The Favorite Daughter

by Patti Callahan Henry

The girls and Hallie reached Colleen’s side, and Hallie said softly, “I know.” Then she opened the door, and afternoon light shot through in a single burst and then scattered across the room. In identical movements the sisters brought their palms to their brows to shade their eyes. Hallie stepped into the light and closed the door, leaving Colleen inside.

  THE MEMORY BOOK

  Interview with Aunt Rosalind and Uncle Fred

  The color photo of Gavin and his younger sister, Rosalind Donohue Parsons, lay on the kitchen table in the Donohue home. In the photo Dad and Aunt Rosie sat together at a round table covered with a bright blue tablecloth. A centerpiece of balloons and flowers dominated the right side of the image. Behind them hung a banner announcing 1979 and HAPPY GRADUATION. Gavin wore a black graduation gown, open to reveal a dark blue suit with a wide green-and-blue-plaid tie. His long hair touched his shoulders. He was smiling and his arm was cast over Aunt Rosie’s shoulder. She was wearing a flowered dress, and her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, yet her bangs were overpuffed and shadowing her face. Her blue eye shadow was the brightest thing in the photo.

  Colleen dialed Aunt Rosie’s number, and she knew the drill—Aunt Rosie, Dad’s only sibling, would answer the phone and then call for Uncle Fred before placing the call on speakerphone. Together they would scream into the receiver while the radio or TV blared in the background.

  “Hello?” Aunt Rosie’s pack-a-day deep voice was warmly familiar to Colleen.

  “Aunt Rosie, it’s Colleen.”

  “My lovely Lena. Let me get your uncle. He will be devastated to think he missed a chance to talk to you.”

  The predictability of her aunt’s reaction cheered Colleen. She settled back in the chair and glanced around the family kitchen. It sure could use some updating, but why bother? Wasn’t it fine as it was? She thought of the man she’d met at the bar—Beckett—and what he would think of people’s constant desire to throw out the old in favor of the new.

  Then Rosie and Fred were both on the phone, hollering their greetings. Colleen explained the memory book they were making as a surprise for Gavin’s birthday, and asked if they would help.

  Rosie spoke up first. “Your brother told me your dad is having some memory problems. Is he okay, Lena?”

  “Oh, Aunt Rosie. He is having problems. That’s part of the reason for the memory book. But we’re managing it, getting him the best help.”

  “Oh, he’ll be fine, my dear. No one in our family suffers from memory issues. We all meet our maker in other ways.”

  Uncle Fred cleared his throat and let out what was probably a laugh but sounded more like a coughing fit. “Go on, then,” he said. “What can we do for you? We’re very excited we’ll see you soon.”

  Colleen described the photo as best she could, and then waited.

  Rosie spoke softly through the lines; remembering the day long since passed seemed to erase years from her voice. “Oh, Gavin’s graduation from the University of Virginia was spectacular. All he could talk about was his upcoming trip to Ireland. He was convinced he would find the Donohues’ castle and we’d all turn out to be royalty. There was shrimp cocktail and martinis. Your grandparents hired a four-piece band with trumpets. Trumpets, I’m telling you—it was fancy for sure. Your mother—well, she spent most of the day crying about him leaving the next morning. Poor thing.”

  Uncle Fred’s voice sounded deep and resonant. “How come you can’t remember to pick up the dry cleaning but you remember your brother’s graduation day so perfectly?”

  “Because I love my brother and I don’t love the dry cleaner. You be quiet and get back to your Golf Channel that’s so exciting. Anyway, Lena, we celebrated in grand style at the country club and your dad kissed Ms. Elizabeth good-bye and off he went to Ireland.”

  Uncle Fred chimed in, “A shame what happened then. Poor Elizabeth.”

  Colleen stared at the photo. Her mother wasn’t in it—wasn’t even part of the background. “A shame?” she asked.

  “Oh, pay him no mind. He’s still thinking of her terrible death. We all are, dear. We miss her very much.”

