I grew up in a house of coded language.

For example, when Dad was home with Rudy and Splintz hanging out, and some other guy was there, too, sitting on our leather couch, Dad would say something like “I’m goin’ in the kitchen to make me a ham sandwich,” I knew that that meant something else.

We’re Jewish and he hates ham sandwiches.

He’d go into the kitchen, then Rudy and Splintz, hanging out by the doorway, Splintz with his everpresent cig between his lips, would walk toward the guy on the couch, say, “Let’s go for a little drive,” (Benny, that one time) just like in the movies only this wasn’t no movie– and would stand the guy up and lead him to the door, saying “Later, Twigs,” though my name was Robert, cause, at twelve,  I was a skinny guy then, and that’s what they called me, before they shut the door and the guy they’d walked out I’d never see again.

And after the door shut, Dad would come back out of the kitchen, smoking a fat cigar, his gray, thinning hair all wet from sweat, and look at me, pat me on the shoulder in my chair by the kitchen table and say, “Don’t worry, Bobby, they’re just taking Marv for a drive. They’ll be back soon. His car broke down.”

So, that’s how it was in my house. Ever since Mom left us with the Cancer.

It took me many years to figure out what was really going on. That my dad was a Jewish gangster, no Meyer Lansky for sure, not in our small town of Uberville, but still, a gangster.

He owned a hardware store. I loved to roam the aisles there when I was young, checking out all the tools, nuts, and bolts. I’d hang out behind the counter with Dad, but there were always guys in the backroom hanging out, coming and going in dusty suits and crooked hats. It was a regular poker party all day long, the guys calling my dad “Boss,” even though they didn’t work in the store, one of them getting up after Dad went back there and Louie or Schmaltz or Bag Boy, always saying “See ya, kid,” or roughing my hair lightly before hurrying for the door on their way to their important “business.”

But Dad always steered me away from the “business,” as he called it, said I was too good for that. Sometimes he put it as I was too soft. Anyway, he said, I had advantages that he hadn’t had as a kid, that he hadn’t had the choices I did. So I went off to college. He was even willing to “pay the suckers off” to get me in – he didn’t really know how the whole college thing worked – but, thankfully, I didn’t need that, I had good grades, so I held him off from trying to do that, and I made it into the State University down in Gardenia, spent four years studying, got my accounting degree (I had a thing for numbers, maybe thanks to Dad, running numbers for him at an early age?) and set up my own little office in a nearby town (Jenksville), starting making it on my own. Met a nice woman (Gina), settled down, had a life outside all of that we had when I was a kid.

I’d go to visit the old man every now and then. I was always surprised when I went to visit him, how much older he looked, the paunch growing, the hair thinning, but then again, I didn’t visit him as much as I should have.

One time I stopped in the hardware store at around noon. My dad’s face lit up. He hugged me tight, said, “Just in time for lunch!” and led me to the back room. Nobody was back there just then, none of the old guys and I wondered where they all were. In their place was an old hound dog with floppy ears, lying on the floor next to the old poker table which was a surprise because we’d never had a dog.

“Lou,” I call him, Dad said, staring at me. I didn’t say anything. He just shrugged, reading my mind, and said, “I gave that all up, Bobby, you know that. I don’t need that life anymore. I’m an old man. So,” he said,” pausing for a moment, opening the door of at the old white 60’s GE fridge which had just started making its erratic humming noise, looking at me with a blank expression like he was lost, then said, “So what’ll you have for lunch?”

“How about a ham sandwich?” I laughed for a moment, but he just stared at me with a small, somber smile, freezing my laughter quick, and said nothing. Then the smile disappeared altogether, and his face was as still as an ancient stone wall. He shook his head and said, “It’s been a long life, Bobby. You don’t know. You’ll just don’t know.”

– Mitchell Waldman