by S. Walden
Dad chuckled, and then he grew serious.
“Parents shouldn’t play favorites,” he said. “It’s not fair. Not right. But Puddin’ Pop? You’re my favorite. And giving you away will break my heart.”
I was shocked.
Dad shifted in his chair, eyes glued to the lake.
“No man wants to ask permission to see his daughter,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re married, everything changes. It’s supposed to. The closest person in your life becomes your spouse. Priorities shift.” He paused then whispered, “I won’t get to see you as much.”
“Dad!” I cried. “That’s ridiculous! You act like we’re moving out of town. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here. And I’ll come and see you all the time. Whenever I want.”
Dad nodded. It was one of those “I don’t believe you” nods. I couldn’t know now what he meant, about the shifting of priorities. But I knew I loved my dad right up there with Reece, and I’d never squander the time I’d get to spend with him. Married or not.
Dad reached out and took my hand, squeezing it gently before releasing it in favor of his fishing pole. He caught another perch—perhaps the same one—and went through the routine of reeling it in, unhooking its mouth, and turning it over in his hand before throwing it back into the lake.
Another hour passed, mostly in silence, as Dad caught fish after fish. It was, perhaps, the best fishing he’d ever done.
“I’m having a good day,” he said before falling asleep, head nestled against his favorite chair.
Sometime later I awoke with a start. I had no idea I drifted off, too, and rubbed my face roughly to wake up. I checked the time on my cell phone.
“Dad,” I croaked. “It’s time to get up. I can’t believe we slept so long.”
Dad didn’t stir. He must be having a good dream, I thought.
“Daddy,” I sang softly. “Mom’s already having a fit, I’m sure.”
He dreamed on.
“Why does she care how long you spend out here, anyway? You’re a grown ass man. You’re retired. You can do whatever the hell you want,” I said. I poked his arm. “Now get up.”
He didn’t move.
“Dad.”
Stillness.
“Dad?”
Nothing.
You hear that expression all the time—how your world shifts. Shifting, like the plates under the ground reworking themselves into a new structure. You can’t keep them from shifting, but you sure as hell don’t want them to. You liked the old structure just fine. The old structure was safe. You knew it. You were comfortable with it. It was your reality.
This was not my reality. I stood shaking my father, screaming at him, staring straight into a new reality.
“Get up!” I roared.
His head rolled to the side.
“Get up, Daddy!!”
His hand fell off the armrest and dangled lifelessly.
“DADDY!” I screamed into the morning.
The birds echoed my cry then took off, flapping fiercely, escaping my anger and fear.
My desperation.
I don’t remember making the call. I don’t remember watching my mother tear down the hill. I don’t remember the lights, the sirens, the people pushing me out of the way as I clung to my father. I remember only one thing—Tony Bennett singing a love song, his voice in perfect pitch with the strings and trumpet, pulling my father along into a memory. The thought of him. The very thought of him. I collapsed under its weighted lures and drowned in a lake of despair.
***
I sat in the corner, cradling a plate of untouched food on my lap, staring at my mother. I hadn’t taken my eyes off her since Dad died. I wanted her movements, her conversations with others, to tell me something—reveal to me that she felt the same agonizing pain I did. That she loved my father with everything she had, even if she wasn’t the best at showing it.
She moved through the motions—accepting sympathy, refilling serving plates, hugging family members and nodding with them. I imagine they agreed on what a great man my father was, how he loved his family, how he worked so hard to provide a good life for us. All those generic statements—things said at every funeral that made me feel like they were dishonoring his memory, making him just like every other father and husband when he was so much more than that. He was my father.
“You want something to drink?” Reece asked.
I shook my head.
“Honey, I haven’t seen you drink anything all day,” Reece said.
“I’m fine.”
He picked up the plate from my lap and hovered over me.
“I’m going to stay here tonight,” I said suddenly.
“Oh?”
“I need . . . to do some things,” I said. It was cryptic, and he had every right to pry, but he refrained instead and simply nodded.
Nicki approached me, her eyes swollen and tear-stained. She looked so young—like twelve-year-old Nicki during puberty. Her face was splotched over with several shades of red and pink. Her usually perfect hair and outfit looked tattered: tattered, oily blond hair and tattered sleeveless black dress. I never saw Nicki as a person to mourn. I couldn’t even imagine it, so when she stood in front of me just now, all I could do was stare. Stare at the imperfection and feel a sense of relief.
She has a heart after all.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“I can’t eat either.”
I nodded.
“Will you stay tonight?” she asked.
“Yes. Will you?”
“Yes. Brad is staying, too,” Nicki said. “He didn’t want to leave me alone.”
“You’re not alone. You’re here with Mom and me,” I pointed out.
“I guess he doesn’t want the three of us to be alone,” Nicki clarified.
“What does he think we’ll do?”
“I think he just wants to be here to comfort us.”
“I can stay, too,” Reece offered. I knew he wanted to, but I could not let him witness what I planned to do. I didn’t even want Nicki to witness it, but she was blood, so it wouldn’t be as shocking.
