Winter Loon(92)

I put my hand on the doorknob. The cold brass of it slid in my sweaty palm. The layers between us were more than curtains and screen. A web of time and deception and sorrow and muck were there, too, and I imagined I’d have to buckle and cut through it all to get to him. We found each other’s eyes and held on. Then he shook his head, grabbed his bag, and walked back to the familiar truck parked there. Aveline ran after him. I could hear her through the door. “Moss. Don’t you do this. Moss!” I couldn’t turn the knob. I could only watch as Aveline hit the side of his truck with her palm as he sped off.

“Give him time” is what she said to me.

Her calm aggravated me. I matched it with fury. “Time? I don’t need to give him time! He takes it from me.” Just you wait, he’d said to me. And I had waited. I was at the end of my ability to do that anymore, but I didn’t know what came after the waiting was done. I pointed my finger at her, yelling, “What are you giving him, huh?”

She was firm when she faced me. Her voice was a whisper, but she stamped each letter of each word. “Don’t you raise your voice at me again. You do not know me. Now, you are welcome to stay and to have dinner with us. Or you can leave, too. It doesn’t matter to me which you choose. But you stay, and by God, you will be civil.”

I could see in her face, hear in her voice. My father would face a reckoning.

We sat down to dinner without him. A place had never been set. Aveline had conditioned herself and Annaclaire to expect nothing. “We’re here,” she had said, “but we’re not waiting here.”

Annaclaire said grace, thanking God for the bounty. She eyeballed me, then added, “And thanks for sending Wes, I suppose.”

“Annaclaire,” Aveline scolded.

“Well . . .”

I could tell she blamed my being there for her father’s abrupt exit. I bowed my head and prayed this would all come right somehow.

“Enough, you two,” Mrs. Blue said. “I’m starving. Moss, get up there and carve the turkey already.” Aveline sighed and I sliced the bird. “Was that so hard? Now let’s eat,” Mrs. Blue said, digging in.

And so we did, three of us in a stuffed silence, Mrs. Blue with abandon.



AFTER THE LEFTOVERS WERE PUT away, the dishes done, everyone else gone to bed, I lay awake, listening to the clock tick in the hallway, listening for the sound of tires crunching snow. How many nights had I gone to bed, wondering if he would be there in the morning? Then I heard the faintest click. A shadow stooped, moved across the room in my direction. I was still, like a hunter. I didn’t want to spook him. He was bigger than my fingertip, bigger than the fist resting on my forehead. When he sat down in the soft blue rocker next to me, I closed my eyes and breathed in. He smelled like motor oil on pavement, exhaust backing up into a car, licorice snaps and tobacco, and something wild, flushed geese, prairie sage. He was close enough to me, I could feel the temperature change when he exhaled. It took every bit of courage I had to open my eyes. And he was there. His face glistening and bent toward mine.

“Dad.”

On our knees, grovel and grope, men crawling out of mud, out of quicksand, desperate for relief and mercy. He held my face in his rough hands, turning it over like clay, checking for wounds, for blood, like I had been lost to war, not disappeared in a face-saving lie. It had been eleven months since I’d seen him, since he’d promised to return for me. “I’m so sorry,” he said, over and over. The light switched on and Annaclaire barreled into us. We three were a sobbing dog pile when Aveline found us there on her living room floor.





CHAPTER 28

HE HAD LOST weight, fallen into the hollows between his bones. Aveline put Annaclaire back to bed, then closed the two of them in the little girl’s room. She would not share a bed with my father. I couldn’t sleep knowing he was on the other side of the living room wall, in that peach-and-white bed, in those sheets, sleeping off the seasons and miles that had kept us apart.

The house was quiet the next day, no piano playing, no back talk from Annaclaire. Aveline’s shoulders were down and her head was up as she tidied the house around me. She’d emptied my father’s duffel into a basket and taken it downstairs to launder. I heard footsteps, the bathroom door close, the shower curtain pulled along the rod, water spray. I waited. Before long, my father came down the hall, wearing thick work pants and nothing else. His hair was soaking wet. He rubbed it with a white towel where it brushed his neck. His beard was rough from weeks without a shave. Blue feathers had been added to the birds tattooed around his bicep. Three fluttered up to his shoulder, one fluttered down his chest, a last feather seemed to pierce the skin and embed in his heart. Sunshine had stained his body around short sleeves so his torso was lighter than the rest of him. His hands were darker still, cut and calloused.

“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” he said. He followed my eyes, pressed his right hand on his chest. He glanced up to where Aveline stood in the doorway. “They’re new.”

I couldn’t believe she wasn’t screaming, throwing things around the room, punching at my father for what he’d done to me, for how he’d lied to her.

“Annaclaire still sleeping?” my father asked.

“Let’s let her be awhile,” Aveline said.

He grabbed at the scruff of his neck. “You think you could cut my hair for me?”