“I’m right here,” I said.
She looked at me. Or maybe she was looking
for
me. “I know you are,” she said, trying to smile. “But it seems like I woke up and my little girl was gone.”
“She
is
, Mother. I’m a big girl now, practically an adult.”
She smiled again, but tears brimmed in her eyes.
For a moment I felt bad. But she had brought this on herself. As far as I was concerned, she was lucky to have Dad and me at all.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
My heart stopped.
“For what?”
“Well, honey, I’ve told you this before, but I’m sorry I disappeared on you last year. It was an important year for you—so much was going on in your life. And while your father and I lost a son, you lost your little brother, and I wasn’t there to help you through it.”
Now, that was an understatement.
“Dad was here,” I said.
“I know. And I’ve been so grateful for that.”
Please.
“He’s good at tucking me in too,” I said. “He said he didn’t know what he’d been missing.”
“Well, that’s the upside, isn’t it?”
“I’m tired, Mother,” I said.
“I love you, Maisey, more than anything in this world.”
“Thanks,” I said, which was more of an insult than it sounds.
I knew she wanted to hear something else, something I had said thousands of times before the catastrophic event that changed our world forever:
I love you too
. That I could not say, but when I heard the door click and her footsteps on the stairs, I cried myself to sleep, completely forgetting I was a big girl now, practically an adult.
I’ve been tempted, especially at first, to tell my friends about what I saw—their adoration can be sickening—but something’s kept me from it. I do sometimes wonder what they would have said. All these years, and I told no one until yesterday. I almost told Marcus after our engagement became official, but by then I knew him well, and I could just hear him saying,
Don’t you think you’ve made her pay
for her sins?
If so, I’d say I’ve paid for them too.
Kendy
Ah, the Mississippi River.
I am close. This trip, one I’ve made hundreds of times, has seemed much longer than five hours. I wish I could have been here earlier, and I wish I could be home the minute I leave Mother’s room. But, what is it Luke says? If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride?
Well, as a matter of fact, I wish beggars
could
ride. And I might as well go whole hog and wish there were no beggars. Too much sadness in this world. Some of it I have caused.
With the distance that years bring, I have wondered what kind of deficiency accounts for what I allowed to happen. Surely there must be one. Possibly more than one. Isn’t there someone or something I can blame besides myself? Or along with myself? It wouldn’t make it better, but it would make it at least comprehensible.
I’d like to blame my birth father, a deficiency if there ever was one. If I had told Mother of my incredible indiscretion (such an innocuous term for falling in love with my husband’s uncle), she might have been generous enough to let me place some of the blame on my father’s neglect, though strangely, she herself blamed him for nothing. She did say once, however, that he was useless.
I of course didn’t quite believe that. How could I believe that of a man whose name I did not know, but who must have wanted so much to know me, despite his indifference in his youth? That was one thing I did pursue: I nagged and nagged Mother to tell me who he was, and finally she said she’d tell me the name of the “sperm donor” when I turned eighteen. “Mother!” I had said. Not a nice thing for a child to hear, but I’m sure frustration had gotten the best of her.
“Okay,” I said when she gave me my present the evening of my eighteenth birthday. We had just come home that Friday evening from the dinner Margaret had prepared in my honor.
“Okay?” she had asked.
I felt bad. She thought that was my response to the gift I hadn’t even opened yet.
I laughed and told her I was thinking about something else, and then I opened my present and saw, resting on plush black velvet, a stunning pair of diamond stud earrings. I rushed to the mirror and put them in. She stood behind me and said they looked perfect. “They are,” I said. And I didn’t have the heart, when she had bought me such a thoughtful and expensive keepsake for this special birthday, to broach the subject of my father that night.
“I’m being lazy today,” she said when I came to the breakfast table the next day, “taking the morning off.”
She smiled when I acted like I was about to faint.
She looked across the table as I sat down with my bowl of cornflakes and said, “Okay.”
I held on to my spoon for support.
She said she had been in bed for quite a while last night before she finally understood what I had meant by “Okay.”
