17

It had rained most of the week. I hadn’t minded at all. Between Grandpa’s funeral arrangements and the news out of Detroit, the gloomy skies represented well my downtrodden spirit.

Frank hadn’t come and he hadn’t called. Every time the telephone rang, I jumped, answering it with my heart pounding so fast it made me breathless.

“The letter might not have gotten to him yet,” Joel said, sitting on the couch.

“I sent the letter on Friday,” I said. “He should’ve called when he got it.”

“It’s only Sunday. Be patient, Annie.”

Mom reached for the TV, turning the volume up. She hushed us. “I’m trying to watch the news.”

More footage of the Detroit riots moved across the screen. Police, wielding shotguns, walked up and down the sidewalk, passing storefronts with busted-out windows. Crowds lined the streets, examining the destruction as if in shock.

The anchorman delivered the report of a white woman shot and killed as she stood looking out her hotel window and of a little black girl, only four years old, who suffered the same from the weapons of the National Guard in Detroit.

It didn’t make sense to me. Not even a little. It seemed like the world was just too hard, too dark. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to cry.

“Their poor mothers,” Mom whispered.

He walked through the door of the diner at five minutes until closing time and came directly to where I stood refilling salt shakers at the counter. I knew him instantly. He hadn’t changed much at all. Just a little gray peppered his hair and more lines creased his face. But the eyes, they were the same. Dark and brooding.

The last I’d seen him, his eyes had been like that. He had come to tuck me into bed and listen to me say my prayers like he did some nights. When he’d lowered his face to kiss my forehead, I saw that his eyes held all the sadness in the world.

Those were the eyes that met mine that Monday afternoon.

When I noticed that my hands were trembling, I shoved them into my apron pocket. Swallowing, I willed myself to be steady, to be calm. Of all the times I’d imagined him coming back, I’d never thought I’d feel so nervous, so emotional.

“Hi, Frank,” I whispered, not ready or willing to use the name Dad.

He nodded as if to say that he knew he didn’t deserve more. “Anne,” he said.

“I still go by Annie.”

“Okay.” He looked straight, his hands at his sides. His right he held in a fist. To calm the trembling, I imagined.

I felt at a loss as to what to say. Turning, I saw Bernie peek out through the pass-through window, checking to see if I was okay. I nodded at him to say I was.

“Do you want some coffee?” I asked. “I can make new, but you’ll have to pay for it.”

“Just whatever you have on hand,” he said. “I don’t mind old.”

“Why don’t you go have a seat.”

He picked the table closest to the window, taking the chair that put his back against the wall.

I made my way to the coffeemaker, holding the air in my lungs a good ten seconds before letting it back out. Mike should be here, I thought. He’d know what to do.

What I imagined Mike would do was take the cup of coffee to Frank and ask him how he’d been all those years. He’d have some charming way to ease the tension, to iron out the wrinkles that had formed after years of estrangement before giving him the third degree to find out why he’d left and where he’d been.

Behind me I heard the sloshing of Larry’s dishwashing and the radio Bernie had on a station that only played classical music. Pouring the last of the coffee into a mug, I allowed the complexity of wanting Frank to leave and hoping he’d stay wash over me.

Both anger and relief burbled inside of me, as if they grumbled different songs.

“Annie,” Bernie called out to me through the pass-through. “He going to want anything from the grill?”

Turning, I shook my head. “I didn’t ask yet.”

“Well, find out, would ya? I want to clean this thing if I can.”

“It’s Frank,” I whispered. The two words were out before I realized it.

“It’s who?” He lowered his eyebrows and squinted. Lifting a hand to wipe at a line of sweat on his forehead, he looked in the direction of our sole customer. “Frank? As in your father?”

I nodded.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

He didn’t wait for me to finish. He moved from the pass-through to the kitchen door, pushing it open and joining me behind the counter.

“You want me to make him leave?” He crossed his arms, looking at Frank.

“No,” I said, overeager. “I need him.”

Trying to pretend I hadn’t said those last words, I took the cup to Frank’s table, not bothering to grab a pitcher of cream or a cube of sugar. He’d want it black.

I didn’t know much about him, but of that I was sure.