“It’s okay,” I replied. “I’m fine here alone. You’ve gotta go home to Poppy anyway.”
I was so happy to have a legitimate excuse to send him away. And as I watched him pull out of the driveway hours later—hours after the last of the mourners left my mother and me alone—I waved at him and even smiled a little. I wanted him to believe I was all right.
But I was not all right. And my mother was about to know it.
She stood by the sink washing the last of the serving dishes. She still wore her black dress, and somewhere, she’d found a black apron. I’d never seen my mother wear a black apron in all my life. Did she buy it specifically for this occasion?
I cleared my throat. She turned her head a fraction, glimpsing me in her peripheral vision.
“Oh good, Bailey. You can help. Come dry these plates over here,” she said.
I approached her cautiously. I don’t know why I thought I was sneaking up on a spider. Perhaps it was her all black. Even made her brown hair look black, and I knew I was witnessing a transformation: from mother to black widow.
I picked up the tea towel and began wiping the plates, stacking them carefully on the counter. These were her special occasion serving dishes, and I wanted them in a neat, tidy stack before hurling them across the room. Should I decide I needed to.
“Where are Brad and Nicki?” I asked.
“Upstairs. Nicki needed to lie down,” Mom replied.
“Or avoid helping clean up the kitchen,” I joked.
Mom turned to me. “Is that funny?”
I stared at her blankly. She resumed her work. I resumed mine.
“Why did you decide to stay over?” Mom asked after a moment. There was an edge in her voice. “And why isn’t Reece with you?”
“We have a dog. He needed
to go home.”
“Well, he could have brought the dog over,” Mom said.
“He could have,” I said, “but I didn’t want him around all this.”
“Around all what?” Mom snapped. “Around all what, Bailey?”
“The dysfunction that is our family,” I replied. “I mean, ever since the night you gave him the advice—”
“Why are you even bringing that up right now?” Mom asked. She slapped the dishcloth in the sink. “I called you and apologized!”
“Yeah, because Dad made you,” I retorted.
“Excuse me?”
“I know he made you. And then he probably went fishing afterward to get away from you.”
Mom jabbed her finger at me. “You watch it. I’m still your mother. I don’t care how old you are.”
“Why did you stay with him, huh? I mean, was there ever a time you actually liked Dad?” I threw the tea towel on the counter. “‘Cause all I saw was you nagging and correcting and belittling. And it’s like you took joy in it.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Mom whispered.
“How about Nicki’s big news surprise night, huh? You couldn’t wait to show up Dad. You couldn’t wait to share the news that you were the one Brad asked to marry Nicki. You were the one who gave your blessing. You made him look like a fucking fool!”
“Where is this coming from? That was over a year ago!”
“So what?! So what, Mom?! And you never answered my question. Was there ever a time in your pitiful marriage that you actually liked my father?”
Mom ripped off her apron. “I don’t have to answer that! You don’t get to ask me questions like that! You have no idea—NO IDEA—the love I had for your father!”
“Really? Because as far as I’m concerned, I’m the only one who truly loved him! I’m the only one who accepted him for who he was: messed up and sloppy and fucking human! We shared the secrets. We shared the jokes. We shared the love because you couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. You were too busy hating his guts!”
My reflexes were no match for the swiftness of my mother’s hand. She whipped it out and smacked me so hard that I stumbled backward. And then she did it again. And again.
“Never talk to me like that again!” she roared.
I shut my eyes tightly, willing the tears to recede. They squeezed between my eyelids instead, and I hated myself that she elicited the reaction. I never wanted to shed tears for my mother ever again. I hated her.
“I hate you,” I whispered, rubbing my tender jaw.
Mom gasped, and then it caught in her throat. I knew the tears would come next.
“You hated us,” I went on.
And that’s what I wanted to say all along. It wasn’t just about my father. It was about me, too. Ever since my formal diagnosis. Ever since the first trip to therapy where Mom shifted relentlessly in the passenger seat of our old SUV—embarrassed and irritated that she had another one to deal with. Ever since she held Nicki in her arms for the first time in the hospital, and I knew she didn’t care about me anymore.
Those moments branded my heart, and I just now recognized it. I could cope with my mother when Dad was around. He was the peacemaker. I could crack jokes with him and hide my pain under sarcasm and self-deprecation. But now there was no one to joke with. There was no hiding my fury, my anger at a mother who couldn’t accept me for being like Dad.
“I never hated you,” my mother wept. “How could you say that?”
“I was dreaming it all?” I asked. “I dreamed it when you sent me away from the hospital without letting me hold my sister? I dreamed it when you yelled at me on the sidewalk for counting my steps? I dreamed it when I overheard you ask the doctor if there wasn’t just some pills you could give me so that you could get on with it? Or how long that therapy session would take because you had things to do?” I paused. “I dreamed all that?”
“You were seven,” Mom breathed.
“I remember, Mom. People can remember stuff from when they were seven.”
