Truth was, I had gotten so accustomed to going to my mother’s house almost every day that it seemed like the natural thing to do. If Aunt Bernie hadn’t been there occupying her attention, she’d probably be eating it up.
I wasn’t going to stalk Ben, so I headed up the stairs with the intention of seeing what needed doing in the attic. I passed my door without hesitation, and before I could get to the pull down, I noticed my dad’s office door open slightly.
I went in and flicked the switch, flooding the lonely old room with light. The telescope had been put back in its place from where we’d moved it, and I flicked the switch back off to go peer out of it. It took some adjusting to find the right angles again, but the familiar places were there. Waving, as though they’d been waiting all along. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. I made a mental note to ask Mom once again if I could bring the telescope to my house rather than put it in a cold, dark storage building where no one would enjoy it. I didn’t see her attaching it to Big Blue.
I turned on the lamp behind my dad’s desk and saw that the other stuff was already gone. It struck me hard in the gut to see it that way. All the weird décor, the wooden duck, the tins, the calculator—all the stuff on his desk was gone. I felt a burn in my stomach as I pulled out the drawers and saw they were empty. The thumbtacks, even. I looked up at the poster, though, that was still on the wall and ran my hand over the dusty surface. I wondered when my mother had done this, and if she’d needed me. Or maybe it had been something she needed to do alone. Regardless, it was like a physical loss, not being able to come in there and feel his things. I’d always thought it was kind of silly, but now I realized how comforting it had been.
I sat in his chair, listening to the familiar squeak of the springs and the clicking noise as I swiveled a little to look at the poster. No sooner had I done that, when the tingling and tightness around my body began.
“Lovely,” I muttered, gripping the chair arms and closing my eyes. The sound of wind rushing by filled my ears and everything went topsy-turvy for a second until I jerked forward and sucked in a giant breath of air.
CHAPTER
16
Still sitting in my dad’s chair, I took the usual few seconds to catch my breath and look around. I had an immediate rush of warmth as I got to see all his things back in their places. Knowing they’d be gone again when I returned, I panned the room slowly, memorizing the way it was supposed to be, wishing I could film it for posterity. There were extra things, too. Some large boxes lined up on the far wall, probably attic overflow. Possibly Uncle Tommy’s stuff, or some of Mom’s craft stuff.
The quiet didn’t last, which I didn’t expect it would. I figured there was something to be learned by my little trip, and that hadn’t happened sitting alone yet. Dad’s voice came down the hallway, accompanied by one that grabbed my heart.
“Well, let’s go see,” my dad’s voice said, entering the room. He looked exactly as he did when I’d last seen him, with gray taking over most of his short hair and a slight paunch to his belly.
Holding his hand was Cassidy. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that bounced golden curls like springs. By the stretchy leggings and sparkly yellow butterflies on her shirt, I put her at around seven or eight years old. My hand automatically went to my chest as I took in the little girl Cass had once been. Skinny and prissy, free of makeup and beauty products, just eager dark eyes waiting to drink in the stars and constellations.
“Is it dark enough?” she asked, her little voice melting my heart.
“Oh, I think so,” he said. “Question is, are you eight enough?” I smiled as I remembered him doing that. “Because only true-blue eight-year-olds can see Orion’s Belt.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said, with all the grown-up-ness she could pull off. “You showed me the three stars when we were in the backyard like a year ago.”
He winked at her as he peered into the scope and moved it to line it up just right. “But not the whole shebang,” he said. “Not like you can see it through here.”
He moved to the side so she could look, and she did it like he told her to, not touching it, keeping her hands down by her side.
“Whoa,” she breathed. “Look at everything else around them. How come you can only see the three when we look up at the sky? There’s like kagillions!”
“Because space goes on and on forever,” he said, leaning an arm against the window. “We see the closest and the biggest. The stuff the sun shines on.”
“I want to go see it all one day.”
Dad laughed. “You want to go to space?”
“Yeah,” she said in awe, still taking it all in through the little eyepiece. “I could do that. I could be an astronaut.”
Dad shrugged. “You can be whatever you put your mind to, whatever you’re willing to work for. Because if something’s hard to get, it’s—”
“Gonna be the good stuff,” she finished with him, smiling up with two missing teeth.
“That’s right, doodlebug,” he said, tweaking her nose. He sat down on the window seat and gazed at her.
“I want to go everywhere,” she said, climbing onto his lap and looking up at the poster with the red circles. “Space and Japan and Greece and Hawaii.”
He widened his eyes in mock surprise. “All that?”
“That’s just one summer,” she said, her head cocking with attitude, as he laughed. “I’m gonna see all of Europe, and South America, and Australia the summer after that. And Alaska.”
“Wow,” he said. “I want your job.”
“Oh, I’m gonna have a great boss, too. She’s gonna let me take off on my trips whenever I want, and pay me lots of money.”
“Good for you!”
“Yep.”
“Cassidy?” came my voice from downstairs. “Come on, baby, we have to get home. Tomorrow’s school.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Today should go on forever. Birthdays should be longer than regular days.”