“When did you get here?” I asked, putting the cup in front of him. “Into town, I mean.”

“Just now.” He looked at the coffee as if it were from an alien planet. “This was my first stop.”

“Are you going to order food?” My voice was more clipped than usual. It surprised me how much I sounded like my mother. “Bernie wants to shut down the grill.”

“I’m not hungry.” He lifted the cup to his lips, taking a sip. “You have time to talk?”

“My shift isn’t over until quarter after three.”

He sighed and nodded.

“I’m sure you’re in a hurry to get out of town, but we all have lives to live,” I said, barely over a whisper. I looked at my wristwatch. “If you want to talk, you’ll have to wait twenty minutes. You think you can manage that?”

He looked at me with a half grin, one that reminded me of Mike. “You sure are like your mother.”

I pushed up my glasses, feeling the heat of my cheeks with my fingertips.

“That’s a compliment,” he said. “I can wait here. Unless you need to clean the table.”

“You can stay,” I said. “Just as long as you order something to eat. The special is meat loaf.”

He grimaced. “How about a piece of pie.”

“All right.” I jotted a note. “Ice cream?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll have that out to you in a few minutes,” I said as if talking to any customer who had walked in off the street. “Anything else?”

“Nope.”

I turned away from him, leaving his table.

“Annie,” he said.

I looked at him over my shoulder.

“You look like your mother.”

I’d heard that my whole life from just about every single person who lived in Fort Colson. Never before had it made me feel anything. It was just something people said. But then Frank said it, and I thought it was a roundabout way of telling me that he thought I was pretty.

I’d waited my whole life for my father to say something like that to me.

I was sure to stuff away that warm feeling, trying to ignore how good it was.

I couldn’t afford to let him break my heart again.

Bernie agreed to let me punch out early, before the cleaning routine at the end of the shift. Larry said he didn’t mind covering my tasks. He didn’t have anything else to do and could use the extra half hour’s pay.

“If I were you, I’d tell him to take a hike,” Bernie whispered. “You want me to tell him? I don’t mind.”

“No.” I hung my apron up on the peg behind the kitchen door. “I need to talk to him.”

“All right. But if you change your mind, I’ll be around,” he said. “Get yourself a glass of Coke. You can talk to him right here if you want. When you’re done, just lock the door behind you.”

“Thank you.”

“And I mean it. If you want me to kick him to the curb, I’m more than happy to.”

“I hope that won’t be necessary,” I said, pushing my way through the swinging door and into the dining area.

Frank read a paperback at his table. I had a flash of memory cross my mind of when he used to sit in his recliner, the one Mom had sold to a neighbor for three dollars after he’d left. In the evenings of his good days, he’d read something out loud to Mike and me while Mom cleaned up after supper. He liked reading Kipling the most.

I still had his Kipling book on the shelf in my bedroom. I’d never opened it on my own, fearing the stories wouldn’t be nearly as good as I’d remembered from when he read them to me.

“I’m done,” I said, putting my glass of pop on the table and pulling out the chair across from him. “Bernie said we could talk here. Unless you wanted to go somewhere else.”

He put his finger up to tell me to wait just a minute before dog-earing the page and shutting the book. I tried not to let that annoy me. He’d been gone for twelve years and he couldn’t put his book down before finishing a sentence. I clenched my jaw to keep from saying anything about it.

“What are you reading?” I asked instead.

He turned the book so I could see the cover. “Some Steinbeck,” he answered. “He travels around the country with his dog.”

“Is it any good?”

“It’s Steinbeck.”

I bobbed the straw up and down in my glass, trying to decide if he meant that the book was good or bad.

“Aren’t you going to eat something?” he asked, folding his hands on the table.

“I already had lunch.”

“You been working here long?”

I shook my head. “Just a month or so. Since graduation.”

“Are you planning to go to college?”

“I don’t think so.” I sipped my Coke, hoping it would settle the nerves that had taken over my stomach. “It’s too expensive.”

“I imagine Michael would be halfway through by now.”

“He’s at basic training.”

He shook his head. “Army?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody should have told him to enlist in the Navy,” he muttered, grimacing.

“Why?”

