by Tina Welling
“What, Jess?”
“Shame,” I whispered.
More tissues emerged from Lola’s pockets. My chest heaved as I tried to keep my sobs inside my body.
“Then I told him. I said, ‘Cam . . . he, uh, I . . . fell asleep.’ I buried my face in a big hug to my kid. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even want to. It was Cam I was worried about.”
I blew my nose on tissue after tissue. I checked on the dogs. They were sniffing scent marks with wagging tails and leaving their own scent marks on snow-covered logs and boulders beside the old road.
I looked down to the creek bed far below the edge of the path, a sheer drop, and I wished for a single bleak second to toss myself over. As if alerted to the drastic thought, my dogs came bounding back down the trail and gathered around my knees, whimpering softly. I smoothed the ears of each of them and seemed to come back into myself.
I said to Lola, “Cam’s eyebrows slanted down along the sides of his eyes in sympathy.” I nodded to Leidy, Bannon and Ranger. “I’ve fallen in love with all my dogs because they have this same slant to their eyebrows. It gives them the look of a wide and loving understanding.” I turned toward Lola. “Don’t you think?”
She said softly, “Yes, yes, I do.” She pulled more fresh tissues out of her pockets.
I used those and she pulled out more. I joked to her, “I thought you had gained weight, but it’s just all these tissues puffing out your coat.” She had them stuffed all over her, inside and out.
She laughed. The dogs led the way and we started walking again.
“I don’t know to this day what that little boy felt when he woke up and they told him his mother died, bled to death.”
Lola said, “Jess, that little boy is you.”
I said, “You know what Cam said?”
“What?”
“Cam said, ‘It wasn’t your fault, Dad.’ ”
Lola said, “And what do you think, Jess?”
“I don’t remember much about it.” I looked up to the peaks rising across the creek bed. Annie liked to say I didn’t remember much about anything in order to remain guiltless about everything. She had to be very angry at me before she’d bring up “The Story.” But I was expecting to hear about it any day. Now that I thought of it, I was expecting to hear that I’d have to see a therapist and address my mother’s death before she’d return. Well, now that was done.
Lola and I turned around when the road narrowed with only ski and snowmobile tracks and no footpath tamped down through the deep snow.
Lola said, “Jess.” She took a big breath. “Jess.”
I looked at her and she was fighting tears. I wrapped my arms around her to soothe her. Hugged her hard and hated to let her go.
When we walked on she said, “Jess, you are a good hugger.”
“Well, you needed it.”
She stopped right on the path. “But you didn’t?”
“Don’t get sappy on me, Lola.”
“Jess, you told me that long, hard story about your life, yet told it from your son’s point of view. Next time I’d like to hear it from your point of view. Next time, the pronoun must be ‘I,’ not ‘he.’ It will be difficult at first, but then I promise you, it will be easier and then easier yet.”
Twenty-three
Annie
Dad had seemed at loose ends. So I invited him to come for the weekend, even though I’d just taken my sons to the airport on Monday. Too, Daisy could use a couple days free of phone calls and drop-in visits. Despite having lived in the same place with many friends for decades now, Dad refused all social invitations unless Daisy accompanied him, because he said the world was made up of couples. And in his world, that was true. Mom used to say that the old conventions were ridiculous, considering how many single people there were in their age bracket. Still, parties at their golf club were like Noah’s ark, everyone arriving in twos.
Dad flung open the bathroom door. “Biko, Biko-o-oo, Bi-ko.” His beautiful singing voice reverberated off the tile walls. At church, when I was a child, the first note to ring out in any hymn was Dad’s, as if he felt it was his duty to lend the timid and straggling voices of the congregation his own confident resonance.
I said, “Gee, Dad, you don’t usually remember songs. ‘Silent Night’ is a brand-new tune every Christmas.” Once again I decided to hold off on telling him who Biko was and his story of being a freedom fighter in Africa. The anticipation of revealing that news gave me too much pleasure to squander too soon.
