Excerpt from JoySorrow “Julian at the bagel shop”

There was a bagel shop near Julian’s high school. He would go there for breakfast sometimes. He associated the shop with Julie since the old man had loved cream cheese and would ask for a different flavor every time. The day after the crash, Julian entered the shop and watched a man in a suit lower his body into a booth. His slicked back hair made him look like a FBI agent or a con man. Julian walked by the man and ordered an onion bagel with butter. It was too soon for cream cheese, even though he shared his grandfather’s love for it. The thought of biting into a bagel with cream cheese was painful in that he knew it would taste like the pain of caring for a dying man. He didn’t thank God that Julie was dead. Rather, in a way that an outsider could consider selfish, he thanked Julie for dying. There’s no denying that Julie was a burden, as most people are when they reach a certain age. Who’s to say that children aren’t a burden on their parents, no matter the ways in which sun-faced mothers and fathers laud their little boys and girls as buckets of joy and the best things that ever happened to them? A burden can be a blessing, certainly. After his death, Julie still provided for his grandson, the orphan who had to grow up too soon. When he was still alive, Julie shared wisdom and compassion, teaching his grandson that misfortune introduced strength. Julian knew that it was only because of his grandfather that he even knew what being strong meant. Yet, Julie was dead, and it was better that way.

The con man sitting in his booth a few down from Julian’s focused on his bagel instead of catching Julian’s eye. He read The Economist and jotted down some notes or statistics in his notebook. Julian thought that the man might have been drawing pie charts since his hand moved in circles for several seconds. Sometimes Julian felt awkward observing people, like he shouldn’t be allowed to peek into the windows of so many people who just seem to be living their lives. He wasn’t one to watch a panning shot of a tsunami on the news and try to imagine what it’s like to live or die in such a catastrophe. The men, because they were men more often than women, that he observed lamented no urgent misery, they displayed no hopeless endangerment. They weren’t open, exposing their raw flesh to horny gnats or epithets. These men were only what Julian made of them. He created their resumes and chose to groom their hair in the morning either with an ivory comb or a mildewed, wooden brush missing patches of bristles. Now that Julie was dead, Julian began developing more intricate histories for the men he saw. Maybe in doing this he’d happen upon fractions of his father.