“Because they won’t send them.” His voice was deeper than I remembered it, full of more gravel. He sounded a lot like Grandpa, and when I realized that, it stung. “They always send the Army. Always.”

“How would we have known?” I asked, surprised by the calm of my voice.

He held his empty mug with both hands, spinning it around and around, keeping his eyes on it. I turned in my chair, my legs off the side of it, and looked out the window. Larry came in from the kitchen with the crate of glasses he’d just washed. I hoped he wouldn’t look over at Frank and me.

“Your mom still lives in the house?” Frank asked.

I knew he meant the one that backed up to the lake. I shook my head.

“We had to sell it after you left,” I said.

He let out a sigh that had a low rumble to it. I prepared to pounce on his words if he had anything to say about that. But he didn’t.

“We live on Lewis,” I said. “Not too far from Oma.”

“You still live at home?”

I nodded.

“I thought you might have been married by now.”

“I’m just eighteen.”

“Plenty of girls your age are married.”

I shook my head. “No qualified candidates have presented themselves so far.”

His lips rose in his half smile. “It’s good to be picky, I suppose.”

“Where have you been?” I turned toward him.

He crossed his arms and kept his eyes on the table between us.

“Well—” he started. “The loons come this year?”

“They come every year.”

“I’d like to see them while I’m in town.”

“I’m sure you will.” The sun coming through the diner window warmed me, making me sleepy. “Are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”

“I traveled for a while,” he said. “I made it out west for a few years. The weather didn’t suit me, though, so I came back to Michigan.”

“To Bliss?”

He nodded. “Somewhere in between Detroit and Toledo.”

“Do you have a job?”

“I do.” He didn’t elaborate.

“Doing?”

“I own a car shop,” he said. “We fix them up and sell them cheap.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“I’ve got a dog. He’s out in the truck if you want to see him.”

“No thank you.”

He rubbed at his nose with the backside of his forefinger and turned his attention to a spot on the floor where a dot of light jolted and jerked around, reflecting off something. I wasn’t in the mood to figure out what it was.

“It would have been nice to know you were still alive,” I said. “You could have written at least a few times. At Christmas or our birthdays.”

“Maybe I could have.”

“Why did you make Grandma keep it a secret?” I leaned forward on the table. “Why would you do that?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he thrummed his fingertips on the cover of the Steinbeck book.

“How’s your mother?” he asked after a few minutes.

“Fine,” I answered. “She works for Dr. DeVries.”

“I’m sure he loves that,” he mumbled, crossing his arms.

“Well, she had to get some kind of job after you left.” I tried to keep my voice calm but failed miserably. “How else were we supposed to survive?”

He cleared his throat again.

“It was hard for us, you know.” I pushed up my glasses, hoping they’d hide how watery my eyes had gotten. “It was especially hard for her.”

“Not nearly as hard as if I’d stayed,” he said, raising his head and squinting up at me.

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

As a little girl I’d entertained daydreams of when Frank would come back. We’d be having supper at the table and he’d come right through the front door. Mom would welcome him straightaway and all would be as it was.

But in my imagination, Frank didn’t have heavy bags under his eyes and age spots on his forehead. Somehow I hadn’t factored in that he would have aged at all. In my mind, he’d been stuck in his early thirties.

And in my imagination he’d smiled, glad to see us, eager to make all right again. The man sitting across the table from me didn’t seem capable of gladness.

“Your mother won’t like that I’m here.” He clasped his hands together on the tabletop.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“She won’t want to see me.”

“Probably not.” I shrugged. “You can’t blame her, can you?”

“Fair enough.”

I bit my lower lip, raking my teeth over it before letting it go. “Have you met anyone?”

“What do you mean?” He frowned at me.

“Have you seen anyone,” I said. “Since you left?”

“I haven’t taken up with another woman, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

I sighed and my shoulders relaxed. Looking into his eyes I saw earnestness there. I couldn’t help but believe him.

“I’ve never been unfaithful to your mother. Not in that way, at least. I haven’t even made a single friend,” he said. “Can you believe that?”

“You aren’t exactly friendly.”

That half smile again.

“I’m staying for the week,” he said. “I’ll be over at the campground. I’ve got a trailer.”

