by Kelly Harms
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, but I’m not leaving.”
It hits me in an instant: They sell walking canes here. I could do real damage with a walking cane, especially the ones with tripod feet at the bottom for added balance.
“Amy?” he asks again. Am I smiling? Maybe even grinning? Is this the day I finally well and truly crack up? I feel like I’m going to start to laugh, and I have no idea why. “Do you need to sit down?” John asks.
And then he does something so unacceptable, so beyond the pale, that I almost, almost decide to hell with the onlookers, to hell with the gossips, I am going to have to just scream at the top of my lungs to make him stop.
He reaches out to take my arm.
I whip it away. “Oh no,” I say, and all at once my wits come rushing back, and fantasies about physical assault and screaming and hiding all fall away, and at last, at long last, I am in the reality of this moment. I inhale. “I have no idea what you are doing here right now, John, but it has been three years since you showed your face, since you lived with me and my children and shared my bed and shared our table and shared our life every day, day in and day out. Three years. More than a thousand days. And you cannot come back here and shop in my drugstore and buy Band-Aids from my Band-Aid selection and try to take me by the arm like I’m some kind of invalid. Not after all those days and nights and mortgage payments and electricity bills and trips to the goddamned dentist. You cannot. You can not.”
John looks shamed. His sheepish smile has been replaced by a pain as deep and wide as my own. I see at once that he, too, has been in a canyon. And he thinks that I am the one with the rope.
He shakes his head as he speaks, and what he says are all the things I dreamed of him saying to me years ago when he first left us and my whole world fell apart. Only now they sound like a high, painful ringing in my ears.
“You’re right,” he says. “I’ve done something terrible, and I’m so, so sorry. But I’m not here to hurt you again. I’m here to fix things.”
“I don’t know how you could ever do that,” I tell him honestly.
“It’s not your job to figure that out,” he tells me, and the words are so disarming I am rendered speechless. “It’s mine. And that’s why I’ve come here. I want to be the man I should have been before, be a real father to our kids. I want to try to be the kind of father they deserve.” He picks up my basket off the ground. “I want to make things right.”
—
“He wants what now?”
My daughter, Corinne; my son, Joseph; and my best friend, Lena, are sitting in my—in our—house, a good-looking Foursquare within a short walk to the Country Day School where I work. Like most good-looking things, my house is high maintenance. My house makes it so I never, ever have any extra money. If my house starts to notice I’ve been squirreling away a hundred dollars here or there to try to get my kids to a national park for a week, the house breaks something. I think it has abandonment issues.
When John lived here, it was not a huge problem. He was terribly handy, happy to putter away in the house and fix what needed fixing and watch YouTube videos about how to do it all day long. When he broke down and called a contractor, his very solid paycheck as in-house council for a large food producer covered the bill.
The house was a project from the start, of course, a hundred years old when we moved in and not getting any younger. But oh, it was all fixable, one thing at a time. The wiring was brought up to code, the rot was pulled out of the walls, the basement was resealed, the wood siding was replaced in an architecturally dignified way. One thing at a time, no rush. Having grown up in Amish country without access to a Home Depot, John was incredibly competent at fixing just about anything with his own two hands.
Except, I guess, himself. To fix what was wrong in his life, he took a two-pronged approach: Step one, keep all his emotions a secret so that none of us knew anything was wrong. Step two, run away from his wife and family.
“He wants . . .” I fish around. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my kids believe their dad is an asshole now, after protecting his reputation—protecting their memories—for three long, lonely years. “He wants to spend time with you guys. He loves the hell out of you and always has. He hasn’t been here for you, and he regrets it.”
Cori makes a teenage mouth noise that has, since the time of cavemen, meant, “Bullshit, you don’t know anything / I’m inventing feelings right now / Get out of my way, old lady.” Sort of the sound you’d get if you tickled her while she sneezed. Thanks to two long and difficult labors, if I make that kind of snort-laugh sound, a little pee leaks out.
“Let’s hear what he has to say,” I say. “Let’s have a little family meeting and hear what he has to say.” And then, as though the very thought doesn’t make my stomach churn, I tell them what he told me in front of the Band-Aids, when I finally was calm enough to really listen. “Summer break is coming up, and he’s interested in spending the first week with you.”
“What?” asks Cori. “No. Absolutely not. Pass.”
That is exactly what I thought at first when he asked me. Absolutely not.
“I know how you feel, I think,” I say, then realize my mistake.
“You have no idea how I feel. Your dad didn’t abandon you the week you turned twelve.”
“That’s true.” Lord, am I patient with this girl. “But my husband did leave me with two wonderful kids and a wonderful, expensive house and no job or money, and I can use that situation to empathize with you.”
She rolls her eyes. “But it’s not you he wants to take back.”
And there it is—the secret superpower of teenage girls. She didn’t mean to, but her words cut to the heart all the same. Did I think he was coming back here for me? In that first instant when I heard him calling my name? When he tried to hug me when it was time to leave? When he looked at me with something like longing?
How could I not?