He said, “This song sticks to me like hot cheese. It gives me the wimples.”
“Wimples?”
“You know.” He wriggled his upper body.
“Shivers.”
“Wimples,” he repeated and bent down toward the sink to splash water on his face in preparation for shaving.
I spoke to the back of his neck. “You’re letting your hair grow longer. Is this your idea or your hairdresser’s?”
“It’s hers.” He glanced up to the mirror. “She said I need a scalping lotion.” He pointed the shave cream spout onto his left palm and spread squiggles of deep aqua gel over it.
“You tee her off?”
“No, she likes me.” He rubbed his palms together and magically the blue gel turned into white foam, which he spread across his cheeks and chin.
Puzzled, I said again, “Scalping lotion.”
“You know . . .” Dad carved shapes in the air around his head with his foamy fingers.
“Oh, sculpting lotion.”
“So I got some. I’ll use it for my next appointment with her.”
“I don’t think that’s what she had in mind, Dad. She meant for you to use it every day after your shampoo, like now. She didn’t mean for you to look good just for her.”
“I don’t know about that. She likes me.”
I began to drift into a different direction of thought at this. In Dad language this meant he liked her. And it meant not just as a hairdresser. I watched his razor carve pathways down his cheek, and for a moment I felt homesick, as it reminded me of skiing down the snowy slopes of Casper Bowl.
“What’s her name?” If he knew her name, this was serious.
“Her name is . . . something sweet.” He rinsed his razor, then banged it on the edge of the sink a couple times.
“Candy?” I could just picture her. I hated to ask this next question, but something about Dad’s manner alerted me. So I asked, “About how old is she?”
“If you have to know, she’s a lot younger than me. Maybe your age. But I don’t give much of a darn about that.”
You hear these stories. You never think it’s going to be your dad. Would it have to be the whole deal? Younger woman seeks out older, richer man, woos him, takes his money, disrupts the family, breaks his heart, leaves much older, much less richer man for children to put back together again? Made me tired just to think of it.
“I don’t think it’s Candy—something like that though.”
And yet . . . Daisy had been worrying about Dad’s memory. She had given him extra vitamins, since she’d read that a lack of one of the B vitamins could account for memory loss. Mostly we concluded that he was bored, lonely, a bit depressed. A new love interest could perk things up and offer Daisy some needed time off.
“Might be something to drink,” he said.
Of course. “Brandy.”
“Close. She’s nice. I’m going by after her work Monday so we can get to know each other. Go out for a drink and, if that goes all right, dinner.”
So this was moving along. Might as well jump on board. I said, “You could take her out to that nice place in Old Town we all like, Flagler Grill.”
“You’re making my wallet quiver now.”
I laughed. He looked ten years younger just talking about Candy/Brandy. For a guy who had been married for nearly fifty years, living without a partner for the past four was lonesome.
This could be good. The last emergency he called Daisy to check out was an animal
Dad said was chirping in his house. Claimed he’d looked all over the place, moved furniture, rooted through closets. The thing seemed to move. He’d be in the bedroom and hear it, then in the living room and hear it, before he could get back to the bedroom himself, the creature had somehow scampered ahead of him and was chirping in there. Daisy climbed into her car, drove the three miles to Dad’s place, opened his front door and immediately heard the alert that smoke detectors sounded to warn batteries were low. Chirp, chirp.
Daisy fixed the problem, then told Dad he had to start getting out of the house and doing more. He’d told her, “These are my reclining years.” Daisy said to me on the phone afterward, “I guess he meant his declining years, but he’s declining too fast and reclining way more than he should.”
We had both feared that after taking care of Mom for so long during her illness, shutting himself off from his friends and his usual social routines, he would find it hard to get his life going again.
Now this new development. I could hardly wait to phone Daisy.
