The Impossible Knife of Memory(43)

Her face in the mirror melted, morphed one centimeter at a time the way pictures in a flip book do when you slide your thumb down the edge of the pages. She waited to see what or who she’d turn into. Her skin lightened. The freckles vanished. The color drained from her lips and then her hair. Her eyebrows and lashes turned white, then transparent, and then they no longer existed. Her chin faded away next, then her mouth and her nose. The eyes smudged like they were being wiped off with a fat pink eraser, and then they were gone, too. The mirror was empty.

I blinked.

When I opened my eyes she was gone and I was back. My eyes. My freckled nose. My absurd hair. My sweating, shaking hands that poured the pills back into the bottle. I ran out of the house before I turned into someone I didn’t want to know.

Our living room smelled a lot like chicken wings and pizza and a little like weed when I walked in the front door.

Dad looked up from the television. “Hey, princess,” he said with a grin. “Have a good time?”

I hung up my jacket in the closet.

“Giants are playing,” he said. “Philly, first quarter. I saved you some pizza. Double cheese.” He frowned. “What’s that look for?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“You love double cheese.”

“I’m not talking about the pizza.”

“Is it the wings? You gave up being a vegetarian two years ago.”

“Are we going to play ‘pretend’?”

“Vegetarians can eat double-cheese pizza.”

“It’s not the food,” I said.

“Are you still upset about the cemetery?”

“What?”

Dad muted the television. “I was thinking about what you said. I’ll call the cemetery and find out how much those special vases cost. Mom didn’t like cut flowers, but she hated being outdone by her neighbors, and that headstone looks awful. Good idea?” He let Spock lick the pizza grease off his fingers. “Why are you still wearing the pissy face?”

“Did you run Friday night through the Andy-filter so instead of looking like a total ass, you can feel like you were a hero or something?”

He turned the television off. “Andy-filter?”

“You don’t think I have a right to be upset?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Friday night I split wood and fell asleep reading about the Spartans.”

“What about when I came home?”

“You never went out,” he said.

“You don’t remember?”

He frowned. “Remember what?”

When we first hit the road, I’d been clueless. I was twelve, confused and brokenhearted about the way we left home and about Trish. Getting by minute to minute was my strategy. It was at least a year before Dad started to take unapproved “sick days,” and a year after that before I connected the dots that led from him spending the night in a bar to him waking up, puking, and moaning. He got fired a couple times for it. That always led to months of clean living and on-time deliveries until he’d stumble again and fall down the rabbit hole. But he’d never gone this far. He’d never forgotten what he did the night before.

“This is stupid.” Dad picked up the remote. “I’m not going to be interrogated by my own kid.”

I snatched the remote. “You blacked out, Daddy.”

He pressed his lips together.

“When I got home you were waving the splitting maul around like the crazy bad guy in a horror movie. You humiliated me in front of my friend.”

Spock jumped off the couch, shook himself, and fled for the kitchen.

“What did I say to her?” he asked.

“To who?”

“Your friend.”

“It was him, not a her. Jesus, you don’t remember any of it. Was it just booze or did you take pills, too?”

He paled, but narrowed his eyes. “There’s no law against a grown man getting a little shit-faced in his own house.”

“There’s a difference between getting drunk and getting so drunk you black out,” I said. “That’s a bad sign, Dad. A really bad sign.”

“Pack the attitude away, young lady. I drink. Sometimes I don’t remember. That’s how it works.”

“This has happened before?”

“We’re done talking. You want pizza?”

“Give it to the dog,” I said.





_*_ 47 _*_

I’d been at Gracie’s for only one day, but dirty dishes filled the sink, and the trash can smelled like sandwich meat gone bad. Directions to Roy’s camp still hung on the wall, stuck on a nail. In the living room, the Giants scored and the crowd went nuts.

I was hungry for pizza and wings, but wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. The peanut butter was in the cupboard next to the stove and the bananas and bread were on the counter. After I made the sandwich, I opened the fridge for something to drink and stopped. On the top shelf, next to a cloudy jar of pickles and a tub of expired cottage cheese, sat a stack of mail.

Another first. Dad never left mail lying around anywhere, much less in the refrigerator.

The catalogs for garden supplies and special tools for arthritic hands still arrived monthly, even though my grandmother had been dead for more than a decade. Dad got a couple of credit card applications and a VFW magazine that I knew he’d throw out without reading. The last two envelopes were addressed to him, too. I poured myself a glass of milk.