I set my chin. “I think the best move is to discuss this without extra drama. There will be no kidnapping. We will make this decision together, the four of us.”
“I already decided. No.”
Like mother, like daughter. Those were the very words I said to John when he first asked for a week with the kids. A week, to make up for being gone for three years. No. Not good enough.
“Let’s have that family meeting before deciding,” I say, faking some kind of disinterest. “I’d love to see what you can learn from him and the experience of facing someone who has caused you hardship.”
“Thing the first,” says my studious son. “He cannot come to a family meeting. Family meetings are for family only.”
Cori nods dramatically and crosses her arms. “Family only!” she echoes. I have to laugh. When the kids were little and I was in over my head from their nonstop bickering with each other, I’d sometimes say menacingly, “Don’t forget your father is coming home in two hours,” and they would immediately fall into line, suddenly the best of friends. Even now the mere thought of John’s appearance renders them a united front.
“Thing the second,” Joe goes on. “I have nothing to learn from my dad. Unless you want me to learn how to have a nervous breakdown and go to Hong Kong and use stupid younger women to rebuild my self-esteem at the expense of my existing family.”
I set my jaw. Should I be annoyed or grateful that Joe’s therapist is so good that he can put voice to all these feelings at the tender age of twelve?
“May I?” starts Lena. We all nod. Lena is part of the family in some weird way, or she’s become so in the last three years. Would I have survived John’s leaving without my best friend stepping up, helping with the kids, wrangling me a job, cooking my meals, holding my hand while I sobbed? I can’t imagine so.
Lena’s voice projects. “I think if we are going to rule against your father, to speak in his legal language, we need to think about what we would have to prove in court to cut off ties from him forever. According to my extensi
ve study of The Good Wife, we would need to prove he did real and irreparable damage to you guys by leaving.”
Cori, an unabashed fan of all legal dramas, pays attention. Joe, a fan of logic but rather disinterested in TV in general and dramas in specific, waits patiently.
“Did he do real, tangible damage to you guys?” asks Lena. “I would argue, not really. Because your mom is so awesome. She went from staying home with kids to working as a school librarian in basically thirty seconds so you guys could stay at your fancy private school without missing so much as a day of class. She got the house refinanced in the blink of an eye so she had more money to buy you guys Eggos and LEGOs and . . . uh . . . Speedos, even without your dad paying child support. In terms of quality of life, you guys haven’t suffered at all from your dad moving out.”
I look at her. The thought is kind, but what’s really made plain by this speech is that I have suffered plenty. I am a poster child for low-grade chronic suffering. If an ad agency wanted to make suffering into a thirty-second spot, they would make a time-lapse video of me in my three colors of elastic-waistband teacher pants shoveling eight inches of snow at five a.m. so my kids can get to their early-bird activities on time, then teaching 250 overprivileged kids how to not use computers for porn for ten hours, and then collapsing in front of Outlander too tired to even find, much less turn on, my vibrator at the end of the day.
It would be kind of a dismal video.
But Lena’s not done. “Now, on the not-so-tangible front, we could prove emotional pain and suffering, right? Because it had to hurt when he left. But is it irreparable? That’s the question he wants answered now. He wants to know, Can he make up for lost time?”
“Who cares what he wants to know?” interjects Cori. “What about what we want?”
“Ok,” says Lena. “What about what you want? Can forgiving him and enjoying time with him now actually make you feel better than holding a grudge against him for the rest of your lives? In other words, is punishing him what’s truly best for you?”
Corinne groans audibly. “Lena. You make it sound so unreasonable to hate him forever.”
“It is unreasonable to hate anyone forever,” I say, mostly to myself. “Lena is right, as usual.”
She shrugs and gives me a smug smirk. “What can I say?”
“I am not happy with your dad,” I tell my children. “In fact, if I’m being totally honest, he hurt me quite a lot when he left.” And if I’m being even more totally honest, he gave me quite a wallop to the heart today when I first saw him again too.
“Duh,” says Cori.
“But as appealing as punishing him may sound at first, I have to remember what I want most in this life. I want your happiness more than anything. Well,” I add upon further thought, “that’s not true. I want you both graduating from college without criminal records more than anything. After that I want your happiness. I think time with your dad—and trying to forgive his past mistakes—can lead to more happiness, not less.”
Do I believe this? Do I believe that strongly in forgiveness? So much so that I could ever forgive John? Move past what he did, take him back into my life like the whole thing never happened?
Probably not. But don’t I want that belief for my kids?
“Now, you guys know that your dad didn’t leave us for no reason, even if that’s how it felt at the time. He left us because he truly believed we’d be better off without him. He left because he was so sad and upset he thought he was bad for you guys, and he thought leaving would fix that so he could one day come back and make things right.” I try not to wince. No matter how much he swore to me it wasn’t personal, how can it not be when the man you love says he has to get far away from you to ever hope to be happy again? “And you know that he’s never stopped thinking of you. Those ridiculous cards . . . ,” I remind them, referring to John’s habit of sending inappropriately large checks with the cards he sends for the kids’ birthdays, for holidays, even one year for Labor Day. “They show that even when he hasn’t done exactly the right thing, he’s tried to do something.”
