CHAPTER 2
I told them I had been on my way home after visiting my father. I stop by every few days after work. He doesn’t get out much. Who am I kidding? If he leaves his house three times a month it’s a real Dear Diary moment for the guy. I bring him groceries. Sometimes takeout from his favorite Thai noodle place. His liquor deliveries he arranges himself.
That Tuesday had been particularly hot and humid. Dog days of August. I thought he might get a kick out of something cold, so I swung by Michael’s Frozen Custard on my way. I knocked on his door, but there was no answer. I kept knocking. Long enough that his across-the-hall neighbor poked her head out.
“I haven’t seen him in two days,” she said. “He didn’t look none too healthy, if you ask me.”
I thanked her and knocked again. The pint of custard was getting soft. I finally used my key and let myself in. I hate doing that. Bad karmic deposit. I wouldn’t want anybody walking into my apartment unannounced. But then, he gave me the key for a reason and, like I said, I come by every couple of days.
His place was hot and smelled like dirty laundry, bacon grease, and seven-dollar-a-pint whiskey. I put the custard in the freezer, walked into his living room, and turned on the window air conditioner. The grinding sound of metal on metal warned anybody listening that the unit was putting in its retirement notice. The fan alone was loud enough to wake him up when my knocking hadn’t.
“There she is.” My father wiped a hand over his face. “I must have dozed off. Heat and all.”
“I brought you some Michael’s,” I said. “Death by Chocolate.”
He struggled to bring his recliner to an upright position. “What time is it?”
“Five-thirty.” I picked up the mug and newspaper from the table next to his chair. As I headed into the kitchen I collected a half-dozen paper plates littered with tortilla chips and caked-on salsa.
“Will you stay for dinner?”
He always asked me that. As though dinner was a scheduled and respected event in his life instead of a grab-a-plate-of-whatever-is-handy-and-sit-in-front-of-the-television affair. When we were living together, before I left for my ill-fated attempt at a college education, I’d set the table and we’d talk. The meals weren’t fancy. I was never the cook my mother was. But I tried to make it a special family time the way she always did.
“Not tonight.” I threw the plates in the garbage, along with a few empty cans of fruit cocktail—always the kind packed in heavy syrup—and a flattened cereal box. “What did you do today?” I pulled the garbage bag clear of the bin, tied it tight, and carried it to the front door.
“I planned on walking over to Hilldale. Maybe see who’s at the coffee shop. But the day got away from me somehow. I never seem to know where the time goes.”
It goes into that coffee mug you fill with booze first thing in the morning, I thought. Followed by several more as you fry your mind in front of morning talk shows.
“Well, maybe tomorrow,” I said. I got a packaged meat loaf dinner from his freezer, stabbed a few holes into the plastic cover, and popped it into the microwave. He asked me the same questions about work he always does, and I gave the same answers. Our conversation ended when the timer dinged four minutes later and I busied myself scooping the slice of ground beef, dollop of mashed potatoes, and spoonful of green beans onto a clean paper plate. “You want the gravy over just the potatoes or the meat, too?”
“Let’s live dangerously, Tess.” He wiped his hand over his face again, like he was trying to clear away the haze. “Gravy über alles.”
I set the plate on the table next to his recliner. I brought him a fork and a glass of ice water. I knew he preferred a different beverage, but I long ago stopped bringing that to him. The ice water would be nothing more than a chaser for the fresh glass of whiskey he’d pour the minute I left.
I kissed the top of his head and tasted his oily hair on my lips. “Maybe you could take a shower tonight, Dad. Show off your handsome side when you strut on over tomorrow for coffee with the buds.” I headed to the front door, collected the waiting garbage bag, and told him I’d see him soon. “Don’t forget the custard in the freezer. It’ll make a nice dessert.”
He asked me to make sure the door was locked on my way out.