But I sympathized with Dad. I knew now how difficult it was to rouse energy when you were grieving. In many ways I was grieving for Jess, though I realized more and more that I was grieving for my image of Jess—my imagined husband, my imagined marriage—something not wholly based on reality, but on expectations and dreams. Hearing Perry talk about marriage to Alex clued me in to how much of my trouble depended on expectations I carried and how important it was to let them go. Jess may never address the childhood guilt he carried, may never accept responsibility, may never choose to fully come awake to me or his own life. And now, instead of feeling angry because I was not receiving what I had felt to be my rightful due, I was feeling a kind of grief, an emptiness in that place of expectations and dreams. And the grief made me lethargic, as if all my energy was being sucked into that emptiness or taken up by its management.
As I hung in the doorway talking to Dad while he finished his turn in my single bathroom, I thought how comforting it felt to be around maleness, watching male activity. He poured cologne into his cupped hand, and in the way many men started their day, Dad began slapping himself in the face.
I had become used to having male energy in my vicinity with Jess and our sons. And I missed it. I’d begun taking walks on the docks in the late afternoon when the fishermen came in. Men boning their catch, hosing the decks. Guides standing next to their clients who were holding huge fish and grinning for photos. Sometimes the men flirted with me, and it felt good. I put lip gloss on now when Bijou and I walked there. One guide in particular I found especially handsome. He didn’t flirt or even smile, but he looked. Maybe Dad and I would amble down that way before dinner tonight. Right now we were going to the Green Bottle Café for breakfast.
“You about ready?” I asked Dad. He seemed to have arrived at the final step, tidying up the part in his hair with his comb.
“I’m losing my hair.”
“You are not.” Dad had a dense head of hair, another one of his vanities along with his singing voice. His silver hair was so thick that up until this visit he had been wearing it in almost a military-style crew cut. With his tanned face and blue eyes, he was the picture of radiant health. I said, “You have piles of hair, more than me.”
“You should see the pillow. When I lift my head in the morning and look down, I think I’m still there—so many hairs cover the pillowcase.”
“It’s just because your hair is longer now; you haven’t worn it that way for years.”
As we walked out the gate and headed for breakfast in town, I told Dad, “I’m glad you have a new friend and something to look forward to when you get home Monday.”
He said, “Make a new friend around here and before long they up and die on you. That’s why I’m dating younger women now.”
That would be Candy/Brandy. Daisy was going to scream.
We sat at the counter so Dad could gain the favor of the waitresses (he felt that gave him an edge with any food dropped in the kitchen they might consider sticking back on the plate) and also so he could strike up conversations with strangers. He was always at his best with strangers. Came from working in a store most of his life. I wondered if I’d become like that after working in my store for many years, mostly interested in shallow conversations with people I’d never meet again.
He started right off before our coffee arrived with a fellow probably in his seventies, tan and strong-looking, wearing a khaki fishing cap, shorts and plaid cotton shirt. The man sat one stool down from Dad and was writing a postcard.
He looked up at Dad’s greeting, raised his pen, said, “My ninety-five-year-old mother has to know where I am every day.”
Dad opened the menu, said to me, “They have that drink stuff you like.” Meaning mocha lattes. “Guess I’ll have fried eggs, potatoes and sausage.”
“That’s not on the menu.”
“I didn’t see it either,” he said, “but tell them that’s what I eat.”
“Dad, they don’t serve that here, but I’ll order something good for you.”
“No, you won’t; you’ll order something inter-esting.”
He never cooked at home, except popcorn in the microwave. His stove top was used as a fireplace mantel. Photos of his grandchildren that Daisy and I gave him lined the backside of the stove, leaning against the burner knobs.
When our food arrived, I found myself watching Dad’s eating manners; since living alone he’d relaxed them. On my last visit, he had pried out watermelon seeds with the pen he was using for his crossword puzzle.
When the afternoon cooled, we set off with Bijou to walk along the pier.
“Beautiful day,” Dad called to the fishing guide who always looked, but never smiled at me.