So it was her eighth birthday. That thought jiggled something in my memory, but I couldn’t pick it out.
“Yesterday was your birthday, it probably was longer. Today was just like icing. Like a freebie. That’s the good part of when birthdays fall on a weekend.”
“I guess.”
“And you need lots of school if you’re gonna be an astronaut and snag that rich job of yours,” Dad said, tickling her ribs. “So give me a hug.” She jumped up and attacked his neck with a giant bear hug. “Ooh, yeah, that’s a good one. Love you, doodlebug.”
“Love you too, Paw-Paw.”
She ran downstairs, and Dad continued to sit in the dark, leaning against the wall that jutted out from the window. He looked off at nothing, and I wanted so badly to talk to him. To tell him all the things I never got to say. Because you always think you have later to say them.
The light filled the room, and my dad blinked as Uncle Tommy walked in. “You sitting in the dark?”
“Hey, bud, thought you were already gone,” Dad said.
“Nah, I had to hit that birthday cake again,” Tommy said with a chuckle. “Nice to see everyone tonight; thanks for the invite.”
I had to think a minute, but then I remembered a party that Uncle Tommy came to right after his second divorce. He was evidently lonely and Mom and Dad decided he needed some family interaction. My kid’s eighth birthday was, I guess, the closest thing on the agenda.
“Glad you could come by,” Dad said, getting to his feet, looking tired in the bright light. He hugged his brother in that backslapping way that men do and moved as if to leave the room, but Tommy stayed put.
“Um, wanted to talk to you, if you have a second,” he said.
My alarms started going off. Dad’s probably were, as well, but he didn’t show it. He just looked worn out.
“Okay.”
<
br /> Tommy sat on the desk, so his back was to me, but I could see Dad’s face.
“Well, you know things have been hard since the hardware store went under,” Tommy began, and I saw Dad’s eyes lose a little shine.
“Yeah, I have a little bit of an idea.”
Tommy held up a hand. “I know, I know. You’ve had to struggle, too. The store just—”
“Don’t even go there,” Dad said, his voice quiet. “That was seven years ago. And the store didn’t do anything. You did.”
Tommy sighed, a deep, miserable sound that even made me feel sorry for him. “I know,” he said again.
“And you need money,” Dad said. It wasn’t a question.
“Just till the end of the month, when I get paid,” he said. “And only if you can spare it.”
“And if I can’t?”
There was a pause, and all three of us knew that Tommy would do something stupid to get it, which is why they kept trickling it to him. “Then I’ll figure something out,” he said. “I’d pay you back, though.”
“No, you won’t,” Dad said, walking around behind his desk. Tommy turned to face him. Dad leaned on the desk, right next to me. I could have touched him if my bubble of freakydom would let me. His hands splayed above the drawer that held his never-used thumbtacks. “Do you know that I’ve been trying to save for years to take my wife, my family—now just my wife again—on a trip?”
“What?” Tommy said, looking thrown by the change.
“All she ever wanted to do was travel,” he said, still looking down at his hands. “I promised to take her, but it never happened. We had kids, and I promised to take them. Never happened.” He stood up and looked at the poster. “Kids are grown and have kids of their own now; it’s just me and Frannie again. I’d love to make good on just one of those promises.”
“So what’s stopping you?” Tommy said, making my dad turn to him with a look that should have withered him.
“You.”
Tommy looked taken aback and gave a little chuckle. “What do I have to do with it?”
Dad turned back to the poster, lifted up the free corner at the bottom with no tack, and reached behind it sideways, to his elbow. When he pulled out a metal box, I cried out.
“Oh my God.” The freaking box. It was behind the damn poster?
He set it on the desk rather hard, making the pencil cup jump. He opened it, and there was a small stack of cash, with notes scribbled on bits of paper. I strained to see them, but I couldn’t make them out from my angle. He grabbed a section of the cash, counted out five hundred dollars, and shoved it at Tommy.
“Take it and go,” Dad said.
“That’s it?” Tommy asked, fingering the bills like they’d betrayed him.
“Are you kidding me?” Dad said, rounding the corner of the desk. “Four months ago, I gave you a thousand. Six months before that, fifteen hundred. Last year, another four thousand throughout the year. And every other damn year before that,” he finished, his voice rising. “Why am I never able to do anything with my money? Why have I never taken my family anywhere? Why did my livelihood go down the damn toilet? Why am I having to live check to check at a shit job and watching Frannie work her ass off to help make ends meet at this point in our lives?” Dad advanced on Tommy, and I held my breath. I’d never seen him angry like that. “Because you are a leech and a user and all I ever do is throw good money at you.”
Tommy picked up the bills slowly, not saying anything, as Dad closed the box and put it back in its place.
“Thank you,” he finally said after a full minute, then he walked out the door, never looking up.
Dad leaned against the wall after he put the box back, and then looked at the poster again. He lifted the corner and pulled the box out, glancing at the door suspiciously.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I asked, not really intending to ask it.
