Many an adult has to deal with the loss of their parent, and eventually both their parents, when they die. They cry and they cry and then they grow out of it, and they look back on the times they shared with their parents when they were alive. Mark's father, though, hadn't done that. His breath had never cleared up of the stench of alcohol, and his smile never returned from the cheeks where it had vanished, and his plain brown eyes were never cleared of the tears. Mark looked at this face in his mind and he saw the crying, and the sleeping, and the drinking, and everything that he had sworn not to be. Yet the face of his father still looked remarkably like his.
He was seized now, with an urge to reach out to his father. He thought of his father's face that he had never seen unravaged by tears, and he thought of the heart inside him which was now thumping loudly, loud enough for him to feel it in his abdomen, his own heart which, too, had never washed itself of the pain that had been left behind by his grandmother. Mark couldn't remember if he had cried or not, when his grandmother left.
He felt tempted to simply be honest and logical with himself like a good accountant should be, and he was, he was a very good accountant. His co-workers loved him for being honest. His boss loved him for being logical. He was a hard worker and he never failed to look at things from an objective point of view. He was tempted to do this now, regarding the issue of his father, and his grandmother, and himself, as well as the disappearance and abandonment thereof. He wanted to take up his documents and files and categorise everything and find the answer in a single value at the bottom of the spreadsheet column. Honestly, and logically, he knew that he should admit that his grandmother was a lost cause and probably dead, and that his father was a lost cause and perhaps as good as dead, and that everything that was in the past was in the past, and to then conclude that he shouldn't have decided that late morning to think of that nonsense at all. And at the same time, he found he couldn't.
