switch and turn off emotion. She says, “You’re too young to even know what love is!”

I come back with “says the woman who got married at 21.”

Then Mami comes back with something else, and I let it be at that point because I am never going to get the last word.

The Smithwicks, when it’s served, looks fine, I must admit. Moody in a sweating glass. But I don’t dive in right away because it might become part of my own private ceremony. The one I plan to hold right here for Connor McDevitt in the Carefree Copilot Bar & Grill.

I don’t need to look at the menu. I know what I want.

“Cheesesteak.”

“Comes with chips or fries, but fries are extra,” Tattoo says.

I think about it. A plane that sounds like a flying lawnmower puts-puts-puts overhead.

Tattoo adds that the cheesesteak “can come with onion rings, too, if you want that instead of fries.”

Sold.

When she leaves, I get off the stool, step behind it, and inspect the plaque. This would look suspicious in a full house and if the bartender didn’t already know why I’m here. Well, she doesn’t really know why I’m here. Not the whole story.

The plaque needs a good polishing, and I lean in close to read:

Connor B. McDevitt

1956 — 2023

A life well-lived!

Husband, Son, Uncle, Brother, Friend

Raise your glass and give a cheer!

Connor McDevitt loved it here!

How could they tell? He and his wife loved it here. But then him alone after his Maureen dies and after the incident with Papi on top of that?

Connor McDevitt told me — wrote me — that for about 12 years after, he usually just sat and stared at one of the TV screens, watching but not seeing. If someone who didn’t know about him asked the score, Connor McDevitt would just shake his head.

Don’t bother me.

Outside, the shower stops and the sun rebounds. There might be a rainbow close by, who knows? Light streaks through the bar’s windows, spotlighting some of the tables in the restaurant part.

There’s a patio for outdoor seating which I’m betting they expanded into the parking lot during COVID and covered it in that cloudy plastic roof. Complete with fans blowing hot or cold depending on the season. It’s how places like this survived. And after COVID, they kept it as is. Why not?

Another plane buzzes by. Its shadow ghosts over the outside setup and then disappears.

Quit stalling.

I pull the papers from my back pocket, unfold them, flatten them out on the counter. This will be my third time reading this letter.

_______________

I am Connor McDevitt. I am a working man. And most of my working years I was a foreman with a forklift manufacturing company outside of Philly. Worked my way up from the line. Never did college. Barely did high school.

You probably by now figured out who’s the hero of this story, Juan. And it ain’t you and it sure as hell ain’t me.

It’s your mother. She needed to point you in the right direction. Because at first, I wanted to just shove the money — the guilt money; the blood money — your way when you turned 18 figuring that you can do what you want with it. But your mother wouldn’t go for that. You had to earn it, she thought. You needed to do good in school.

She is strong. She has to be. For I am the man who killed your father, Alberto Diego Garcia. It was me, Juan.

_______________

I look up. I see Tattoo talking to one of the waitresses. She glances my way, but I wave her off.

She smiles. A sweet smile. A kind smile. Is it a real smile or just one of those . . . I don’t know . . . what bartenders and waiters and waitresses do for tips?

Anyway, when I got this letter from Connor McDevitt, I had been hunched over my oatmeal. Mami comes in and moves the envelope on the kitchen table toward me like you might slide somebody the salt.

Mami does this about five days after I graduated from Mapleforge University.

“Yours,” she says, and backs quietly out of the kitchen. Strange, because she usually thumps and bumps about. Lets me alone with it. Giving me time to ingest. When I read the thing, it rattles me. No surprise, right?

I read it twice. Things go hazy. I wander out of the kitchen like I just wake up and into the living room where Mrs. Isabella Garcia herself sits with the TV on mute.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Because I wouldn’t take a single cent from that man unless I used it to pay for your college.”

“You wouldn’t take $120,000 just handed to you?”

I know that’s a stupid question soon as I ask it. Just like she wouldn’t take any help from anybody — church, state, or relatives — after my drug addict stepfather bolted and never paid even one penny of alimony for we kids.

I could maybe understand me. I wasn’t his. But my stepsisters? His own biological children? Mami adopted them, and they honor her; the only real parent they’d ever known.

