Read The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) for Free Online

Helen at the airport.
    My mother and father each hugged her, and then I got to hug her too.
    To Helen Dad repeated his favorite stories: the division he worked for was shut down a year or two after he retired, because
     no one could do his job as well as he did; they had said he was too young to retire, and they had asked him to stay, but he
     had retired anyway; later they asked him to come back, but he refused, because he was enjoying retirement too much.
    Later I overheard Dad tell Helen he could see well enough to drive if he wanted to, which wasn’t true.
    In the garage I stood looking up at the many empty boxes, trying to pick one that would be about the right size.
    Dad gave me Ken’s Mexican leather jewelry box, whose contents included four fortune cookie slips:
    “An affectionate message, good tidings will come shortly.”
    “You will be asked to a wedding soon.”
    “You will overcome obstacles to achieve success.”
    “Success in everything.”
    Joan Didion once complained that a particular detail regarding a murder made for too obvious an irony, but she noted it anyway.
    To my surprise, my brother Ken’s old girlfriend, from before he was gay, e-mailed me. I hadn’t spoken to her since the memorial
     service, in 1989.
    While Dad and Helen napped, I tried to listen as Mom talked about their HMO, because health care was important, but afterwards
     I felt complicit with the accompanying complaints about my father.
    A new cosmos: in the rafters of my parents’ garage was an infinite number of cardboard boxes, left over from an infinite number
     of Christmases, birthdays, and anniversaries, and within each was an infinite number of boxes, and so on.
    Helen and I knelt in Mom’s study wrapping Christmas ornaments in tissue paper for mailing.
    At the top of the box we placed the thick envelope that said “FOR CLIFF/RE: KEN.”
    We didn’t learn of the air strikes on Afghanistan until my oldest brother, Paul, called from Boston to say hello.
    Christine’s e-mail told of how she had fallen out of touch with Ken and hadn’t even known he was sick when she received the
     call inviting her to his memorial service.
    Every story is simultaneously being written from someone else’s point of view.
    After I replied to Christine’s e-mail she was anxious to speak to me, and though I had told her I was in San Jose that week,
     she tried to call me in Brooklyn and then e-mailed me that she hadn’t been able to reach me.
    “My vision is really bad,” my father lamented.
    “Is it like you’re wearing sunglasses all the time?” I asked.
    “No, it’s like there’s a cloudy film over my eyes.”
    Helen and I selected expensive peaches in the fancy supermarket. I didn’t mention to her that Christine had contacted me,
     nor did I tell my parents, because it just seemed too complicated a subject for my last day in San Jose.
    Sublime and stately, the huge old magnolia in the calmly dying light.
    Mom’s stories: the uncooked broccoli on the cruise ship; the uncooked potato, the rude waiter, and the inedible rice pudding
     on a different cruise ship; Mom locked out of the house by Dad; Mom locked out of the house by my sister Carol when she was
     two; the riverboat that had to go to Cincinnati because the river was too high to go to St. Paul; the pretentious woman in
     the tour group who mistakenly cracked hersoft-boiled egg into her tiny egg cup; the first time Paul saw a “colored person,” whom he called a “dirty man”; Dad spilling
     his water in a dark restaurant and not noticing, which made Ken and Mom laugh; Mom and my late aunt laughing at the dinner
     table, when they were kids, because they could see the sun shining through their Uncle Al’s huge ears.
    At breakfast Helen said she disagreed with the bombing, that it would only make things worse, and with some of the old ferocity
     my father said we had to strike back or they’d just do it again.
    As I packed, Mom and Dad argued in the kitchen over