* * *
I was thinking about my father’s life as I inched through traffic back to my place. He hadn’t always been like this. I remember Sanford Kincaid coming home for supper when I was little. Back when everything was different. He was a giant man with shoulders as wide as any door he walked through. At least that’s what it looked like to my little girl eyes. He was always in a hurry. A new professor at the university’s law school didn’t have much time for family matters. But dinners were important to my mother. She traveled a lot for her job. I remember she worked at the university for some hotshot genetics guy, but when she was home she made sure to carve special time for the three of us. He always indulged her. I remember her saying, “We have seventy-five minutes with your father. Let’s make them count.” She had a way of making things festive. On nights my mother had to be gone, my father wouldn’t bother to come home for dinner at all. Katya, a university student with acne so bad it scared me, would meet me after school and feed me canned soup or tuna sandwiches before sitting me down to concentrate on homework. But when my mother was home, her kitchen welcomed us with warm aromas of roasts or casseroles every night at precisely six o’clock. She’d still be wearing her good dress, the one she wore to work. I’d tell them what happened in school that day. Only the good things, Mother insisted. Things that would make my father proud. At precisely 7:15 he’d push away from the table, tousle my hair, kiss my mother’s cheek, and head back to his office, where he would stay until long past my bedtime. Back in those days, even though it was my mother who traveled, I viewed my father as a visiting dignitary, granting us an abbreviated slice of his oh-so-important schedule before disappearing, leaving us grateful for the crumbs of time he’d dusted us with and filled with anticipation for our next encounter.
I remember begging him to teach me to ride a bike when I was six or seven. He always promised he would, but stacks of papers and piles of books kept him too busy to follow through. It had been my mother who took the training wheels off my bike one Saturday morning. We put that bike in the trunk of her car and drove to the empty parking lot behind the engineering building. In less than an hour I was confident enough to tell her to drive away, I’d bike myself home.
But my father did take great fun in letting me drive his car. It made my mother shiver in fear, but once or twice a week my father would come in, drop his briefcase by the door, and call out for my mother to hold dinner. Just five minutes should do it, Audra, he’d say. Then he’d wave for me to join him, let me crawl into his lap behind the wheel, and we’d go forward and back along our driveway. Is D for Donuts? he’d ask. I’d be very serious and tell him no, D was for Drive. He’d tell me how clever I was. And R . . . I suppose that’s for Rug Rats? I’d shake my head, check my rearview mirror, and assure him I knew which gear was for reverse.
We started that ritual when I was eight years old. My legs were too short to touch the pedals. We’d make five or six runs up and down the drive, then head in to hear my mother fuss that one day I’d plow right into the house.
“Or into the street and get hit by a truck,” she’d say.
My father would give her that look. The one warning her not to say another word on the matter. Then he’d nod at me, closing the subject before taking his seat. No matter what my mother served, dinner always tasted better on those nights my father took me driving.
After my mother left us I tried my best, but running a house that big was too much for a preteen, no matter how grown up I thought I was. My father had to shop for groceries and take me to dentist appointments. He had to write checks, gas the car, and go to my school conferences. I convinced him I was old enough to stay home alone, even though it was scary rattling around those rooms all by myself. And there was a giant oak tree with a branch that liked to knock against my bedroom window when the wind was strong enough. Truth told, I was relieved when a concerned neighbor called CPS and my father gave up those evening working hours. But that didn’t work out so well for my father. His students complained he wasn’t available. He no longer had the time to devote to his research. He missed one important conference when I was sick with pneumonia and another when my wisdom teeth needed to come out. I’ll never forget those weeks after the dean informed him he wasn’t putting my dad’s name forward for tenure. I’d just started middle school. He’d sacrificed his career to take care of me, and the look in his eyes told me he was wondering if I was worth it.
He’d been allowed to finish the year. They offered him a one-year extension as an instructor, but he declined. My grandparents died before I was born and left him a modest trust fund. It carried us for a while, but we had to sell the big old house on Lathrop Street two years later. I asked him how my mother would know where to find us when she came back. He answered me by telling me to pack another box. I didn’t ask again. After all, we wouldn’t have been moving if he didn’t have to spend all his time caring for me. He didn’t need me complaining about anything, right? We rented a bungalow off Monroe Street, and he got a job teaching at the local community college. The two bottles of wine it took to soothe his pride each evening cost him that position my sophomore year in high school, and we moved to a two-bedroom apartment over a pie shop. He was never employed again. When I left for the university, his moves took him to smaller apartments in shabbier buildings. He’d been in the one-bedroom place off Midvale Boulevard for the past three years.
