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Daisy
That afternoon,I stay out of Celeste’s way and putter around the house. Investigate why the crawlspace lights don’t work. Blown fuse. Investigate why the kitchen exhaust fan won’t work. There’s a mouse nest in the intake vent. Investigate why the air conditioning doesn’t work very well in my bedroom and Celeste’s office. The vents have been deliberately shut off to save money. All stuff that a homeowner could fix easily, but I’m guessing Celeste doesn’t have much experience in that role, and Liam strikes me as the type who calls a plumber when his toilet just needs plunging.
I got lucky when Celeste caught me at the computer. She only saw his firm’s website on the screen. That was a cover while I did deeper digging.
Liam has a distinctly shady side. He makes a habit of defending drug dealers, and he has a reputation for being very good at it. He’d spent ten years working for the Tampa district attorney’s office, where he’d been married to a high-school teacher, living in a decent middle-class neighborhood. Then he jumped sides, became a defense lawyer, split from his wife and—despite the divorce settlement—ended up with his million-dollar condo. I suspect the guy spent his time in the DA’s office racking up frequent-flyer miles with the people he was supposed to be prosecuting. Then he redeemed those rewards for a solid clientele that won him a partnership at his new firm.
I mull that over as I tinker. As promised, Tom swings by after dinner to salvage that window. We walk there—it’s shorter cutting through the property. When we draw near the abandoned house, I recognize it. I passed it a few times, tramping around pastures and swamps.
I was careful not to get too close, presuming the house was occupied. Is that because it’s in such good shape? No. It’s because half the homes around here are in this state of disrepair, with sagging roofs and broken windows and cluttered yards. This is the face of rural poverty, where you choose between maintaining your home and putting food on the table.
Some will snark about option three: putting dope in your veins or booze down your throat. Yet even for cases where it does apply, like my father, it wasn’t a choice. It hadn’t been choice for a very long time, and even when it was, it’d have seemed like an escape from a dead-end life. Stealing one sliver of joy from a world that guarded it as jealously as gold. Snatching a few moments where you aren’t worrying how you’ll pay the bills. And then, one day, you can’t pay the bills because the sliver of joy has turned into a devouring monster that always demands first feeding.
After the tragedy, when Mom took me away from Florida, I didn’t talk much about my father. Talking about him reminded me how much I missed him, and how much I hated my mother for taking me so far. But talking about him also became a wellspring of shame. None of my suburban friends had fathers with addiction problems—or so it seemed to me. And they had a very definite view of people like my dad, views I’d heard their parents expound on at length. Weak and feeble-minded, lacking the strength and will to overcome their demons.
That middle-class view insidiously infected my memories of my father, and when my mother decided my monthly phone calls with Dad were too expensive, I didn’t argue very strenuously. He still sent me cards, each with a handwritten letter, and brat that I was, I saw only the atrocious spelling and cringed and hid them in shame. I replied, but with the kinds of letters one might send a distant uncle who insisted on staying in touch. Matter-of-fact recitations of my life.
I was fourteen when I overheard my mom saying he was in a hospice. Sick and not expected to live much longer. The bubble of my cruelty snapped, and in that moment, he was my daddy again, and I had to see him. She refused... so I went anyway. Emptied my bank account and bought a bus ticket to Florida.
I spent two weeks by his bedside. My mother knew where I was, but she didn’t come after me. She meant to teach me a lesson. Instead, it was the greatest gift she ever gave me. In those two weeks with my father, all the shame that had cast him into shadow fell away, and the man I knew stepped from it. A complicated man. A man who’d made mistakes. But still the daddy I remembered, who loved me unconditionally, and who’d surrendered his place in my world because my mother convinced him that was best. To him, I now had the life he couldn’t give me, the life I deserved. His version of the American Dream: a house in the suburbs, a father with an office job, the bills always paid and the fridge always full, new clothes when I needed them, new bicycles when I wanted them.
I never told him the truth about Keith. Why would I? My father gave me up so I could have that life, and I was sure as hell never admitting it was less than the perfect jewel he’d polished in his mind. However, I did make it very clear that while Keith provided for me, he wasn’t my dad. There was still a place in my life for my father. He needed to know that. He owned that spot, and he always would.
After he died, I went home, and my mother acted as if I’d been away at summer camp. We never spoke of those two weeks. There are times when I wonder whether it truly was a gift, one she could not give outright.
She let me go to him, and she never punished me for it. I would have loved to have had the kind of mother who put me in the car and took me to my father and waited in a hotel if she couldn’t face him. That goes too far, though, and I will instead allow myself to believe that she accommodated my grief in the only way she could—by leaving me to it.
As my mind weaves through slipstreams of memory, Tom and I salvage the window. It’ll need a frame to fit, but it’s in better shape than the one that broke.
Afterward, I rummage about for other useful bits and pieces while he talks about the people who lived in this house. The couple who’d raised their family here had died about five years ago, and the house was in such bad shape that the kids just left it as is, deciding that the cost of bulldozing wouldn’t cover what they could get for the land.
Those kids are all middle-aged themselves, off in the world, living the kind of suburban fantasies my dad had set as his pinnacle. They’re considering returning someday to build a winter retirement getaway here, but they’ll demolish the old house first. It’s a story that makes me feel less like a thief and more like a recycler, taking from people who wouldn’t begrudge me the scraps.
Night is falling by the time Tom fetches his truck, and we load it up. I know Celeste is expecting Liam, but his Rover isn’t in the drive yet. We unload the window, and then Tom says, “I’ve got something to show you,” and leads me around the house to where an overgrown garden devours the north wall in a tangle of roses and ivy.
“Haven’t been around this side, have you?” he says as he grabs a rusty spade to clear a path.
I watch him chop through the vegetation barrier. “Oddly, no.”
“What a mess, huh? However, there is something back here that I think you might like.”
He squints, shining his cell phone light over the mess. Then, with a crow of victory, he dives in and wrestles something from the vines.
“Ta-da!”
He flourishes a hand at a bicycle manufactured before I was born. It’s yellow, with a torn banana seat and a plastic handlebar basket. I look at it, and a million emotions rush up, all those summer days of running down back roads, Tom pedaling beside me. Summer evenings of us both on our bikes, riding until darkness called us home.
My throat constricts, and I stay back, hiding my expression in darkness.
“I know you’re a runner,” he says, “but this will be more practical for getting to town. While I’d happily drive you in, you’ll never ask. So, if you ride...” He waves at the bike.
“It’s perfect.”
His laugh floats through the night. “It is a long way from perfect. However, after a bit of work, I can have her ready to go.”
“You don’t need to—”
“I want to.” He hauls the bike the rest of the way out, shaking off the foliage. “I’ll have her done by noon tomorrow.”