  “I miss her, too, Aunt Rosie.”

  “Well, darling Lena, we will see you soon.”

  Colleen hung up the phone and felt her skin tingle in irritation at Aunt Rosie pitying her mother. There was nothing about Elizabeth Donohue that warranted the word “poor,” that was for damn sure.

  Colleen set her mind to typing the story, imagining her dad at college graduation, and headed for his European trip, so full of adventure for whatever might come next in his life.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

  Michel de Montaigne, Essays

  Seated in the Donohue family kitchen, Colleen hit save twice, always twice, on the third story she’d written that day from interviews with the folks in her dad’s photos. Aunt Rosalind had been the last. The first photo was of a baseball team circa fifth grade showing Gavin and his best friend, Nick. She’d spoken to Nick’s mother and learned that Nick had died in a car crash fifteen years ago, but she’d relayed a story of the time Gavin and Nick tried to build a baseball diamond in the backyard by burning the grass into a diamond shape using gasoline. What trouble they got in, she’d said as she laughed.

  For the second photo, of Gavin standing in front of a schoolroom blackboard with high school history teacher Mr. Tuttle, she’d been able to find and speak to the man who’d instilled in Gavin his love of Ireland’s past and its poetry. Writing the mini stories came quickly and easily to Colleen, and with each phone call she’d felt she knew her dad a bit better, loved him a lot more. Why did children find it so hard to accept that their parents’ lives began well before their children were born? Now, discovering Dad before he was Dad felt both jolting and exciting, as if she were learning even more about her own life.

  This would be Colleen’s third night at home, and she was well into accomplishing her tasks for Shane. Somehow she’d managed to avoid Hallie and the girls for a full twenty-four hours, but that wasn’t going to last but a few more minutes.

  The aroma of peach cobbler filled the house. This was the one dish Colleen knew how to make and each time she baked it, she felt calm and right with the world. Sometimes she baked it and never ate a bite, giving it to a neighbor or friend. Everything else in the kitchen was a mystery, her every attempt to follow the simplest recipe, with only four ingredients, becoming an inevitable failure. She was reminded of chemistry class when she blew up the Bunsen burner and was sent to the principal’s office for “not following directions.”

  Her dad had picked her up from high school that afternoon and told the principal, “Yes, that might be the theme of her life: not following directions.”

  When she’d slid into the car, the edges of her hair singed and smelling like they did the morning after a campfire, she’d started to cry. “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Little lark, why would I want a daughter who always follows directions? As the Irish say, bless your little Irish heart and every other Irish part.”

  “Dad!”

  “That includes your clumsy need to forge your own path.”

  Colleen had known that if it had been any of her other friends, they would have been in deep trouble with their dads. But not hers; he turned the worst of her into a positive, into another small aspect of his daughter to be celebrated and honored.

  Colleen went over to the oven and leaned down to open the door, inhaled the sweet aroma of the peaches she’d bought at a roadside stand bubbling under a pastry crust. She slipped on hot mitts and pulled out the baking dish, setting it on the stove to cool. Somehow Shane had convinced their dad to miss an hour or so at the pub that evening so he could eat supper with his children at home. Colleen was cooking. Which meant she was reheating a store-bought chicken-and-poppy-seed
casserole, steaming broccoli and baking the cobbler.

  The needle on the old record player, a black box set on the side buffet, spun around with a Frank Sinatra LP that her dad kept on it. More albums in faded dust jackets filled a box under the buffet. But Sinatra was just fine for now, his voice a soothing embrace—“Fly me to the moon.”

  “Lena?” Shane’s voice called out as he entered the back door. “My God, it smells good in here.” He entered the kitchen and gave her a hug. “Peach cobbler. Please never leave.”

  She kissed her brother’s cheek. “Anything for you. And you’ll be pleased. I’ve finished three stories today.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you can go back to New York early. And I’ll be needing more of this.”

  “One can’t live on cobbler alone. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  He headed to the fridge. “Hallie and Dad are on the way.”