I put down my spoon and told her I was sorry my dad’s name had dominated my thoughts even while I held her unopened birthday present in my hand. “Such a wonderful present,” I said, touching an earlobe, still trying to fathom my mother’s unprecedented attention to this particular passage, especially nice since we had had several unpleasant discussions about my choice of universities during that year. No, I hadn’t expected such a generous and special gift.
She told me there was no need to apologize, that I had been waiting a long time to know my father’s identity.
She got up, retied her robe, and walked to the refrigerator to get both of us some orange juice. I sensed how badly she did not want to say his name inside the walls we inhabited. I know now he had nothing whatsoever to do with us, but that was something I would have to find out for myself. I know now how much Mother dreaded that for me.
“Your father’s name,” she said, putting the pitcher and two juice glasses on the table and sitting across from me again, “is Craig Tanner.”
I repeated it, amazed I finally knew his name. I don’t know how many times I repeated it in my mind after that moment at the breakfast table, and I puzzled even myself when I waited more than a year to contact him. I didn’t ask my mother to help me locate him, but at some point during my freshman year of college, Margaret tracked him down for me in Denver, Colorado.
I picked up the phone to call him several times until finally stress alone caused me to stay on the line to hear his voice and to say, “Hello?”
“My name is Kennedy,” I added seconds later. He didn’t reply but seemed to be waiting for something else. I realized I needed to add one detail. “Kennedy
Belk
.” Still nothing. “Your daughter.”
He of course was very surprised to hear from me, or perhaps
horrified
is a better word. For some reason in those first minutes, he told me, among other things, that he had been married a couple of times but had no children.
“No
other
children,” I replied, surprising myself. I thought he might be glad he had an offspring in the world, but if tone and words are any indication, he was far from elated. I said I’d like to see him, and he took my phone number and said he’d get back to me.
“I can come to Denver when school’s out,” I said before he hung up.
He didn’t call for weeks, but finally the phone rang, and instead of Paula saying she’d be late or some guy asking for a date or my history notes, it was my father on the end of the line. He didn’t want me to come to Denver, but he said if I wanted to meet him, he’d fly to St. Louis the next time I was there. I did not intend to let this opportunity get away from me. I told him I’d be home the next Friday.
“That’ll work,” he said.
He didn’t even get a hotel to spend the night the Saturday
I met him. He fit me in for a long lunch between his flights in and out of St. Louis. We met at a restaurant near the airport. I told the hostess I was meeting Craig Tanner, and she led me to a luxuriously padded booth where a handsome man with my sky-blue eyes sat drinking a glass of wine and perusing a menu. He stood up and put his hands on my shoulders, as close to intimate as we would ever be. “Well,” he said, looking into my face, “there you are.”
We ordered (I have no recollection of eating whatever was put before me), and he looked at me across the linen tablecloth. “I do believe you favor my mother,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Do you have any pictures of her or my grandfather? Do I have aunts and uncles? Do I have cousins?” Seeing him had been my focus all these years, the family that came with him not even in my peripheral imaginings. Suddenly I longed to know them.
“Not with me,” he said. “Maybe I can send you some.”
He had no trouble chatting. I learned his family knew nothing about me. I think I might have winced when he said that, though he didn’t notice. It made me terribly sad, because I knew I wasn’t the one to tell them such a thing and doubted very much that he ever would. I was glad my grandparents had other grandchildren from an aunt and uncle I’d never know either. My father repeated what he had said on the phone: that he had been divorced twice (“Not a bit good at the marriage thing”) and that he had no
other
children (his voice implying “Thank God”). He added that he was dating a woman a mere five years older than his recently discovered daughter. How about that?
He did accomplish one important thing with that two-hour lunch: He made sure I understood a relationship wasn’t going to happen, though he was “certainly glad” we could meet.
Like an idiot I hugged him when we parted and said, “Thanks for coming.”
“I wish I had more time,” he said, hurrying outside to grab a shuttle, though I had offered to drop him off at the terminal. “You take care of yourself now.”