When I talk about Mami, sometimes people think that she’s in her 50s, maybe 60s, like how it works with a lot of individuals my age. They picture Mami as old; or at least older and matronly. She’s not. One of my stepsisters is pregnant. That means Mami might become an abuelita at 45.

Nobody would look at her and think “grandmother.” Blue-black hair that swerves on shoulders, bright shiny eyes holding back a laugh, a dancer at weddings who never gets tired.

It’s a little bit embarrassing being her son.

That morning when she shows me Connor McDevitt’s letter, she’s got her hair in a messy bun and wears glasses I thought she’d thrown out long ago and a bathrobe that she must have found in the back of her closet. For once, she actually could pass for an abuelita.

I wonder what Alberto Diego Garcia would have looked like by now?

Now he loved us, Mami and me, and sacrificed to give us the best possible life. When he died, Mami struggled — emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and, yeah, financially. Papi didn’t have much life insurance. At 32 and with so much energy, I don’t think that he accepted that he’d one day die, let alone die young.

I once a year, usually near my birthday, play the home movies, just to hear Papi’s voice, see his smile. His essence comes through.

When I was two, Papi would say, “Do your silly dance, Juan!”

And I would — a mixture of the chicken dance, hopping, and somersaulting — and he’d come out with that laugh of his and when he finally could breathe, say, “That’s the best yet, m’hijo. We’ll call that your silly, willy, nilly, pilly dance!”

And I’d laugh my little toddler laugh as if that’s the funniest thing I’d ever hear. Maybe it was.

That morning after reading Connor McDevitt’s letter for the first time and in the middle of talking to Mami, I closed my eyes for . . . I don’t know how long. It may have been a second. It may have been 10 seconds, and that’s like ages to sit facing somebody with your eyes closed but Mami stays quiet too.

And what am I thinking? I’m thinking about all the fights Mami and me had. Her dealing with my anger, surliness, and backtalk before I’m even a teen. She comes home exhausted from her job and then helps me with my homework at the kitchen table.

And I get frustrated and throw tantrums from first grade on up. And she argues me mute after chasing me down. Somehow, someway we get the lessons done. She won’t accept nothing but A’s or B’s from me neither.

“No excuses,” she says. “You’re smart.”

But I’m no Einstein and she knows I have limits. I do well enough to get grant money to go to a couple of nearby state colleges, but they maybe cover only about twenty percent of the cost, and I want to live on campus, not commute.

She teaches advance placement history in high school (not the school I attended) and makes just enough money to put us over the poverty line. But her job means she gives me and my stepsisters the most important things: time and attention. She’s off from school when we’re off from school. She gets home about the time we get home.

I know what I want when I graduate from high school. I want to go to Mapleforge University — a little college with a big reputation for STEM; right up there with MIT or Stanford — and study computer science, but even Mapleforge’s tuition costs more than a suburban home.

“I’ll get some Parents Plus loans,” Mami says. “Maybe some help from the banks, too.”

The same banks that love gouging people like us.

I say, “I can’t let you do that.”

“You’re going to Mapleforge, m’hijo.”

In those years — my growing up years; my wonder years — I never once went to bed hungry. Sure, we did without. Mami did without. Junker cars in the better times. No cars mostly; mass transit. Clothes from thrift shops. The last TV in America that still used tubes.

Daytrips maybe to the shore in summer, but never able to afford a week or two down there even in the offseason. Friends and family stopped offering to help because that just pissed her off.

So, I went to Mapleforge knowing that either I’m going to have to repay a shitload of money for the rest of my life or Mami will, and those options sometimes make me ball up my fists in anger and embarrassment. I’m surprised when I notice this.

“I’ll worry about paying off the loans when the time comes,” I decide.

When I graduated, Mami says to me, “Tell me what you didn’t learn, Mr. Scholar.”

She’s testing me. She does that. Always the teacher.

“What I didn’t learn?”

“That’s right. Your education is not over.”

“What I didn’t learn,” I repeat, stalling.

“What do you still want to know? A lot, probably. Give me an example. Just one.”

It comes to me: “The square root of negative 1.”

“And what’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“Zero.”

“No, I didn’t say zero, Mami. I said nothing. It’s an imaginary number.”

“Says who?”

I try to explain and, as I do, a smile spreads across Mami’s face. She’s proud of me.

Now, another plane buzzes the Carefree Copilot. Tattoo breezes by, checks the Smithwicks that I’ve not touched, and keeps walking, looking perplexed. I sip the water.

