Winter Loon(87)

She looked at me matter-of-factly. “Well, he looks like my dad, don’t you think?” She took my breath away, this little thing.

Mrs. Blue banged the bottom of her water glass on the arm of her rocker. “See? I told you so. Moss Ballot.”



IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN a house with a first grader, you know there’s no such thing as an uninterrupted conversation. So it took a while before Aveline and I could get back to the one we both needed to have. The four of us eyeballed each other over a supper of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Aveline managed the conversation like a switchboard operator, pulling the plug when talk got too difficult. While Aveline settled her mother in bed, Annaclaire gave me a tour of the dollhouse her grandfather had built for Aveline. “It used to have electricity but it doesn’t anymore,” she said, toggling the dead switch on and off. “Maybe you can fix it.”

“Maybe.”

“Or I can wait. My dad maybe could fix it.”

She reminded me of Jolene in a way, that boldness that comes from wearing your skin well. “You see him, then? Your dad?”

“Sure, I see him.” She took the doll I was tucking in out of my hand and put it in a different bed in a different room. “That’s not her bed.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“He’ll be here soon.”

I looked at the door to her tiny bedroom. “Soon? Like tonight?”

“No, silly. Soon like Thanksgiving.” Only days away.

Aveline popped her head in. “Time to brush teeth, miss.” She clapped her hands and Annaclaire made a production out of stomping to the bathroom.

“Fine. But don’t let him mess anything up.”

I held up my hands in surrender. “I won’t touch a thing.”

“I’ll be out in a few minutes, Wes. Why don’t you go sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”



THE LIVING ROOM WAS LAMPLIT and tasteful, with matching furniture and oak side tables. There was a small television in the corner with rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil. It seemed more her mother than Aveline. Had the tiny bedroom been Aveline’s when she was a little girl? If so, Annaclaire was growing up like I had, sleeping in her mother’s room in her grandparents’ house. But how different this house was. I sat down on the floral sofa and waited for Aveline to take a seat next to me in the swivel rocker.

“Your house is nice. Did you grow up here?”

“I did. Annaclaire’s bedroom was mine. I had my own apartment for a while, but after I got pregnant, I had to move back. Then my dad died. Didn’t make sense to be anywhere else.”

I spoke the obvious so I could hear the words come out. Here I thought it was way too late for me to have a sister who lived. “So Annaclaire, she’s my half sister?”

Aveline nodded. “I had an older brother named Neil. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when I was fifteen. One of those crosses out by the bridge belongs to him. I thought I’d have a big family. At the very least I thought Annaclaire would have a brother. I mean, Moss told me about you,” she said.

“Where is he? Annaclaire said he’d be here for Thanksgiving.”

“That’s what he told us. He’s lucky he’s not here right now, I can tell you that.”

She didn’t wear a ring on her wedding finger, but I’d inspected it for a white line, some indication there’d been a commitment. I saw nothing. “Are you married to him?”

“I wanted to be. But no. We never got married.”

“Will you tell me what’s happening here? Because I’m awfully confused. Annaclaire. She’s, what, six?”

Aveline curled herself around a pillow, tucking her legs off to the side. “How about I tell you what I know, then you tell me what you know, and the two of us figure out together what sort of a pickle we’re in?”

“That sounds good to me.”

“First off, I think it’s better that I start at the beginning so maybe we can sort out the end a little better. You be patient with me, okay?”

And so Aveline told me how she met my father, how he’d come into the Cozy Cup, flirted with her while she was working the morning shift. He told her to come over to the carnival and he’d give her free rides on the Shooting Star. She told the story wistfully, like she was alone and daydreaming. I could tell she was thinking of other things, things maybe she was unwilling to share. “You don’t really want to hear this,” she said.

But I did. More than anything I wanted to understand. “I’m a good listener,” I said. “Go on.”

“I still remember what I was wearing: my good denim skirt, black cowboy boots, and a pink lace top. Moss had on a Pink Floyd T-shirt and his tattoo was peeking out from under his sleeve. I can close my eyes, like this,” she said, pausing to rock her head back and take a deep breath, “and still see it.”

I closed my eyes then, too, remembering when he came home with that tattoo and how mad my mother was that he’d gotten birds tattooed on his arm instead of her name in a heart. I think she slapped him across the face, because I mostly remember that weepy ink, freshly wrapped around a bicep flexed to strike.

“I know I’m probably not supposed to ask, but how old were you?”

“Twenty. Spring chicken. Your dad was too old for me, at least I thought he was at first. I didn’t know he was married when I took up with him, Wes. You have to believe that. It was something about the ride, the lights, the way he looked at me. It was a bad time for me. I wasn’t doing shit with my life. My brother had just died. My parents were sad. And there I was on that ride, at that spot where it’s almost straight up and down, when you feel like you don’t weigh anything. I felt like I was leaving my body up there and something else was going back down. I felt like a bird.” She spread her arms out and threw her head back. “When I got off the ride, there he was, looking at me in that way of his.” She tried to imitate my father’s glare, the one that punctured my thoughts when I was little, and knew when I was fibbing.