“Why won’t you stay at Grandma’s house?”

“Too many memories,” he answered. “But if you need me, you can find me there.”

“Will you help her?” I asked. “She needs someone to make funeral arrangements.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“What should I tell Mom?”

“Whatever you want.”

“What if she does want to see you?”

“That would surprise me.” He stood, taking his wallet from his back pocket and digging out a few bills.

“You haven’t asked about Joel,” I said, an edge to my voice. “Remember, your youngest child?”

“Of course I do.” He swallowed hard. “How old is he now? Eleven? Twelve?”

“He’s turning fourteen next week.”

“Have I been gone that long?”

“Yeah. You have.”

I stood, going toward the exit. He followed me, stepping to the side when I opened the door.

“I suppose I should have been a gentleman,” he said, squinting at the bright day.

“What do you mean?”

“I should have opened the door for you.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”

He looked at me before walking out to the sidewalk behind me.

“You aren’t one of those feminists, are you?”

“Would it matter if I was?”

For that I’d earned a full smile.

“You sure are like your mother,” he said.

That time, I took it as a compliment.

I didn’t tell Mom that night that Frank was in Fort Colson. She was already worn out by the time she got home from work. She heated up frozen dinners for us in the oven and told Joel and me we’d eat in the living room.

She didn’t even have the energy to set the table.

Joel set up TV tables and Mom took her place in her chair, curling her legs up under her. There she fell asleep before her dinner had even had the chance to cool off.

Joel and I watched more coverage of the riots in Detroit. The reporter interviewed a white woman wearing a headband to hold back wilted hair from her head. She stared at the camera as if she couldn’t believe what was happening.

“It sounded like we was in Vietnam, all the shooting and such,” she said. “I got down on the floor and prayed none of them bullets would hit me. I thought I was going to die. I think I’ll have nightmares the rest of my life over this.”

I thought of Frank alone at the campgrounds.

I wondered if he still had nightmares.

“He just showed up at the diner?” Jocelyn asked, whispering into the space between our windows. “He didn’t call first or anything?”

I shook my head. It had felt good to spill the beans to somebody. Whenever I had a secret to tell, I went to Jocelyn first.

“Unbelievable.” She shook her head, her eyes wide. “What did your mom say?”

“She doesn’t know yet.”

“You’re kidding me.” She let her mouth hang open. “You know she’s going to slap him. I sort of hope I’m there to see it.”

“Yeah, she might.”

Then Jocelyn tilted her head and made her sympathetic face. “Do you think he’s here to stay for a while?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “He said he’d be here for a week. I don’t know if he’ll extend his stay or not.”

“Do you want him to?”

I didn’t answer right away. Shrugging, I looked at the roof that peaked above her head.

“It’s okay if you don’t know what you want,” she said. “It makes perfect sense. It’s all positively confusing.”

There were few people in the world who had the privilege of seeing me cry. Jocelyn was one. And on that night, I didn’t hold back. Not even a little.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

Eventually I would.

Fort Knox, Kentucky

Dear Mom, Annie, and Joel,

Thanks for calling me about Grandpa. I know I was awful quiet on the phone, Mom. That was because I was trying not to cry in front of my drill sergeant. He’s been calling me a ninny ever since the day I got off the bus, and I didn’t think he needed another excuse for the nickname.

I asked if I could get leave to come home for the funeral. No such luck. I can only go if it’s an immediate family member, so unless we can trick them into thinking Grandpa was my big brother, I’m stuck here.

I know I shouldn’t tell jokes at a time like this, but it’s the only way I can keep from boo-hooing in front of all my buddies.

Gosh, I’m heartbroken over not being there with you all. I’ll bet Grandma’s not taking it so well. She’s been doing everything for him for so long. And I’m not just talking about when he was sick. Tell her I’m sorry, will you? And, Joel, give her the best hug you’ve got for me.

I’ll be thinking about you all day on Wednesday. And I’ll even think about Frank if he decides to show up. I hope he does the right thing and comes home. It would do Grandma’s heart good, don’t you think?

Write me again soon, will you? I miss everybody back home something awful, especially when I think about how I’m missing out on something so important.

I sure do hate being so far from you all.

Love,
Mike