She serves me the cheesesteak and onion rings. I take a couple of bites but then get back to rereading Connor McDevitt’s letter.

_______________

Maureen and me, we had a great marriage. Not perfect. No marriage is. But pretty darn special. I couldn’t save her. I tried. I thought I could beat cancer. Hers. If I just stayed on top of things. I wanted to be Superman. No joke. Me. Superman.

We never had kids, but we loved our nieces and nephews, and we had fun. Every Friday me and Maureen would meet for dinner at the Carefree Copilot and catch up on what goes on at our jobs. Griping and laughing about work stuff. Everybody at Carefree knew us. Everybody liked us.

She died. I wanted to die, but she made me promise not to kill myself. They say wait at least six months to a year before making major life decisions. I don’t give a damn what they say anymore. They said that Maureen could have another good 10 or 15 years in her. They don’t know shit.

I put my house on the market right after the funeral. Got a buyer in a matter of days. Packed up all my shit and stored it in a container yard. Quit my job. Planned to drive around the country a bit. As if I could just pull into the driveway of a new life somewhere.

But the buyers lose their jobs a few days before settlement. Both wife and husband at the same time. Worked for the same company.

No sale.

Oh, almost forgot. During all this I drink heavy. I drink to fill an emptiness that can’t be filled, an emptiness that elbows its way in. Beer. Bourbon. Scotch. Wine. Doesn’t matter. Hell, even NyQuil once when I forgot to stock up.

I drink in the living room in the dark. I drink talking to myself. I drink talking to my Maureen, as if she’s there. I don’t cry. I can’t cry. I wish I could.

I place my pistol on the table next to me. I want it to end. I know I promised Maureen I wouldn’t, but she’d understand.

Between Maureen’s life insurance and the sale of the home, my brother and Maureen’s sister and their kids will get a big-ass payout. True, I off myself and that snuffs out my life insurance. No money from that. But they’ll still do OK. More than OK.

A couple of days after the sale craters, the rain pounds the roof, giving way to stretches of — I don’t know, it’s like an eclipse, is how I’d describe it — then more rain. Night lasts for 24 hours.

And I’m drinking like it’s my job. I clock in early. Work overtime. I don’t shave. I don’t shower. I don’t even tie my workboots. I blackout in the lounge chair facing the front door. Wake up. Stumble to the kitchen. Grab more of whatever’s handy. Find my way back to the lounger. Drink more. Blackout again.

I decide to blow my brains out the next time I wake up. But when I do wake up next time it’s because I hear someone pushing his way into my house. My house. It’s like he’s breaking into my memories, the only things keeping me going this long.

My relator would always call before coming over and she’d give the secret knock. Some homes in the neighborhood had been robbed lately.

I think, “Not me, asshole.” I grab the gun. Put it on my lap. I sort of pet it like I might pet a shaky little dog.

Why, oh why, didn’t I just call out, “Who’s there?” Because I’d lose the element of surprise. Maybe I thought that. Oh, man, Juan, I forget what I thought or if I thought at all. When this big guy bursts in, large and dark in the dim light, I react. I shoot him three times.

The rest is a horrible mess. I’d forgotten that my realtor said that she’d give other realtors in her office the keys to my house.

Soon, cops and flashing lights and I’m being led away to jail and what I can remember about all of it I try not to remember.

Your Dad assumed I’d moved out. I assumed your Dad wanted to rob me. He thought the house was empty. That I’m already gone. He wants to take a look. And it wasn’t night, as I thought, but two in the afternoon on a workday.

The law clears me. They talk about the Castle Doctrine. You’re allowed to defend your property. That’s what I thought I was doing. Also, allowances made for my drunken gloominess.

The public exonerates me. Time erases me because something else always pushes yesterday’s news further and further back until it’s, like, last year’s news, and who remembers last year’s news?

I don’t exactly decide to slow-kill myself. I just sort of stop living. Quit my job. Kept my house. It’s all paid off. Lived off my savings, 401K, old-fashioned pension. Got a diagnosis for mental health issues which means I can collect. Went on Medicare, Medicaid. Get one of the charities to bring me dinners.

Maureen was insured for a half-million dollars. I set up a trust fund for your college like your mother wants.