No doubt I’d have to. Or if someone contributed to my care, it most definitely would not be Mr. Cliché. I drove back to the condo, disappointed that my “father” was so unbelievably self-absorbed. He was a flat character in the play of life, a most reprehensible type. I summed up my impression to try out on Paula when I returned to Indy: “As deep as a thimble.”
Still, I couldn’t say I was sorry we’d met. My curiosity was satisfied and my silly illusion that my father was impatiently waiting to meet me and love me was irrevocably shattered—far beyond the help of Super Glue and a steady hand. I had also learned about my grandfather’s serious hypertension and my grandmother’s bout with breast cancer. Those are important things to know.
“You were right, Mother,” I said when she got home that evening. “My father is useless.”
She put down her briefcase and walked over to the couch, where I was sitting with a book in my lap. Then,
to my great surprise, she cupped her hand under my chin and kissed the top of my head. As far as memories of my mother go, that kiss is right up there with the blizzard.
Maisey
Marcus is walking outside, holding a cell phone to his ear. He pivots the phone away from his mouth and whispers, “Blair emergency.”
My heart stops. And I must look like I need resuscitating, because he holds up a hand to stop my imagination in its tracks and quickly adds, “
Minor
emergency.”
He speaks into the phone now. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’m sure we can work out something.”
He snaps the phone shut, pulls a chair up beside me, and squeezes my hand. “My calm and capable mother is uncharacteristically freaked.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Pete.”
“Pete? Do I know a Pete?”
“Pete the dog?”
“Oh,
Pete
!”
“Yes, Pete the ten-year-old dog, as cherished as any one of us sons. Mom likes to say he’s caused her a good deal less trouble, has not had any use for higher education that would continue bankrupting them, and has never strayed farther than the yard.”
“Is he sick?”
“No, but his regular sitter had to go to Wisconsin this morning. Her daughter had her baby early.”
“How rude.”
“Very. Mom said she’s pretty disgusted with the whole lot of them.”
“Can’t Pete stay in a kennel?”
“Excuse me?”
I laugh.
“I believe she’d miss the wedding first—or rent Pete a tux.”
“Well, Marcus, your mom really has no problem. We have an empty pen. Pete can stay right out there.” I point at a pen beside Dad’s outbuilding, one long side of it being the building itself.
“He’s a house dog, honey.”
“The outdoor pen is on a concrete slab and there merely for his enjoyment of nature. There’s a hole cut into the side of the building, an entrance into lovely quarters. If those accommodations were fit for my darling dog, Lady, they’re fit enough for Pete, trust me. You’ve seen it, haven’t you, when you were out there with Dad? Believe me, we’ve allowed few people to see such excess. There’s even a fan on the wall, pointing straight at the unreasonably luxurious doggie bed. Honestly, it will do. I’ll put a rug in there if that will make your mom happy. We can go right now and buy a carpet remnant so you can tell her the outbuilding is a guesthouse.”
Because Marcus hasn’t paid all that much attention to the dog pen on any excursions to the outbuilding, we walk out so I can show him I do not exaggerate. After the inspection, we return to the patio, where he calls his mother to convince her Pete will be fine in the “guesthouse” and that the Laswells will be glad to have him occupy it for the weekend.
I head into the house to get us sodas. I fill glasses with ice and conjure up my dog, Lady, as she was—so lively, so loyal.
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about her, which surprises me. There was a time I was sure I’d look for her every day of my life.
I loved her a lot.
She was the best dog a girl could have. She was officially Dad’s dog, but from the time I could toddle to the pen, she was really mine. Dad had bought the beautiful yellow Lab the year before I was born, choosing her out of a litter of ten. He bought her to hunt with, but he didn’t get around to taking her hunting more than two or three times a year, if that. Grandpa and Clay hunted with her more often than Dad did, mostly out of pity, I think. They didn’t need to bother; Lady was a companion much more than a hunter. I rarely spent the night with my grandparents or Clay and Rebecca without taking Lady. She especially liked to be at Clay’s, because she could run all over his twenty acres and swim in his pond.