I was a stay-at-home dad for five years, while Tonya worked downtown at the Key Bank building. Our daughter Cosi and I would leave our rented duplex on Fletcher and drive the short way downtown to meet with Tonya for lunch. Tonya and I would share a sandwich while she breastfed Cosi. It was a good arrangement. I miss those meetings. It forced space and time on us at a time when we had neither.

One day I’m parked in front of the Key Bank Building on West Market, waiting for Tonya to come downstairs, and someone knocks on my window. It’s a UPS guy, and he motions for me to roll down my window. I do, maybe I’m blocking a loading zone. I start to apologize. He stops me.

“I know you,” he says, and he proceeds to recount my home address, which freaks me out a little. “I recognized your minivan. I used to rent your house.” Ah, I smile back. I mention the rain gear meant for Alex, like it’s a shared inside joke we have.

UPS guy smiles a slight smile, and explains: he’d lived in that house because he was Alex’s boyfriend. And yes, Alex did have crazy parties with rain gear, because Alex was crazy, but he was also crazy brilliant. Alex was an artist. And though I’ve never seen Alex, I can see this couple working as a couple in my head; Alex the loud crazy rain-gear one, and this UPS guy the sane, reasonable one.

UPS guy tells me that Alex was always painting something. He even painted murals on all the walls of every room in the house. His house, my house, where I live, my walls.

I ask where Alex is now, and if he wants his rain gear back, but the second I ask, I regret it, and I realize UPS guy has been talking about Alex in the past tense.

He looks down Market Street and past the Monument. His words slow, stuttered, delicate. I can barely hear him for the traffic. Alex is dead. I don’t dare ask how. He says after Alex died, it fell to him to paint over all the murals in the house.

And then we moved in, unbeknownst, days after.

Fuck me.

“Anyway,” UPS Guy says, patting my car door like a pillow, or a baby’s head, “I just wanted you to know. Know that Alex was amazing.”

I don’t say anything, I don’t think I’m expected to, and he walks back to his brown delivery truck and drives off. But when I go home after lunch and get Cosi down for a nap, I walk downstairs and I sit in the living room. It’s quiet, only the white noise of the baby monitor. I stare at the cream colored walls and try to see something through the cheap paint. I look outside and expect to see a UPS truck driving by.

I think about Alex, dead, his work and life and art and sex around me like a blanket, like a ghost, and I am discomforted. I am discomforted by my discomfort.

Is Alex haunting me, here in this moment as the dust passes through the piano window’s sunbeam?

Maybe that’s what the suburbs were for: getting away from the ghosts.