  Colleen spun around, hitting the side of the cobbler pan and burning the edge of her pinky. She shook her hand in the air. “Shit.” Then she looked at Shane. “Is Walter coming?”

  “Only the girls.” He fished a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and popped the top against the underside of the counter. He took a long swig, and then pressed the cold bottle to his forehead. “You know, of course, that you’ll have to see Walter at some point.”

  “I saw him yesterday.”

  Shane’s eyebrows rose. “You did?”

  “Don’t worry. He didn’t see me. I didn’t do anything; I didn’t say anything. It was weird. He wasn’t . . . Walter, if that makes any sense. He was just a guy, a guy I used to know.” She smiled. “So when I see him, I’ll behave.”

  “Behave? That’s not really your forte.” He laughed and Colleen twisted the dishrag into a thin rope and snapped his arm with it.

  “Ow. Damn, sis.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Oh, yes, I am.”

  Colleen made a face at him. “Will you watch the timer for the casserole? I want to walk to the river for just a few minutes before dinner. Maybe even cast the net.”

  “Will do.”

  Colleen took her own bottle of beer from the refrigerator and headed out the back door, allowing the quick slap-slam of the screen door to echo across the yard. The grass was soft beneath her sandals and she tossed them from her feet to one side of the stairs. The loamy earth shifted beneath her toes and she ambled slowly to the dock. At its end stood a gray heron, his neck curved in a majestic C. His wings were tightly wrapped around his body as he stared to the horizon.

  Colleen stepped carefully, playing a familiar childhood game—to see how close she could get before the bird flew away. She’d always envied the herons’ ability to be utterly themselves, and completely at one with their landscape.

  “Each of us is unique,” her dad had said to her one afternoon in a reverential voice on the dock, as they watched a pod of dolphins swim by in an achingly beautiful choreography. “Who would choose to be anything but what they are created to be?”

  And Colleen had vowed, all those years ago when she was twelve years old, to be only herself, exactly what she was meant to be. But that promise had been lost with all the others because she’d invented a new Colleen. And who was to say that this new version was exactly the one she was supposed to be? Maybe there were many selves she could be; maybe it wasn’t so static and unwavering. She could become someone new and then another someone new. There was no marble-cast Colleen, defined by someone else and then carved. And yet, and yet, there was a truth that had to be tapped, a real Colleen that needed her voice to be heard among the louder voices of expectation. What was that? Who was that?

  She approached the dock on tiptoe, and made it only two steps before the great heron spread its wings and rose from the edge of the dock. Its feathers gray and speckled, white and dense, spread before her. A lump rose in her throat at the beauty. She swallowed it with a swig of beer and watched the heron skim across the river before settling on a sandbar exposed at low tide. The oyster shells created a crusted edge around tall summer-green spartina grass. The heron standing on its stick legs seemed to stare at Colleen with a message she would never understand.

  She set the beer bottle on the built-in wooden bench and opened the rusted metal box that contained fishing equipment. The shrimp net lay puddled in the bottom tangled and damp. She withdrew the net and shook it out, droplets of water splattering across her cotton tank top and shorts, ones she’d found in the bottom drawer in her old bedroom. Who had used the net last? Dad never would have put it back in the chest so tangled and wet—it was a strict rule: clean it; dry it; wrap it.

  Here was another hint that Dad’s brain was failing. Even as she stood on the dock and Hallie drove him there for dinner, those neurons were twisting; plaque was growing along the axons like moss between the stones of their walkway, slowly, inexorably.

  Colleen hoisted the net onto her lap as she took a seat on the bench. Her fingers began disentangling it, pulling here and stretching there in an intuitive motion. If only she could do the same to her dad’s brain. If only she could reach in and . . .

  “Lena!” his voice called out from across the yard. She waved at her dad and then stood as her nieces ran toward the dock, still wearing their tutus from the previous day. Rosie reached her first. “Will you teach us? Will you? Mom said you would.”