The guide tipped his head up, checked the sky, said, “You’re right. Severe clear.”
“Sounds like pilot talk to me.” We paused and Dad asked, “You a pilot?”
“Yes, I am . . . or was. On the water more these days.” The man was cleaning a small part with an oily cloth; he flung that aside, set the part down and, while wiping his hands on a cleaner cloth, came over to the side of the boat and introduced himself.
“Daniel.” He stuck his right hand out toward Dad.
Dad shook it and said, “Skip. And this is my daughter Annie Teague.” Dad didn’t use my married name, never had.
I shook Daniel’s hand, looked up at him, and I felt a brief sexual jolt at meeting his clean penetrating gaze. For a second it threw me completely off balance. Daniel nodded imperceptibly as if confirming the jolt. Then he directed his attention to my dad, who was bent over, checking out the engine on view inside the open hatch cover.
During their small talk I rearranged any trace of response lurking in my facial expression. It was as if this man had passed me a secret note, a small key, acknowledging with his nod that it was intended expressly for me. I’d felt a vibration in the center of my palm, sharp and brief. To ease the weight of my sudden self-consciousness, I worked to convince myself that it didn’t happen.
Maybe he had one of those practical joke hand buzzers.
I greeted Daniel’s dog, who had gotten up, stretched, then sauntered over to check us out. I petted the sleek black-and-white dog that Daniel said was named Jeter. Then he and Bijou sniffed each other.
In between his casual questions to my dad—Live around here? Do you fish?—Daniel answered enough questions of Dad’s to make him feel comfortable—Don’t guide much, used to fly cargo, been around Florida a few months. But through my father, Daniel gleaned more information than he offered, slowly and methodically, and with no help from me.
Then Dad said, “That fellow over there down the beach—he’s watching you with his binoculars. Did you notice?” Dad directed our attention back toward the grassy park, where the picnic tables sat beneath the shade of Australian pines.
Daniel didn’t glance over in the direction my dad indicated, but said, “Lots of tourists around, interested in boats.”
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br /> I turned to see, though.
I said, “He looks as much like a tourist as the Secret Service who accompany Vice President Cheney on his trips home to Jackson Hole.” Even from this distance you could see the sun reflecting off the smooth fabric of this man’s dress pants, and though he didn’t wear a tie, his shirt was collared with long sleeves. Back home the Secret Service started off wearing dark suits and ties, and when all the locals greeted them with questions about the weather in D.C., they switched to khakis and fishing vests, which handily concealed their guns and communication equipment. Whether they actually had the dry cleaners starch and press their fishing vests was uncertain, but somehow the way they wore them gave off that impression. We still asked about the weather in D.C.
I’m not sure why, but when Dad tried to pursue a discussion about the man with the binoculars, I conspired with Daniel to change the subject, as if I were in on the mystery and trying to protect it along with him. And there was a mystery. I didn’t know who Daniel really was or why he was posing as a fishing guide or why the man in the pressed pants was watching him, but I wanted the mystery for myself; I didn’t want to share it with my dad.
Luring Dad away from the topic, and then soon after away from Daniel’s boat, set me firmly into an alliance with this stranger. Unless I chose not to come walking on the docks again, not to talk to Daniel again. Then, of course, no alliance could possibly exist. I suspected I would be back. I didn’t know whether Daniel would stick around or not.
Twenty-four
Jess
I remembered how endearing AnnieLaurie looked on extremely cold skiing days when the baby fuzz along the hairline in front of her ears froze and the ice crystals sparkled like party glitter. Temperatures finally crawled stiffly into the lower single digits, so to hell with the business, I was downhill skiing all day long. As I poled into the lift line at Teewinot for my first run, I searched for that glitter on other women’s faces. The darnedest thing was, it tended to look stupid on other women, even masculine. I never noticed before how many women had hairy faces. I swear, one woman had a heavy ice mustache and goatee. Looked like Sigmund Freud on skis.
