Nineteen

I never saw my father alive again. It wasn’t long, maybe an hour or so after we’d all gathered, when the doctor entered the waiting room. All of our heads snapped to the doorway. The doctor hadn’t seen us yet and he paused for a moment, removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then he scanned the room. When he located us he started forward. The skin under his eyes was thin as tissue, and pleated with wrinkles. He had a kind face but there was something in his gaze that pasted me to my seat. I gripped Michael’s knee and held my breath while my mother and Jill sprung up as one, standing hopefully in front of him.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Carson,” the doctor said.

My mother stared. She put her hand to her face. Her mouth opened but no sound emerged.

My stomach was a stone inside me. I looked at Michael in disbelief. I’d just seen my father and he’d looked like he would be all right. How could this be? Tears pooled behind my eyes. No. No. No. My breath caught in my throat. I needed to tell him how much I loved him.

I buried my face in Michael’s shoulder. No. No. No. No. No.

*   *   *

I knew I was lucky to be fifty years old and never to have lost anyone this close to me before. I’d lost an aunt and two uncles and their deaths had left me saddened, but this was an annihilating loss that subsumed me. If my father had had a devastating illness or a long-term slide into senility, I would have at least had time to prepare, but seeing him so healthy and vibrant one day and dead the next left me stunned and reeling, with a liquid anguish running through my veins.

I stayed at my mother’s house the days before the funeral, just going home to do the things that needed to be done: calling friends and family to let them know, making funeral arrangements, running errands, trying to keep up with my work. Michael called several of my clients to tell them I’d be unavailable for a while, but I somehow managed to finish all the alterations to Mrs. Rosatti’s cruise clothes. I wanted to submerge my mind in the work, but the realization that my father was gone was like a flotation device that kept pulling me up to the surface. More than once I found myself pressing a garment I’d just finished yet couldn’t remember doing the work. I did the best I could and simply prayed that everything would fit and be up to my usual quality. Michael delivered everything to Mrs. Rosatti just in time. She was profoundly touched and sent her heartfelt gratitude and condolences.

While at my house I finally read the e-mail from Patrick.

Lib,

I’m so sorry to hear about your dad. I am praying for him to get well and I’m praying for you to be strong. If there’s anything I can do, please call me. I know that sounds ridiculous—what could I do after all?—but I do mean it, Lib. My thoughts are with you.

Love,

Patrick

I couldn’t tell him my father was dead. I couldn’t even thank him for his kind words. I know it sounds silly—I know that now—but then it felt like a betrayal to even be reading the e-mail. It felt like a betrayal of my father, who believed in my relationship with Michael; it felt like a betrayal of Michael’s trust—his love and support. And it felt like a betrayal of who I was, or thought I should be.

Michael drove me to my mom’s each evening and the three of us sat in the kitchen where Dad’s Boston fern hung over the sink, neglected, trickling leaves. Mom’s collection of Tuscan pottery paraded across the tops of the cabinets and countertops. I’d always found it odd and sweet that even though Dad hadn’t been a big fan of clutter, he’d had an affinity for that collection of pottery. Some years ago he’d painstakingly painted the chair rail and moldings until they perfectly matched the forest green in the leaves on the ceramic. It had taken three separate coats before he’d been satisfied with the color.

On those evenings at Mom’s, she made steaming mugs of hot chocolate and we took them into the den and lit a fire, and she told us stories of when she and Dad were first married. Michael and I sat side by side on the couch sipping from sturdy green mugs, Dad’s La-Z-Boy mournfully vacant, the seat cushion lightly dished. I hungered to see him sitting there, just once more, looking up to smile when I walked in the room. Just once more was all I wanted.

Then Michael would leave us for the night and Mom and I would go up to bed. I slept in my old bedroom, which still had lavender walls, the bookshelves Dad had installed and the primitive purple flowers he’d hand-painted on the ceiling.

Night seemed hardest of all with its silence, and the sorrow that pulled at my body. I couldn’t imagine how it felt to my mother, lying solitary now in the bed they’d shared for decades, and I wept as much for her as for myself. In the morning I woke to this painful thing inside me, but there was a comfort in seeing my mom and facing the hollowness together.

It didn’t feel like my real life while I stayed with her. It felt as if when I finally did return to my own bed in my own house in my normal day-to-day existence, my father might still be there, and I could just call him to grab a cup of coffee with me.