And at least five days a week I would walk to the Carefree Copilot. Land around four. The people there know about me. They understand I’m not the same guy. They save my seat for me as if I’m special.

I drink, and stumble home at first but then the owner comes up with a system where somebody drives me home. Or I cab it. Or lately it’s uber.

I drink and I stare. I still drink at home. Sure. But home’s a killing field for me. Not just because of your dad, Juan. Did I mention that my Maureen passed away in bed right beside me?

So, I guess I am really killing myself. But death for me takes its own sweet time. The only time I go to a shrink, she tells me to assume that at any given moment nobody — absolutely nobody — thinks about me. Everybody’s got their own shit.

But God thinks about me.

Not the Jesus-buddy who divvies up forgiveness, but the God who asks, “Connor, what have you done?” The same God who asked, “Cain, where is your brother?”

You know who else doesn’t clear me?

Maureen. In dreams she looks at me with the same look she’d hit me with when she was alive whenever I screwed up royally. (Often.)

Just looks at me. I talk to her. In dreams. But she don’t answer.

_______________

I stop reading to discover that more customers have filed into the Carefree Copilot: postal workers and maybe bus drivers and other people who don’t have to wait until 5 to end their day.

The music’s turned up. A loop of oldies that some customers interrupt with their phone apps to hear songs that came out in my lifetime, or at least theirs.

I rub my eyes.

I asked Mami a few days after first reading Connor McDevitt’s letter, “Do you forgive him?”

“I pray for him.”

“But do you forgive him?”

“Mark 9:24,” she says.

I shrug. I don’t know the Gospels.

Mami explains. “It says, ‘I believe; help thou my unbelief!’”

“What does that. . .”

She says, “I am praying something like, ‘I forgive; help thou my unforgiveness.’ Been praying that for years.”

“He paid for my college.”

“I should forgive him, even if he never did any of that,” she says. “Forgiveness means everything.”

“It does?”

“Prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. . .’

“Mami, what are you doing?”

“Those are some of the cardinal virtues.”

She really doesn’t like it that I don’t go to church no more. It’s just not for me. I don’t exactly not believe in a God. But a lot of religion is, let’s face it, bullshit. But in Mami’s home, God lives.

I say, “OK. The cardinal virtues.”

“But forgiveness is the one mentioned in the Our Father. We need to forgive.”

“Do we?”

Silence settles upon us for a moment. We’re thinking.

Finally, I say, “And now this Connor dude wants me to forgive him? This guy who killed Papi. Who brought so much misery into your life, Mami.”

“It was an accident. He was drunk.”

“If I got killed by a drunk driver, Mami, would you ever forgive that driver?”

“Cancel that thought!” Mami says. She’s always shooing away bad juju.

“But would you forgive that drunk driver?” I persist.

Here, she bows her head. She might be praying. She does that a lot. People think she’s thinking. I know she’s praying.

“Mami?”

“It would be difficult. Most difficult. But you have to do it.”

“I do?”

_______________

Tattoo stops by again.

“You don’t like Smithwicks, Juan? I can get you something else. No charge.”

She remembers my name and offers to pour me one on the house. Wow. She’s no dummy. In fact, I’m thinking that she went to college, maybe majoring in something artsy fartsy and finds out too late that artsy fartsy don’t pay no bills.

I lift the Smithwicks like I’m holding it up to the light, and quaff as she watches. Seems like I don’t have much choice but to drink some now. It is good and when I exhale, I say, “Nice! I’ll probably order another soon.”

Now go away.

That first taste; I wanted it to be significant. A start to a difficult spiritual decision that I might make. That, eventually, I must make. I guess it doesn’t really matter all that much if that happens with the second pint.

My cell buzzes. A text from Mami.

She asks, “How did interv go?”

I applied for a job with one of the main health insurance companies in the Philly area.

I tapback a thumbs-up emoji. Text: “Tlkng 2 hm nxt wk.”

I’ll need to do a little research on that hiring manager. Get an idea of the best approach.

Mami asks, “Where r u?”

I stopped home and changed out of my job-hunting dress suit before coming here.

I text: “Wut we talked abt.”

We talked about a lot of stuff since graduation, not just Connor McDevitt’s letter and all this forgiveness stuff.

