Mas sobre mi padre

He says, "Will you count some money for me?" I say, "Sure."

He reaches into a pocket of his topcoat and pulls out a pad of bills as thick as a desk calendar. They are restrained by a ragged leather wallet wrapped with a rubber band. He leans toward me from the armchair and hands me the wad.

There are more bills stuffed into a secondary compartment of the wallet. He begins counting those himself.

The sun coming through the window is falling directly into his eyes as he hunches over the work, turned sideways in the chair. I pull the blind. The Lions are losing to the Redskins on TV.

We count the money. I arrange hundred-dollar bills in piles of ten, get momentarily derailed when I hit a seam of fifties and twenties, but continue counting extra carefully until I've assembled nine piles of a thousand dollars each and one pile of eight hundred. He hands over two hundred from his stack to make it an even ten thou by me on the couch, plus four hundred on the ottoman.

He was going to buy a Cadillac Seville from a guy in Grosse Pointe, he says, but the car had been Bondo'd and the guy had lied about it and he'd offered the guy seven thousand on the spot but the guy said no go. And besides, the '78 Coupe DeVille he's driving was plenty good enough, and why should he be looking to buy a Seville at his age anyway?

I said he should buy a Seville if he wanted to, because so what? It's his money, his life.

Throughout all this, my father's navy blue skipper's cap with the patent-leather brim (exactly like the skipper's cap his idol Frank Sinatra wore in Pal Joey) never leaves his head. Nor does he doff his topcoat.

One of my kids later asked if Grandpa was a policeman. I told her huh-uh: my father was a character in a book by Charles Dickens.

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