He carried the box to the far side of the room, looked at the door again, and opened a flap of one of the large cardboard containers. He dug around in it, pulling things up I couldn’t see, and shoved his box down into the middle somewhere, putting the other things back on top and closing the flap back.
I laughed out loud. “I don’t blame you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have trusted him, either.”
Dad rubbed at his face, raked his fingers back through his hair, and walked downstairs. I looked down at the pencil cup, the big antique calculator, and the desk calendar. And my skin lit on fire.
It was turned to May 7, 1998.
• • •
“Oh, no,” I breathed, as I looked back up to where my dad had left. “No, Daddy, wait!”
But he couldn’t hear me. And I couldn’t change anything. Tears filled my eyes anyway as I wished for a do-over so that I could have looked at him closer. If I’d realized this was the night he died, I would have paid attention.
I rested my face in my hands and recalled the hysterical phone call from my mother at three in the morning, when she’d found him in his recliner with the TV still going. Bonanza was on. I heard the music through the phone. I let the tears come, thinking how tired I was of crying. “I love you, Daddy,” I whispered.
The suction began, and I didn’t move, didn’t brace myself, I just waited. The noise of air and high-pitched ringing filled my ears, the air was squeezed from my lungs, and I hurtled through whatever it was that kept throwing me back and forth until I pitched forward like someone kicked me.
I sucked in a giant gulp of air and gripped the desk as the vertigo slowed down.
“Shit,” I muttered, blinking in the dark. “Okay, that—oh my God.” I got up and walked on shaky legs to the door, and shut it behind me.
“Whoa, Emily honey, are you okay?”
My mother would pick that precise time to come out of her bedroom.
I turned and nodded, swiping at my eyes. “Just having a nostalgic moment, I guess.” I opted against, Well, I just saw Dad a few hours before he died, and by the way he gave Uncle Tommy five hundred dollars.
She put an arm around me, and we walked to Holly/Aunt Bernie’s room, where Holly was smiling through Aunt Bernie’s rant on downsizing, while giving the unmade bed-with-clothes-on-it an evil eye.
“You saw Big Blue,” Aunt Bernie was saying. “She has all I need. None of that crap that used to hang on me like a noose was necessary.”
“Well,” Holly said. “Right now, I like my crap. Think I’ll let it strangle me for a little while longer.”
“Suit yourself,” Aunt Bernie said, kicking her shoes off and looking for her slippers, which were in two different places. I knew it had to make Holly nuts to see her old room so messy. “Sure wish I would have started sooner.”
She excused herself to go start baking something, and no one was about to get in the way of that, so Mom and I sat cross-legged on the messy bed and watched Holly wrap tiny ballet dancer figurines.
“House is looking good, Mom,” Holly said.
Mom smirked. “Well, some of it’s just putting lipstick on a pig, but if it’ll help sell it.”
“Sure you still want to?” Holly pressed.
Mom widened her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure. So—I hear things are happier with you and Ben?” Mom asked, nudging me.
I gave Holly a look, and she stuck her head in the box. “Really?” I said. “Can’t imagine how you heard something like that.”
“Well, it’s a good thing,” she said. “No reason to hide it.”
“Oh, lots of reasons to hide it—not that we’re hiding it,” I corrected. “We’re not really doing anything—purposely. There’s not a plan or a thought process behind—”
“Lordy, you’ve got it bad,” Mom said, interrupting me with a shake of the head.
“No kidding,” Holly said, taking a figurine out of the newspaper
to wrap it again, better. “She’s at the babbling phase.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are, honey. You do that,” my mother said. “When you get all giddy over a man, you do that.”
I stared at her, amused. “Right, because there have been oodles of them.”
“I can’t believe you just said oodles,” Holly said.
“I can’t believe y’all think I babble.”
“I can’t believe you never told me the truth about him,” Mom said.
I sunk back against the comforter and miscellaneous clothes that smelled like old perfume. “I was so devastated that he left, Mom. And then everything kind of settled in, and I was afraid of blowing it all up. I had this beautiful baby, and Kevin just—” I sat back up. “You know, for a while I think he actually went on the straight and narrow. She changed him, made him want to be a better man.”
“And then you started believing your own hype,” she said, her eyes wise. Even Holly stopped her wrapping and just listened.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I told myself it was what it was.”
“And now?” she said.
I met her eyes. “What do you mean, now?”
“Do you keep up the lie, or come clean?” she said.
“Are you serious?” Holly asked, piping in. “Do you realize what the fallout would be?”
“Oh my God, I don’t even want to think about Kevin ever finding out Cass isn’t his,” I said, covering my face. “And it being Ben would be the nail in the coffin.”
“Shhh,” Holly said suddenly, darting her eyes toward the door.
My stomach contracted to the size of a pea as Cassidy took two very slow steps into the room. “Hey, doodlebug,” I said, wondering if my voice really sounded that high. “Didn’t hear you come in.”
But the look on her face turned on the faucet of doom that started at my fingertips and seeped steadily through my skin to my core.
“What did you say?” she said, her voice taking on a monotone quality.
Before and Ever Since (9781101612286) Page 22