One evening my mother and I sat up long after Michael had gone, poring through photo albums—a vacation in the Wisconsin Dells where Dad smiled out from under a ten-gallon hat as he sat next to a statue of the town sheriff; another at Yellowstone when Jill and I earned patches for being Junior Rangers. There were pictures of family outings and birthdays, anniversaries and graduations. Mom and I shed tears as we turned the pages of memories of picnics and dinners and holidays, but we smiled, too, at the sweet mundane days of my childhood, and laughed over images of Dad as a skinny Santa and Dad in his first pair of Bermuda shorts, proudly displaying his hairy legs for the camera. In most pictures my father had his arm around one of us, and a proud, luminous smile on his face.

“You girls were the pride of his life,” Mom said. She had dark circles under her eyes and her hair was uncharacteristically messy, curls spiraling around her head. Exhaustion had etched her face. “Whenever he took you somewhere people would say, ‘Here comes Harry and his girls.’ He was so proud of that.”

“He was a great dad,” I said, my voice splintering. Mom touched my cheek. “He was always there when I needed him. He always had good advice.”

“Not that you listened,” she said.

“That’s not true. I listened. I didn’t always follow it but I listened. And he was okay with that. He let me do my thing, encouraged me to think for myself.”

“He went a bit overboard in that regard,” she said with a wisp of a smile. She was the conservative one, wanting me to be safe and knowable. It had been a source of conflict between us when I was young, but they had balanced each other on the parenting scale.

“He never made me feel that anything I wanted to do was silly or beyond me.”

“He was less than thrilled when you applied for the Peace Corps,” she noted. “Or took up scuba diving.”

“But he bought me a customized wet suit.”

She leafed through one of the older albums with heavy black pages and white stick-on corners anchoring each photo. She smiled at a black-and-white picture from their first anniversary, Dad looking like a gangster in a pin-striped suit with a wide tie, holding a cigar, and Mom in a dress with forties-style shoulders and a pleated skirt with an orchid pinned to her lapel.

“Look how handsome,” she said, a finger caressing Dad’s Kodak chest.

“Both of you. You were a beautiful couple.”

She sat back, deflated, and her eyes shone with tears. “I don’t know how I’m going to live without him,” she said, pulling a tissue from her sleeve and wiping her eyes.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t know how I would either.

In another photo she sat at a table, a big birthday cake in front of her. She leaned forward, blowing out the candles while Dad grinned at the camera.

“My twenty-fifth birthday,” she said.

So many years ago, a canyon of memories filled since then. I sighed. “I wish I’d had what you guys had,” I said. “All those years together, all that history. I’ll never have that.”

“Well, you won’t be married fifty years but you’ve started a history with Michael, and you’ve got lots of time to make memories.”

“Sometimes I wish things had worked out with Jeremy and that we’d had a family. We’d have been married thirty years now. I could be a grandmother.”

My mother poured more chocolate into my mug and added a cloud of whipped cream. “It doesn’t pay to look back, honey,” she said.

“I know. But it’s hard not to think about it. Daddy was so disappointed when Jeremy and I got divorced. I think he thought I gave up too easily on that marriage.”

Mom pulled her sweater tighter around her knobby shoulders. “Perhaps,” she said, “but you have to remember we come from a different time, when people stayed together no matter what. But you know he wanted you to be happy. And he always trusted you to do the right thing.”

“I know. But still. I envy what you and Dad had. It must give you some comfort now.”

“It does. I had fifty-two years with a man I was crazy about.” She daintily licked whipped cream off the spoon. “But it wasn’t all peaches and cream.”

“Well, no relationship is. But you were so in tune, so … united.”

“We were. But don’t idealize it, honey. And don’t use it as a scale to measure your own success or failure. It was human. Real life.”

“Of course it was. But it was still an enviable relationship. I want that. Jill managed it, why couldn’t I?” I was sounding like a pouty little girl but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“You and Jill are very different. You wanted different things. She’s more like me; traditional, unassuming, wanting peace. You’re like Daddy, more of an adventurer. You like to mess things up a bit.”

“That’s true, but he still had the love of his life,” I said, unable to let it go, “and the great relationship. I just sometimes wonder why I couldn’t manage that. It seems so basic.”

“Libby, stop now. Michael can be your great relationship. Just don’t expect it to be like ours or Jill’s or anybody else’s.”

