It was that next morning when I noticed the photographs. They were sitting in plain sight on the little mantel in the dining room. I must have walked past them a dozen times and never noticed.
My mind was elsewhere. Sierra had slept in, as usual, but I got up and made myself at home with toast and jelly. Two minutes after I got there, Mrs. Leland walked in. She was obviously startled to see me, but instead of saying so, she gave me a sort of fake half smile and asked me if I’d found everything I wanted. I was polite, but I basically ignored her. She made coffee and pretended to be busy over by the sink. I knew she had to be pretending because there was nothing that could possibly be done. Hers was the cleanest kitchen I’d ever been in. The counters were all gleaming. There wasn’t a smudge on the tile, a crumb on the floor or a even an empty Pop-Tarts wrapper hanging out of the garbage. It was almost creepy. Sierra and I took turns doing dish duty, but neither of us ever got so into it. Mrs. Leland was definitely one of those women on the TV commercials, ecstatic over some antibacterial liquid or paper towel.
More reason to dislike her. I ate my toast and brooded.
When Mom entered the kitchen, she was already showered and dressed. She greeted us both with a cheery smile, but I knew it wasn’t genuine. She was wearing what I called her fake-it getup. The gray suit was kind of tweedy, very conservative. It had hung in Mom’s closet always and was worn only for occasions like contesting a speeding ticket, attending a parent-teacher conference or going to a funeral.
“May I get you some coffee?” Mrs. Leland asked her.
“Yeah, great,” Mom answered.
“Cream and sugar?”
“All I need is some artificial sweetener,” she answered.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any of that.”
Mom nodded. “Sugar’s fine then.”
She stirred her coffee and Mrs. Leland hovered at her sink for a few minutes before grabbing up a watering can and heading out the back door inferring that she was going to tend her flowers.
“Where are you off to?” I asked Mom.
She smiled, but she didn’t look me in the eye. “Oh, just some personal business,” she said, evasively.
“I heard something about a doctor,” I admitted.
She didn’t seem surprised that I’d wormed out that info. Mom looked at me directly then.
“It’s probably just some gynecological thing,” she said with a wink. “I know how you hate talking about that stuff.”
That was true. I’d started having my period the winter before and it still seemed like the yuckiest, most uncomfortable and inconvenient thing imaginable. Sierra thought I should be grateful, finally maturing up, later than a lot of my classmates. But to me it was just a nuisance. I couldn’t, however, let my aversion to discussion of the female world be used to sidetrack me from finding out what was going on.
“Sierra says that you’re probably pregnant,” I told her, being deliberately nonchalant.
Mom’s jaw dropped open. Her expression was incredulous and then she actually laughed.
“I’m underestimating your sister’s creativity and imagination,” she said. “Or maybe she’s just watching too much TV.”
“So if you’re not pregnant,” I said, “why are you going to the doctor?”
“There are lots of reasons to see a doctor,” Mom answered. “I don’t really have an appointment at this clinic, so I’d better get over there so I can pressure them to try to work me into the schedule.”
She drank down her coffee and got up to leave.
“Mom!” I whined.
She reached over and flicked my nose, playfully. “When I have anything certain to tell you and Sierra, I will.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but she wouldn’t be budged from it.
“At least stay and have breakfast with me.”
“You’re finished already,” she answered. “Tomorrow. We’ll make it a date. Breakfast tomorrow.”
She winked at me again and then she was gone. A few minutes later I heard the loud muffler on the Dodge as the car started up.
I sat there in the big, superclean kitchen alone.
I got up and carried the dishes to the sink. Normally I would have rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. But I figured if Mrs. Leland liked cleaning so much, then she could do it.
I glanced through the little storage room between the kitchen and the back door. Through the window I could see Mrs. Leland. She set the watering can on the edge of the patio and walked back to the office behind the garage. I took the opportunity to snoop through a few cabinets. I wasn’t really looking for anything, just looking.
It was all basic stuff, detergent and spray cleaners, paper products and canned goods.
In the bottom cabinet near the door, I noticed the dog food and wondered where Rocky had gotten to. I’d never had a dog before and I’d always kind of wanted one. It seemed like such a neat, ordinary thing. A kid and a dog. That was like a regular childhood. I walked through the house, whistling and calling for him, but he didn’t come.
The place was pretty much empty. Mom’s little suite was messy and chaotic already. She’d apparently tried on lots of outfits before deciding on the gray funeral suit.
I peeked into the Lelands’ bedroom. Nobody was there, so I tiptoed in. It was decorated in pale tones of yellow and gold. The bed was made, the dresser uncluttered. Vern’s house shoes were sitting precisely parallel just under the edge of the bedspread fringe. The closet doors were closed. From inside the master bath I could see the dim glow of a night-light. It felt weird being there. I sniffed the air, testing the rumor that old people smell bad. But it was all candle scent, faint with gardenia.