Mom turned her face and sobbed. I wanted to walk away, but I also wanted to hear her answers—her excuses for why she was such a terrible mother.
She blotted her face with the backs of her hands and walked to the coffee maker. I watched in confusion as she poured the water, scooped the coffee grounds, pulled the sugar from the cupboard. I watched her stare at the pot as it percolated, and I realized I was getting no answers until a cup of coffee was made. I grew impatient.
“I think I’ll just go home,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “Stay.” She pulled two mugs from the cabinet.
“I don’t drink coffee,” I said.
“Tonight you will,” she replied.
I watched her pour the cups, dress the coffee, and take them to the kitchen table. I followed reluctantly. I didn’t like the turn of events and raged inside that she took control of the conversation with a coffee pot. I liked it better a few minutes ago when I controlled it—when I had her flustered and on edge and angry.
I slipped into a chair and waited. Mom sipped her steaming brew, then placed the mug on the table.
“I discovered his tics about eight months into our relationship,” she began. “At first I thought he was just habitually late to everything.” She paused and smirked. “We were always late to the movies. Always.”
I tapped my fingers on the tabletop. She noticed and said nothing.
“I learned a few months later about the neighborhood loops. You know what I’m talking about?”
I nodded. I could see Dad even now, circling the neighborhood at exactly fifteen miles per hour.
“I . . . I was going to break it off,” Mom continued. “I didn’t know much about the condition, but what I witnessed with him was enough to aggravate the shit out of me. And I was afraid of more. I thought perhaps I’d just skimmed the surface of his tics. Of course, I learned years later that I had. There were a slew of them, and it was hard to cope. They didn’t know back then the things they know now. It was frustrating when there were so few answers.”
“So why didn’t you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you leave him?”
A sad smile played on my mother’s lips. “I found out I was pregnant with you,” she said softly.
Now it was my turn to gasp.
“What?” I breathed.
“I was pregnant with you,” she repeated.
I checked the math in my head. It didn’t compute. Didn’t make sense. I was born in July of ‘82.
“You were married a year before I was born. March of ‘81,” I said.
Mom shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“We . . . your father and I married in March of ‘82. We just decided to tell you ‘81 because, you know.” She took another sip of her coffee. “The stigma.”
“The stigma?”
“My parents,” she said quietly, “my parents were furious. Good ol’ Southern Baptists and all.” She sighed and looked at my mug. “You haven’t had any.”
I lifted the cup to my lips automatically and drank. I tasted nothing. My sole focus was on this new revelation—the revelation that my perfect mother who needed a perfect second daughter in place of her imperfect one screwed her boyfriend and got pregnant, had a shotgun wedding, then lied about it for thirty years! I’d no idea I was smiling brightly until Mom pointed it out.
“I just . . . I can’t even . . . you of all people . . .”
The side of Mom’s mouth quirked up.
“But we’re talking the ‘80s here! Wasn’t everyone getting pregnant outside of wedlock? I mean, who cares?”
“No, not everyone was getting pregnant outside of wedlock. The ‘80s were more of a throwback to conservative thinking anyway, but that’s not the point. Didn’t you just hear what I said? You knew your grandparents a little, Bailey. Raging conservative Baptists.”
I laughed. On the day of my father’s fun
eral, I laughed. Mom chuckled, too.
“You totally screwed up.”
“Cute pun,” she said, and we laughed some more.
“So let me get this straight: you were all set to dump Dad, and then you discovered you were pregnant. Your parents went ballistic and forced you to marry him. And what? You lived a miserable life ever since?”
“You have it almost right,” Mom replied.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I didn’t live a miserable life,” she said softly.
I took another sip of coffee. “Are you lying to me?”
“No, Bailey.”
“Then why did you always seem frustrated and angry? With Dad? With me?”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair.
“When I learned you’d inherited OCD, I felt powerless. I was angry with God because I couldn’t understand why he would do that to a child. You couldn’t understand at the time how serious your condition was because you were a child. You just thought you were really organized.” She laughed. “And your teachers loved you because you always had your shit together. They didn’t see what I saw, though. The tears at home if one thing didn’t go as planned. Your inability to be flexible. Your anxiety about school projects. God, I’ll never forget science fair one year.”
“What about it?”
“That goddamn trifold board. Bailey, I thought you were going to have a coronary because the borders I glued on weren’t exactly straight.”
“I didn’t glue them on?”
Mom shook her head. “I made you go to bed. It was too late. So I stayed up and glued them on, and in the morning when you looked at your board, you lost it.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said thoughtfully. “How old was I?”
“Ten, and I’m glad you can’t remember it because I’d never heard such language come out of a ten-year-old girl’s mouth. I thought to yank you out of school that very day.”
“Gosh, Mom, I’m sorry.”
“Well, as much as the surfing scared the shit out of me, it seemed to help,” Mom replied. “You started letting things go.”
I finished my cup. Mom noticed.
“Another?” she asked.
I nodded. When she returned to the table with two fresh cups, she returned to a previous topic of conversation.