I thought about her words later as I lay in bed unable to sleep, feeling like a forlorn little girl in my childhood bed, wishing to go back to my childhood for just one day. I suppose I did compare my life to theirs. I did always think I’d grow up and get married and have a family and duplicate the template they’d created.

*   *   *

The funeral was on Thursday. I put on a black and gray checked coatdress with black buttons, and brushed out my hair. It hung in soft shiny curls, a good hair day. But it looked like happy hair, so I pulled it back and tied it with a black velvet ribbon.

Michael and I picked up my mother. She walked to the car with her back straight, her hair perfectly done and her blue suit pressed. She hugged me and we held on a little longer than usual. And then she got in the backseat and pulled her skirt down over her knees.

Only the gleaming black hearse was in the parking lot when we arrived. The funeral home was quiet. Two enormous floral arrangements stood on each side of the glossy casket, and rows of chairs lined up like soldiers. The funeral director was a beefy guy whose muscular arms strained the sleeves of his tasteful navy blue suit coat. He looked like someone who would beat the crap out of you at the slightest provocation, yet he spoke to us in gentle, efficient tones with eyes full of compassion.

Jill and Mark came in, then Sophie, Pete, Danielle and Tiffany, then other friends and family in a steady stream, offering hugs, hands, comforting gestures. Men my father had known since he was in law school hugged me and told me what a good man he was. People I didn’t know at all told me how much they would miss him. I felt as if I were playing a role in someone else’s life.

“Thank you,” I kept saying. “Thank you for coming.” Michael stayed by my side, watching me carefully as if afraid I would break. His solicitousness would have normally put me on edge but I felt so insubstantial that his attention seemed to be all that was holding me together.

As I stood to read the eulogy I’d prepared, I looked out at the assembly of friends and family. I wasn’t sure I could get through it but was determined to say good-bye to my father. Michael stood behind me, his hand resting on my waist. He’d promised to take over if I couldn’t finish.

“When I was three my father took me to his barber for a haircut, unbeknownst to my mother,” I read. My mom smiled. “That was my first Buster Brown haircut and it was my signature hairdo until I was ten. Dad always claimed he invented the cut.

“When I was seven I had a concussion and broke my arm in three places when I hit some rocks on my roller skates, and Dad scooped me up and ran with me, on foot, to the emergency room and then stayed by my side until I went home two days later.”

I wiped my cheeks with a tissue. Michael whispered, “Do you want me to read?” but I shook my head.

“When I ran my first marathon my dad stationed himself at four different spots along the route to cheer me on with a sign that said, GO LIBBY—THAT’S MY GIRL! and his was the first face I saw when I crossed the finish line.”

I broke down then, seeing him in my mind, the pride that had painted his face, his excitement for me, and I gave up the page to Michael. He read on: “He was my biggest fan, and it’s unimaginable to me that I’ll never again be able to have a conversation with him or hug him or kiss his cheek. He was a good, kind and caring father, and an honorable man, and his greatest pleasure was his family.

“What he has given me is beyond measure, just by being who he was. He taught me about honor and tolerance and acceptance and love. And about commitment and responsibility and goodness and generosity, lessons I am still learning. He will touch me for the rest of my days and I will strive to be more like him. I have cherished every single moment that he was with me. I am so grateful that I’ve had him for the fifty years of my life.”

Michael kissed me and took my hand and we went back to our seats.

I stared out at the expanse of ashen sky as we rode to the cemetery. We were quiet, the air seeming to have been sucked out of us. The earthy smell of the new leather seats mixed with my mother’s White Shoulders cologne. Dad had bought her a new bottle every year for their anniversary, for their entire married life. She held my left hand and Michael held my right.

The hearse passed another burial as we drove into the cemetery. People milled about with handkerchiefs, many in hats, pods of mourners entwined in their grief. I felt tender toward them and wondered who they were burying; a parent, a sibling, a child? The word “death” was real now in a way it had never been; it had an entirely altered meaning to me.

Michael’s arm was comforting on my shoulder as the casket was lowered into the gaping hole where my father would rest. I could hear the faint sound of a buzz saw somewhere in the distance, and then the whir of the lowering device drowned it out. The smell of the earth was overwhelming. I longed to leave this place and take a deep breath of fresh air that smelled of grass and sunlight. I hadn’t run in more than a week and I burned to lace up my Nikes and do a ten-miler through the forest preserve. Or maybe a fifteen-miler. Or twenty. I wanted to run far away from this hole and the casket with my father inside and this new life that I’d have to live, without him.