Joe makes his thinking face. Lena and Cori and I stare at him. Whatever he says next will probably go for the whole family. That’s the kind of kid Joe is. Reasonable. Elbow deep in reasonableness. I am a little bit martyr, and Cori is a little bit drama queen, and John was always a little bit selfish. Joe is the good sides of all those coins—generous, intuitive, striving—and then on top of all of this, he is very, very smart. I don’t understand him, but I love him all the more for it.
“Aunt Lena,” he asks, and I know a philosophical question is coming, because Lena, before becoming a teacher at Country Day, was a nun. “Do you think forgiveness is a skill learned through practice, like playing chess, or a talent given to you at birth, like singing in tune?”
“Yes,” says Lena, in her way. “Some people have to practice forgiveness and will never be naturals. They’ll either do the work and get awesome at it but always have to think it over—or never do the work and die with a sack of hurts the size of an elephant. I know, because I’m in danger of being one of those people whenever I stop paying attention.”
Then she nods at me. “Some people, like your mother, forgive so naturally they don’t notice it happening. They’ll get hurt twice as often because they are so quick to forgive but feel it half as much because of their ability to let things go.”
I twist my lips. I’m not sure I agree, but I appreciate Lena making me seem cooler than I am to my kids.
Cori sighs. “I’m still pissed about Trinity buying the same color lipstick as me. That was supposed to be my trademark,” she says. I bite my tongue so I don’t say anything bad about Trinity, who is not my favorite of all of Cori’s friends. “What Dad did is way worse than that. I want to be mad at him for, like, another two years. Can I do that?”
“Of course you can,” I say. “I think you’ll miss out, but ok. What about you, Joe?”
“I’m doing whatever Cori is doing,” he says in his clever, even-handed way. “If she doesn’t want to spend time with him, not even a week, then we won’t spend time with him. Not even a week.”
Lena smiles and leans back. She knows exactly what just happened here, even before I do.
Cori sighs mightily. “Fine. Jerk.” She directs this at Joe. “A week. I’m fine with a week.”
Joe smiles a little, but he doesn’t think we see. Lena and I exchange our own look that we don’t think they see.
“A week at the beginning of summer,” I say. “Just a week. It sounds like it will be great for everyone. And if it’s not, I won’t be far away,” I promise. “I’ll be there to pick up the pieces.”
Little do I know in that moment that it will be me in pieces before this coming adventure is over.
CHAPTER TWO
Dear Mom,
I realize that you won’t even see this so-called reading journal until the end of the summer. Nevertheless, I would like to lodge a series of formal complaints.
1. School isn’t even out, so why am I already supposed to be starting a summer reading project?
2. Why should I have to do a summer reading project when the whole entire point of summer is: Not Reading?
3. Do other kids whose parents are Not Librarians have to do things like this? I mean, really? Ask yourself. Do dentists’ kids have to do a special three-times-a-day flossing regimen all summer long? What about the children of people in the army? Do they have to, like, go to the shooting range every day?
By the way: I would rather floss and shoot guns in a heartbeat.
4. A word about book selection: This book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Here are some things I can relate to in reading a book about an autistic boy who lives in England and has a rat: ZERO THINGS, MOM.
I see in future assignments I will be reading about people who lived a hundred years ago, fought the Nazis, live in the actual future, and are from a totally imaginary kingdom based on a Disney movie.
&nb
sp; Mom. Have you never heard of John Green or Stephenie Meyer? Would a little Hunger Games action kill me? Is the whole point here for me to be made to suffer as punishment for being born into a family of book-worshipping Einsteins?
It doesn’t seem fair. Because, um, it’s not fair.
I hope in the afterlife you are made to spend an entire summer at the pool with Trinity.
Love,
Your dumbest daughter, Cori
—
A week. At the beginning of summer. It doesn’t really hit me until the next day at school. A whole week. No kids. No work. No nothing.
I am standing in the library when I overhear a student telling her friend about her summer choir-camp plans. I look at the calendar and see that summer is not a thing that is abstract, like commercial space travel or bikini waxing, but is in fact a real thing that is really going to happen in three weeks. In three weeks my husband—well, my former husband—is taking my kids. They will not be with me, the expert parent, the one who knows the story behind why Joe doesn’t eat clam chowder and how to keep chlorine from turning Cori’s hair green. When John left, they were still young kids. Now they are something much more dangerous. Will he know how to ride herd on teenagers? Will he be able to tell them no, or will he just cave to every desire? The last time they were with John, they were both a foot shorter, or so it seems, and so much more trusting. Will he hurt them again? Will they let him get close? Will they even feel safe?
For the third time this week, I duck into the teachers’ lounge during my prep period and call John.
“Hello, Amy,” he says flatly. His voice isn’t annoyed. It’s unsurprised.
“What do you do if Joe gets a beesting?” I demand into the phone, instead of saying hello.
There’s a momentary pause. “This is a trick question. Joe isn’t allergic to bees,” he replies.
