All That's Left to Tell(70)
“Yeah, for a year or so. But that was long enough. It’s not like it was a bad scene. I was just never home. Couldn’t blame her for divorcing me, really.”
“Boy or girl?”
“A little girl. Miss her bad, and see her maybe six times a year. It’s not like I don’t want to miss her, but it hurts, you know? Some days I’d like not to have to remember all of that.”
He thought about this and looked over at me again, and then closed his eyes. Something pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“I guess that’s not true. I’m sorry. It’s gotta be hard. Must be like waking up to a life someone else dreamed up for you.”
My skin flushed warm after he said this. I pushed myself up on my forearms and kissed him lightly.
He opened his eyes and said, “What was that for?”
“It is that way sometimes.”
He was looking at my face, and ran his hand through my hair, and then tucked a strand behind my ear.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, because you don’t usually see a pretty girl behind the wheel of a beat-up Taurus with a Drink Pepsi bumper sticker. Is that your daddy’s car you drive around in?”
I said that it was, but we left it at that, because I had to go downstairs to work. When she told me about my father, that summer afternoon in her living room while I watched the ceiling fan spin, my mother said he’d left me some money through an insurance policy, and I asked her to hold it for me for some time when I needed it. But I did take his car. It was ten years old, a Ford, and smelled of spilled coffee and rust and perhaps sweat, or some other distant smell that had come from the hours and hours he’d spent driving it, and the seat was slightly squashed from the weight of his body. I liked thinking that I was peering through the windshield as he had, heading toward an as yet never-seen destination. My mother told me he’d loved to travel, that once he’d driven all the way to New Jersey with me in the backseat of that car when it was still new because I’d wanted to see the ocean. While I couldn’t remember that ten-year-old girl, it was still possible, glancing in the rearview mirror, to imagine her sitting there.
*
It had been well into August before I’d learned that my father had been killed. My mother’s explanation for not telling me, she said, was to protect me while I healed, but she had left my father in the months before he went to Pakistan, and I think that complicated her reasons for keeping his death a secret. When I asked about him, she told me his mother, my grandmother, was still alive, still living in the place my father had grown up.
We drove out to her lake house the following Saturday, on one of those late August days when the humidity is high and not a leaf moves in the warm, heavy air. My grandmother cried when she saw me, her dog hunkered down next to her knees. I didn’t recognize the white-haired woman in front of me, and she glanced for a moment at the place on my skull where hair was still growing in, and then pressed me close to her chest, and said, “If I’d lost both of you … If I’d lost both of you.” She took me around the small house, and showed me the room my father had slept in when he was a boy, but she’d remodeled it long ago, and there were no signs of his time there except for a wooden candy dish she told me he’d made in shop class in eighth grade that she kept on an end table and filled with peppermints. She showed me photograph albums that we looked through while sitting next to each other on her floral-patterned couch that had the faint smell of mildew. I liked the pictures of my father as a boy, sitting next to his sisters, holding two fingers behind one of their heads in a gesture I recognized from my own childhood. And I could recognize myself in the photographs my grandmother had of me, and I could see myself in the child sitting on her father’s lap with her hands raised in the air, and in the photograph of my unhappy face when I was older while I stood next to him in front of a Christmas tree. I thought I could see that he loved me.
When we had lunch, my grandmother served us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with potato chips and sliced apples, and then apologized for the simple meal, but she said these were his favorite foods when he was a boy. We sat at the round wooden table, but really, there was nothing much to talk about. I watched the lake out the window while she and my mother talked, and when we finished eating, I asked my grandmother to take me outside while my mother cleaned up the dishes.
The lawn that led to the lake was small, and her dog, a springer spaniel named Penny, loped down to the water in front of us and started sniffing among the lily pads for small fish and minnows. The lake was mostly calm at midday, the cottages that circled the front half of it slightly hazy and quiet with the occasional exception of a slamming screen door. The children who would normally be outside playing had likely gone home for the start of the school year. The land on the opposite side was undeveloped, and there were trees along the bank, and some farmland on one end where, tucked away from the lake’s edge, you could see a corner of a field of corn.
We stood silently for a while near a willow tree that grew just short of the bank. I finally asked my grandmother, “Did my dad like coming out here to visit?”
“He did, I think. As much as any grown man enjoys visiting his mother. I don’t think he ever came out here without saying something about how small the place seemed compared to when he was little, when he could still swing out over the bank on these willow branches. Some afternoons, he’d pull a lawn chair out to the edge of the lake and sit there for an hour or so. Just looking out over the water. I wish I could tell you what he was thinking about, but he seemed to find it peaceful.”