When I get set up in a job, me and a couple of friends plan to move in together in Northern Liberties. I’m the last of Mami’s kids to leave. She’s got some empty nest stuff going on.

Sometimes I imagine what Papi would say to me. He’d definitely tell me to move out and move on. I wonder, “Would he be proud of me?”

I never actually say this out loud, but Mami knows. She says, “You make Alberto smile every day, m’hijo.”

She said this often even after I’d been a brat or, when older, got into trouble at school or on the streets. I mean, Mrs. Isabella Garcia herself; she would chew me out, ground me. She would take no shit. But she always told me that I make Papi smile.

I was only 7 when Connor McDevitt killed him. But I feel his essence. His strength. His kindness. His optimism. His wisdom. Yes, only 7. But I know him well.

I think of all the things good fathers do with their kids. The roughhousing. Teaching how to throw a baseball. How to shoot a basket. How to look for adventure. The importance of taking risks. How to live. How to be a man.

Papi, tall and lanky, played tight end in high school. Made all state. Nice mix of quickness and strength. Blew out his knee in senior year of college but the scholarship still held.

Majored in business and did well but then came some office politics and downsizing, so he drifted into real estate and found he had a knack. He liked working on commission. Felt it gave him control over his destiny.

He often switched from clean shaven to a nicely trimmed beard. I think it had something to do with superstition. Mami loved looking at his face either way.

The laugh, though. That’s what people remember. Like water gushing from a fire hydrant cooling off little kids on the hottest days of summer.

I imagine what wisdom Papi would impart to his grown son. I can almost hear him. He tells me not to fall into the traps of life.

“This silly notion that you’re supposed to be happy all the time. This silly notion that it’s all about self-fulfillment. This silly notion that comfort is everything. This silly notion that. . . “

Tells me that it’s great about my computer science degree because that will pay the bills. But. . .

“You are creative, m’hijo,” he says. “Feed that part of you.”

I used to draw a little. I used to play guitar a little. I used to write stories a little. I used to like to be in the plays in high school. A little.

Used to. Used to. Used to. Used to.

Papi would say, “Drive down the Schuylkill Expressway some beautiful spring or autumn afternoon and notice the people along the way with their easels set up painting with watercolors. Will any of them ever make money from what they’re doing? Will any of them ever get famous?”

Probably not, I think.

“Do what you love on the side, m’hijo. Don’t let that part of you die.”

Ever since reading the Connor McDevitt letter I’ve been hoping to imagine Papi’s voice again, as I so often do but nothing comes to me. I want to ask him about forgiving this Connot McDevitt. Then I think that’s crazy.

The Papi I hear and see is imaginary, I remind myself, and sometimes the imagination just sputters out. And Connor McDevitt? Well, he does talk to me from the other side in this letter of his.

_______________

I don’t blame you if you don’t forgive me, Juan. I took your father. I’m dead if you’re reading this. I am in purgatory. That’s the best I can hope for in an afterlife, if there is an afterlife.

“Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory,” the nuns used to say.

If I’m not there for killing your father, then I’m there for drunkenness, for wasting the last years of my life wallowing in self-pity and self-hating, which don’t do nobody one damn bit of good.

Think of the better stuff I could have been doing. Even if it was just going to church all the time and praying for people. I could have been doing that. God offered that as a way to redemption. But no, not me. Pour me another Smithwicks.

But if you can forgive me. . .

GPS isn’t much help in trying to find a specific gravestone in a cemetery. So, I’ve drawn a little map here to give you an idea of where I’m buried. Me and Maureen.

Only if you want. Only if you want. Please find me and say a prayer and tell me that you forgive me for killing your father. I don’t know if I’ll hear you. I don’t know what happens when you die. I hope there’s a heaven and that I’m going there eventually but there’s not much wiggle room in the “thou shalt not kill” rule.

But you will hear you, I believe, and that’s something. That’s everything. Forgiveness sets people free. Forgiving me heals you, Juan. Forgive and forget. Forgetting is the reward for forgiving.

_______________

I did visit Connor McDevitt’s grave a few weeks ago, following his map. And I really did want to forgive him. Or, if not forgive him, at least pray like Mami prays.

“Help me, God, to forgive this man who’d taken so much from me.”

I stood before his grave among lines of granite markers at attention on a cloudless day. I’d never seen a sky so blue.

