DAD SMIRKED ACROSS THE TABLE at the sour pinch of my mouth. This batch of kombucha had turned out better than his last one, but that bar wasn’t exactly the highest.
“Drink up, Elaine. It’s good for your—”
“—digestion. I know. It’s still disgusting.”
“You’ll live.” His chuckle rolled out ahead of yet another thunderclap.
Rain slashed at the windows and splashed along the gutters, but the basement was warm and dry, pungent with incense, lined with shelf after shelf of supplies—jars of dried herbs, flower petals, and essential oils; containers of lye; vats of coconut oil and olive oil, shea butter and beeswax; bin after bin of yarn and notions; stacks of packaging and shipping supplies. The “business” side of our business, awaiting us in neatly ordered rows. It was rote work, and time-consuming, and it wasn’t ever going to make us rich. But it made us happy. After so much misery, that was more than enough.
It used to be a regular thing, working together. I’d sit across from him and knit while he made supply lists, filled custom orders, balanced the bank account. We’d package product over cups of tea and rare batches of homemade oatmeal cookies. Sometimes we’d chat, or watch a movie on his laptop. Sometimes he’d put on a playlist of cheesy pop songs, and we’d sing along until we were laughing too hard to breathe. I’d gotten older, though; gotten busier with school and boys. Gotten old enough for my own shifts at the market, leaving him to handle the back-end tasks. The shift in routine wasn’t personal—it just was.
But today I’d run out of yarn mid-project, gone rummaging through my fiber stash, found him hauling one of several bins of product down from the kitchen; we’d settled at the table without a word, and gotten to work. Grey was out with Sadie, and Skye had picked up an extra shift at her job, so there we were: me, Dad, and a shit-ton of freshly cured soap.
It was soothing and repetitive, our routine: I wrapped the bars in waxy paper, sealed them with our label, and passed the finished product to Dad, who wound decorative twine in bright loops around their middles—red for peppermint, purple for lavender, green for tea tree, pink for rose. The colors trailed from his fingertips, wrapped like vines around the slender phalanges, lay in bright hanks alongside the graceful ridges of his knuckles. Those hands, larger, paler versions of mine, that never failed to pry beauty from the scraps of his world.
“We haven’t talked in a while,” he began, eyes on the table, fingers suddenly fidgety with the twine. “Keeping busy?”
“Yeah, you know. Lots going on.”
“Seeing anyone special? Boyfriend material?”
“What? Oh. Um, no. Like I said, I’ve been busy.” It was a weird question, a step outside our usual conversational stratosphere. Like I was going to bring a hookup home to meet my dad.
“Oh, sure, sure. No doubt. School’s okay, then?”
“Sure,” I hedged. “Dad, are you okay? You’re being—”
“Weird. I know. I just need to make sure you’re fine. With this.”
The words burst out of him all at once. I eyed him over the jumble of our work space, waiting for something other than ellipses. Took in the tension in his arms, the squint of his hazel eyes; his pale lashes and strawberry-blond hair, the same chin-length Cobain cut he’d worn since the early nineties, now slashed with gray. The curl of twine, pulled tight around his purpling fingertip.
Talking with my father was like reaching into a bag of Scrabble tiles, searching for that one missing letter. Coming up, every time, with a handful of question marks that didn’t belong in the game.
“With the soap?”
“Jesus. No, not with the soap, Elaine. With Skye. With me.”
I had to bite back a smile. Dad had spent the time since my mother’s death focused on perfecting his craft, on running the business. On being a father. And he was good at it—all of it. But more than once, I’d wondered how long it would take him to grow weary of perpetual solitude.
Right around thirteen years, that’s how long. Better late than never.
“I’m fine, Dad. I’m happy for both—for all of us.”
His relief was tangible, raw enough to make me wince.
“Thank you. Thank you, Elaine. I’m so glad this is working out. Skye adores you, she truly does. And Greyson—you two seem to be doing well. Getting along. Bonding.”
Yeah. About that.
“We get along fine. He’s nice.”
“Oh, he’s definitely a Nice Guy,” Dad chuckled. I could hear the capital letters, even without his air quotes. “Just ask his mama. But really, he’s a good kid. He’s polite, and kind; he excels in school. He follows the rules, no questions asked. He even sat me down to assure me he’d keep the door open, when you two are alone in a room. Which was awkward, I have to admit.”
“He what?” My stomach hitched, sending up a splash of kombucha. It wasn’t any better the second time around, nor was it much worse. “Why?”
“He wants to avoid a double standard,” he said cheerfully as I died inside, over and over. “Sadie’s mother requires her visits with Greyson to be supervised. Skye wants to respect that, so they have an understanding—she won’t hover, as long as they don’t shut themselves away. An ‘open door policy,’ if you will.” He chuckled again and rolled his eyes, delighting in his Dad Joke. “As if that’s a concern with you.”
“Right.”
Dad’s forehead creased at the catch in my voice. I pressed my toes together beneath the table, kept my face still as possible beneath his unblinking stare. If so much as a trickle of my thoughts leaked into his reality, our new family would implode.
“Elaine,” he said, “Skye and I—this must have—look. I know it was sudden. I know that. And it can’t be easy, having a boy you hardly know living here out of—”
“It’s fine,” I managed. As if he had a clue in hell how uneasy this was. “Whatever makes you happy.”
“It’s your happiness that matters.” He coughed into his sleeve, finally blinked down at the half-tied twine, still wound around his fingers. “It matters to me. It mattered to your mother. She’d have wanted—”
“She got what she wanted.”
It flew out on its own dark wings, beat its way past my teeth. Sunk its talons deep.
I didn’t spend much time dwelling on spirituality in general, much less the concept of an afterlife. Dad himself waffled on the specifics of his beliefs—sometimes he pondered reincarnation, or transmigration; sometimes he went on about astral planes, and the post-conscious bliss and punishments of our own creation. He’d declared more than once that death was the end—that the cycle of human life ended in oblivion and a natural return to the earth. But now I watched his jaw clench and his grip falter; watched the knot fly apart as he met my eyes, and my mother was surely in the room, real as she’d ever been in life. Perched like an owl between us, impossible to ever really bury.
“I promise you. She didn’t.”
“Then that makes two of us.” I finished wrapping the last bar of soap, secured it with the sticker, creaseless and dead center. Perfect every time. I slid out of my chair and headed for the stairs, head down. “Done.”
“I love you.”
I stopped in the doorway, straightened my spine. Unclenched my teeth, until my grimace became a smile. Let it soften my cheeks and light my eyes before I turned to face him. His own smile trembled at the corners, pleading for forgiveness. Wanting so badly to mirror mine.
“It’s okay, Dad. Really.”
“I love you,” he said again. “Above anyone or anything. Never doubt that.”
It wasn’t fair, blaming him for any of this. We’d been two for so long, it was easy to forget we’d once been three—really, very nearly four. Far too easy to forget the way he’d broken and fallen beside me.
But he’d pulled himself up. He’d rearranged the world for me; he’d tried and failed, over and over, but never ever failed to try. He’d lost everything else, but he’d never stopped.
And now we were four again, and he was my dad. There was nothing to forgive.
“I know you do.”
I left him there, still smiling, surrounded by everything we’d made.