  “Teach you what?” Colleen smiled at the sheer enthusiasm, uncontained and free.

  “To throw the net.”

  “Your dad knows how,” Colleen said with a bite of bitterness she wondered if the girls could hear.

  “Not as good as you,” Rosie said. “Mom said so. You’re the best.”

  Colleen held up the net. “Well, this one is too tangled to throw. We’ll have to do another one later or wait until it’s untangled.”

  “It doesn’t work when it’s tangled,” Sadie said, tears forming in her blue eyes, eyes just like Walter’s.

  The little girl’s words flew like the heron across the river, settling into the crevices of Colleen’s fear. It doesn’t work when it’s tangled.

  Without thinking, Colleen drew the little girl to her and wiped away her tears. Surprised, Sadie at first went rigid and then flung herself off Colleen and against her sister. As Colleen contained her slight hurt at Sadie’s rejection, she heard Rosie say in a too-grown-up voice, “We’ll fix it, Sadie. We will.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The dinner table was lively with overlapping conversations and the ringing laughter of two little girls who had their own jokes and method of communicating. Rosie engaged with Colleen, but Sadie still shrank back. Hallie had brought wildflowers, from the same roadside stand where Colleen had found the peaches, and set the bouquet in their mom’s favorite blue glass vase in the center of the table.

  They were getting along just fine, but it all felt so tremulous, so fragile. It would take one wrong word, one wrong motion, and it could all go badly. They trod carefully, talking of not much important and engaging the little girls as distraction. When Shane was finished eating, he nudged away his plate and settled into his seat.

  “Don’t go back to the pub,” Colleen said. “Let’s all stay here.”

  Hallie raised her fork in the air. “You used to say that all the time when we were kids, trying to keep Dad from going to work. ‘Let’s all just stay here for this one night.’”

  “But this time I mean it.” Colleen stood and began to clear the table; she piled dishes one on top of the other, held two glasses loosely between her fingers. “Even though I know the answer is always the same.” Colleen set the plates in the sink, but her fingers slipped and the water glasses fell, hitting the porcelain farm sink and shattering with a startling sound. For a slice of a second she was back in the church alcove, the bottle hitting stone. She jumped back and grimaced, staring at the shards of glass sprayed across
the counter and floor.

  “It’s not a party until Lena breaks something,” Hallie said with a laugh.

  “Speaking of parties, I heard a joke today,” Dad said.

  “No!” all three siblings stated in unison.

  “Yes, yes,” the nieces cried.

  Colleen wiped glass from the sink and counter with a paper towel and tossed it in the trash before heading to the broom closet.

  Their dad was the worst joke teller in the world; they all knew it. He missed punch lines. He left out the important parts. He tried again and again and the family had come to both love and dread the jokes he brought to the table.

  “Tell me!” Rosie cried out, standing on her chair and raising her own magic wand, similar to the one she’d made for Colleen but with more sparkles, if that was possible.

  “Why did the physics teacher break up with the biology teacher?” Gavin paused and smiled in anticipation. When it was silent, he blurted out, “Because there was no chemistry.”

  All of them laughed, partly in relief; he’d actually told the joke correctly.

  Shane stood and held the dustpan for Colleen as she swept the glass shards into its basin. “It’s fiddle night, and we need to get back. I left Hank in charge and that’s only good for a couple hours, and then it’s like leaving the pub in the hands of a friendly golden retriever.”

  “I’m coming tonight.” Colleen tossed the fragments into the trash can. “I’ll finish these dishes later. I want to be with you guys, not here by myself while the house makes noises in the dark.”

  “I have a joke.” Their dad stood from the table and clapped his hands together.

  “Is it better than the last one?” Shane asked as he ran water over the dishes.

  “The last one?” Dad furrowed his brow and shook his head. “Okay, here goes. Why did the physics teacher break up with the biology teacher?” He paused again, just as before, and smiled. “Because there was no chemistry.”