Page 20 of Keep Me

“What are these for?” I asked him, knowing even a detailed answer wouldn’t land much. My dad knew money like a bird knew the sky, and it would not make sense to someone who lived in the waves, like me.

“Oh, just some accounts that I’m moving to your name, just sign here,” he answered.

The lines around his eyes were still there, deep, and permanent, but the tension behind them had cleared out. Maybe Zane was wrong. Maybe the town hadn’t won this time. I filed it away under a victory for both of us and reached for the pen. After the ink met its paper, five separate times, we ate lunch. He did not say much. I didn’t either.

We still didn’t talk as we carried the three cardboard boxes from the office and set them on the living room rug. There were no grand explanations, no preamble about why today was the day he finally needed to clear them out. Just the sound of packing tape being sliced open with his pocketknife. The smell hit me first. Dusty cedar, old paper, and a faint, lingering trace of the vanilla perfume. It was an entire life compressed into three little boxes.

I sat on the floor, crossing my legs just like Cassidy had the night before, while my dad dragged over a dining room chair. He sat down, leaning his elbows on his knees, watching me touch the edges of the things we had spent years pretending didn’t exist.

There was no reminiscing. We just moved through the inventory piece by piece, our fingers doing the talking. A stack of old recipes written in her hurried, slanting cursive. A green wool scarf that had gone stiff with age. A small, silver thimble that rolled out of a velvet pouch and clicked against the hardwood. Then, near the bottom of the second box, tucked inside a faded manila envelope, my fingers caught on the corner of a glossy print. I pulled it out. It was a photograph I had never seen before.

It was my mother, sitting out on our back porch, laughing so hard her shoulders were up around her ears. Her dark hair was windswept, a few stray pieces catching the sunlight, and she looked younger than I usually imagine her being. She wore a pale blue sundress, the fabric flattering her slender figure. My eyes locked on her face for a second. It was like looking in a mirror that slightly curved. It was your own reflection, but something was different, you just couldn’t tell what.

But it was the background that caught my eye. Right above the porch railing, hanging from the sturdy hook that was still there today, was a wooden hummingbird feeder. I stared at it. “The bird feeder,” I murmured, my thumb resting just below the image of her face.

My dad leaned forward slightly, his eyes tracking the photo in my hand. He didn’t take it from me. He just looked at the tiny, faded wooden structure in the frame. His shoulders stayed dropped, his face completely calm, but his hand tightened slightly where it rested on his knee.

“It was your mother’s,” he said. His voice stayed steady, but it had that lower, slower drop I had noticed in people who talk about the dead. He was carrying her name down the dark stairs, terrified of dropping it. “She put it up the first week we moved into this house. I tried to get her a new one, something bigger. She wanted to keep that one. She painted it, I think. When she was pregnant with you.”

I looked out the living room window. Through the glass, out on the porch, the hook was still there. And hanging from it was that exact same blue feeder. The paint was peeling, the tin roof dull from decades of rainstorms, but it was full.

“You still fill it,” I said.

My dad looked out the window too, watching a pair of wings flutter near the glass before settling on the perch. He did not sigh. He did not push me away and all the memories that came with it. He just sat there, looking at the only piece of my mother he had left out in the open. A piece that had been right in front of me for my entire life.

“Every morning,” he said. “She asked me to take over the chore on the day she went into labor with you. Said she would forget because her baby was here. Didn’t want them to go hungry.”

I processed his words while trying not to hide from the thunder of my mother. It was a promise he’s kept for the same number of days I have been alive, it seems.

“You see those rose bushes?” he asked me, and I looked back at the faded photo, noticing the deep red flowers beside her. Those roses were not here anymore. “She loved them. She named you after them. Seren Rose.”

“I didn’t know that,” I told him, and I felt that odd feeling that comes when you learn your own history far too late.

By the time the four o’clock alarm buzzed on my phone, the three boxes were gone. We had sorted everything into three piles: one for the trash, one for the donation bin, and a small, neat stack of things I was taking back to North Haven in my tote bag.

My dad stood up from the dining chair, his joints making a quiet popping sound that he didn’t bother to complain about. He walked me to the front door, his steps matching that new, slow pace he had carried all afternoon. Usually, our goodbyes were a masterclass in architectural rigidity. A stiff leaning-in, a quick pat on the shoulder blade, a mutual sigh of relief once the screen door was securely between us.

But as I reached for the doorknob, he didn’t retreat.

“Hold on,” he murmured. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph of my mother on the porch. He held it by the edges, the way you handle something old and precious, and slid it into the top of my tote bag. “Take this. I’ve looked at it enough.”

“Dad, are you sure?” I asked, my fingers brushing the glossy paper. “You don’t want to keep it?”

“I have the feeder,” he said simply.

Then, before I could register the shift, he stepped into my space. He did not hesitate or look around for a distraction. He just put his arms around me. It was not the obligation-driven hug from the dinner. It was a real embrace. He smelled like dust and cedar and cold coffee, and he held me exactly one second longer than he needed to. He pulled back, his hands lingering on my shoulders for a beat, his face completely serene.

“You’re a good girl, Seren,” he said softly. “You’ve always been so good.”

It was a small sentence, but my throat was tightening with a strange, sweet yet bitter feeling.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I stepped out onto the porch, suddenly feeling the urge to not linger. “I’ll text you when I get back.”

He nodded once, leaning against the doorframe, watching me walk down the gravel path just as the dying goose horn of Cassidy’s car echoed down the hill.

“Well?” Cassidy asked the second the passenger door clicked shut. She had shifted back into her vacation-mode energy, a half-eaten bag of chips sitting in the center console. “Did he make you sign away your firstborn child or what?”

I leaned back against the headrest, letting out a long, slow breath as the car pulled away from the colonial house, away from West Bridge, away from the town that had spent years trying to break me. But the panic from this morning did not come back.