By the time I got to that star intersection, I was thinking about how my mother and I had cost Sanford Kincaid everything. I by my presence, she by her absence. I was also thinking about how small my life and my father’s were. For all intents and purposes my father’s entire world was a four-hundred-square-foot apartment. Mine wasn’t much bigger. In six square miles of Madison real estate I was born, raised, and educated from kindergarten through two years of college. I still work at the same place that hired me when I dropped out . . . that library where my bike went missing all those years ago . . . and I rent the bottom floor of a three-flat two blocks away.
The Kincaid corner of the world is pretty damned minuscule. That’s what I was thinking about when I saw her.
It was what she wore that caught my attention first. I saw a woman come out of the Hotel Red wearing a black suit and high heels. She was walking up the sidewalk, toward where I sat waiting for the traffic to clear. She’s not from around here, was my first thought. You rarely see that level of dress-up here in Madison. And you certainly don’t see it on a late workday afternoon when temperatures are in the high nineties with enough humidity to make your car windows sweat. I figured she must be from Chicago, up here on business. Traffic was barely moving. It wasn’t quite six o’clock, and it seemed as if every automobile, motorcycle, bicyclist, and bus in town was making its way down Regent Street. I watched her walk closer. First it was her hair. It was so like mine. Not exactly the dishwater blond mine is, but close enough. A few blond streaks and highlights perked it up. She wore it short, bobbed to a chin as square and level as mine. My mother used to tell me it looked like God got done with my face, grabbed a straight edge, and ran it under my jaw for a nice, clean finish. Then she’d kiss the top of my head and tell me I was her beautiful doll.
My chin’s still as square, but it’s been many, many years since anyone’s called it beautiful.
The woman got closer. I moved forward one car length, following the little electric roller skate impersonating an automobile in front of me. I could see her better. She took her right hand, combed it through her hair, and flexed her fingers at the top of her head, giving herself a little scalp massage.
Like I do.
She was about parallel with my car when the person behind me honked. I’d been so focused on the woman, I’d missed the opportunity to move ahead. The horn blast caught her attention, too. She turned, and for a moment our eyes locked. She had large blue eyes, spaced wide under a high forehead.
Like mine.
I could tell something registered with her. She wrinkled her brow. The movement was identical to the furrow I get when I think something’s not adding up. Her nose dipped at the tip. Like mine. Her lips formed an anxious smile. Only for half a second. More nervous reaction than sincere greeting. Thin lips. Like mine.
The car behind me honked again. The woman on the sidewalk looked over her shoulder, like maybe she expected someone else to be there. I remember thinking she seemed startled. Maybe a little afraid. She looked at me one more time, real quick. Then she turned around and walked back toward the hotel. I inched my car ahead, keeping my eyes on her. I saw her re-enter the hotel. I didn’t know what to make of it. I mean, you gotta admit, the whole thing was kind of freaky.
Then I got this queasy sensation in my stomach. Thought maybe I was going to throw up.
Like I said, it was real hot and muggy.
The asshole behind me laid on his horn again, like it was vitally important to world peace that he move forward the one car length that had opened up in front of me. I flipped him the bird and followed the traffic two more blocks until I could turn onto my street.
“What did you do then?” Sally Normandy asked.
“Nothing. Went about my evening. Probably read a little. Maybe caught some TV.”
“You didn’t think about the woman you saw?”
I glanced at Anderson. He was sitting there, taking it all in. Looking like there was a certain correct answer I was supposed to give, but he wasn’t about to hand me any clues.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think about her at all.”
Sally kept her eyes on mine for a few moments.
“Go on, Tess. What happened next?”