Obviously, the dog was not there, but I took the opportunity to stand a few feet inside the door and survey the area. It was a guilty pleasure, invading their privacy. I lolled in it for several minutes before tiptoeing out.
I expected Vern’s study to be a dark, cavelike, mannish sort of place. But the old scarred, knotty pine was surprisingly cheerful, the worn—almost ragged—leather lounge chair was inviting and there were more books than I’d ever seen outside the public library. I walked along the bookshelf, fingering the titles. If there was an order to it, it wasn’t obvious to me. A history of the Teapot Dome scandal sat next to a Steinbeck novel.
Near to the window there was a little table with a chess board set up. A game was obviously in progress. There was an old-fashioned turntable nearby and a stack of those big black plastic records. I picked one up, expecting Elvis or something equally sixties. There was a picture of some guy who looked like he ought to be on money. The title was Haydn’s Surprise, Symphony No. 94 in G. I’d never heard of Haydn, so I shrugged and put it back.
Vern was not as neat as his wife, that was clear. The desk was piled with folders, papers and notebooks, and yellow sticky notes were tacked up everywhere. Especially on the area around the computer monitor. It was mostly math stuff, equations and formulas. I was pretty good at math, but this was very tough and there were symbols I wasn’t familiar with. All in all, I liked Vern’s room. I thought I could hang there. But not in the morning. It was definitely a doldrums-of-afternoon kind of place.
I kept exploring, checking out the front hallway and the living room. It was in the dining room that I saw the photos. At first my eye passed right over the frames as if they were just more knickknacks in a house loaded with them. Then inexplicably, like a tingle up the spine, I sensed they were more. Set out on the top of the buffet I saw a small framed toddler next to a somber Eagle Scout, a gap-toothed Little Leaguer beside a grinning kid in a wet swimsuit, a serious boy in a white choir robe, a young man in a mortarboard.
“Dad.”
The name slipped from my lips involuntarily.
This was him. This was Sonny Leland. This was the man who’d really loved my mother, who’d given me life, whose existence had brought me to this place. This was Sonny Leland. He was more than a tattoo on my mother’s breast. Here was a whole life in a dozen framed photos.
Hesitantly, I reached up and touched one. He was in his soccer uniform, burgundy and gold with striped socks. He’d been about my age, I guess. He was lanky like me. He didn’t look like me, not exactly. But I could see familiar things about him, about me. This was really my father. I was really part of him.
I heard the front door open.
Inexplicably I grabbed up the soccer picture and stashed it inside my shirt.
There was the scratch of scurrying dog paws on the entryway tile.
“Where are you going?” Vern called out.
Rocky didn’t answer, but a minute later he was at my side.
“Hey, puppy,” I said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Eagerly, happily, he stretched up, resting his front feet on my knee so that I could pet him. He had a great smile. The white hair around his snout gave him the appearance of a little old man with a gray beard. His little pink tongue hung out of one side of his mouth. His enthusiasm belied his age.
“You’ve been looking at the photographs?” Vern said from the doorway.
I was defensive.
“I was only looking.”
“Sure, look at them all you want,” he said. “I’m sure there’s some you haven’t seen.”
“I haven’t seen any of them,” I said. “I’ve never seen a picture of my dad.”
That statement made him pause. His brow furrowed.
“There’s more,” he said. “Lots and lots more.”
He gestured for me to follow him. In the hallway he turned on the overhead light and opened a glass-fronted bookshelf. Inside were rows of photo albums.
“We took a lot of pictures of that boy,” Vern told me. “He was our only child. We took snapshots all the time. We had a Brownie when we got married. Then we wore out a couple of Instamatics and a Disc before we graduated to 35mm.”
I didn’t say anything, but I guess I must have looked as clueless as I felt.
“Those are cameras,” he explained. “We always had a camera. And we took pictures of Sonny all the time.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
He nodded and sighed a little sadly, I thought.
“Your grandmother is very orderly,” he said. “She could never stand having loose photos lying around. She spent untold hours getting them into albums.”
He handed me one. I held it tightly in my arms, not so much to savor it as to ensure that the framed photo tucked inside my shirt didn’t spill out.
“You can look at these anytime,” Vern said. “I’m sure that’s what Sonny would have wanted.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, still uneasy.
Sierra came out of her room. Unlike me, she didn’t wash up or dress before breakfast. She was in her Radiohead T-shirt, bare feet and wild hair.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I was just showing your sister where we keep the photo albums of Sonny.”
“There are photo albums? Cool.”
Vern handed her one of the thick, heavy books and she began a conversation with him as she carried it into the kitchen with her.
Grateful for the distraction, I hurried to the room and shut the door behind me. For added security, I jerked the drapes shut. Then I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed. It still contained all my extra clothes and special possessions, those I wasn’t willing to put on display.
I pulled the soccer photo out of my shirt, wrapped it in an old sweater and hid it deep in the bottom of the scarred piece of luggage.
These people had hundreds of photos of my dad. I didn’t even have one. When we left this place, I had no intention of leaving it behind.