A shadow moves across the ground thrown by a pretty good-sized bird. I look up, can barely make it out because it turns toward the sun. I shield my eyes and wait for it to reappear but after a few moments give up.

I pray a little for Connor McDevitt. But I just can’t bring myself to say, “I forgive you.” What is forgiveness anyway? I mean, you can see how it affects people if they decide to forgive. I guess the same way nobody can hold love in their hands and measure it. No blood test or X-ray will find forgiveness. You can’t taste it, see it, smell it, crush it.

It exists where invisible stuff hides. Stuff like love or kindness or courage or gratitude. Or stuff like hate or cruelty or cowardice or thanklessness.

They might as well be imaginary because it takes a choice to make them real. To say, “I can’t show you what forgiveness looks like, but I can show you what it does.”

It’s real. It can’t be faked. And it’s not really imaginary. It’s not the square root of negative 1.

At Connor McDevitt’s grave I say, “I forgive you.” But I know that’s not true. I just know it. I think of all the life I could have shared with Papi. And this pathetic drunk takes that from me.

I add, “Help thou my unforgiveness?”

Just then the shadow of the bird once again appears and this time I get a decent look at whatever bird it is. Watch as it flies out of sight.

I drive away a little disappointed in myself, contemplating the gap between what people should do and what they do do.

_______________

“Help thou my unforgiveness.”

I raise my new pint of Smithwicks. Not high. Not that noticeable a gesture and yet Tattoo notices. That girl notices everything, apparently.

“Did you just toast somebody or something?”

She’s smiling. She’s playing with me.

In fact, I did toast Connor McDevitt. As I did, I thought, “I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.” And for just the slightest instance I felt something. I forgave him. At least in that instance. It’s a start. A work in progress.

I say to Tattoo: “No. I was just. . . What do you mean? Toast? I was, you know. . . ”

I was found out, is what I was.

“That was a toast,” she insists. “Are you toasting Connor? I never, myself, met him. Before my time here. But, still, I’ll raise a glass with you. Are you thinking about him?”

“Actually, no. Thinking about something that’s sort of a mystery.”

“Huh? Like what?”

“Do you cross examine all your customers?”

“I’m known for it. I’m majoring in criminal justice.”

“Where?”

She tells me she's going to community college and hopes to do so well there that she gets a scholarship to Temple for her bachelor's degree.

I think of the mountain of debt that most of my classmates face; debt that Connor McDevitt helped me dodge.

“That’s a good move,” I say. Community college is affordable.

She nods. “Humm humm.”

I expect her to be off then, but instead she leans in, placing both hands on the bar, waiting for my answer.

“Well,” I say, “I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking about, but you won’t understand it.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s the square root of negative 1?”

“The what of the what?”

“It’s an imaginary number.”

She looks at the ceiling, searching for a clue. Then she shrugs.

“They didn’t teach that in the seminary.”

“Where?”

“In the seminary. I wanted to be a priest. It didn’t work out.”

“A priest?”

“Yes. I wanted to be an Episcopal priest.”

“Wow.”

“Wow what?”

Wow, she doesn’t look like somebody who’d want to become a priest, but I don’t say that.

“These” she says stepping back and motioning to the tattoos on her arms, “would usually be covered. The Episcopal church isn’t like the Catholic. Tats aren’t really frowned upon, and some of my mentors said it can help my ministry. Especially with younger people.”

“But you left the seminary,” I say.

“About eight months ago. A hard decision.”

I think I know the reason. She fell in love, I’m betting. I spot the nametag pinned on her.

“So, what does your boyfriend or husband or whoever do for a living, Bridget?” I nod at her forearm. “Is Tim his name?”

She laughs.

“No,” she says, putting her finger on the tattoo. “This is a Bible verse.”

I’ll look it up later.

I say, “So, no Tim?”

She looks at me with a gentleness that makes me feel even more awkward. Like she discovered some sour secret about me, and she’s all right with it.

“Are you asking me out on a date, Juan Garcia?”

“Um. . .

“I am at the moment unattached.”

“I. . . Will you. . . Would you. . .”

“God,” Bridget says. “This is painful.”

Just then a plane rumbles by, giving me an out.

I say, “I can’t tell if these planes are landing or taking off.”

“I can,” Bridget says. “That one’s taking off. Now, as you were saying?”