Read More: A brief Q&A with Brian Christopher Giddens
It’s not every day your dad returns from the dead. Not your typical Wednesday night, if you know what I mean. We’re sitting around the dinner table eating the standard Wednesday night supper of spaghetti and Green Giant boil-in-the-bag broccoli with cheese sauce, when the telephone rings. My two idiot brothers race for the phone. And, just like always, Bart trips my little brother Kenny and grabs the phone off the wall first, while Kenny runs to Mom like he’s got a major complaint.
“It’s for Mom,” Bart says.
Mom’s face takes on the “one more interruption and I’m losing it” look, pushes her chair back, and takes the phone from Bart. Meanwhile, her new husband, and I guess I should say my new stepfather, Ned, works on his spaghetti, twisting his fork to catch every last noodle, totally ignoring anything standing in the way of his dinner. Ned has only been my stepfather for three months, but I can tell we kind of weird him out. Ned is an only child, never married, who lived with his dad until now. The more nervous he gets, the more he eats. He’s a strange duck, wanting to marry my mom so much he was willing to take us kids on as well.
As soon as Mom picks up the phone, we can tell this isn’t your ordinary call. “Hello?” she says, and then, when she hears the voice on the other end, she stands straight up from her chair. She looks at us for just a second, and turns away, like she’s hiding something. Even Ned stops eating.
“Where have you been?” she says, like she’s having trouble breathing. “Where are you?” Her hands grip the phone cord. She stares out the window into the apartment courtyard, and I see her reflection looking back at me from the glass, like a thin, frightened ghost peeking in from the pouring rain.
I see myself too, sitting there in my plaid jumper with two matching silver barrettes in my dull brown hair. Mom makes me dress like this. She says that it’s the way a fourteen-year-old girl from a decent family would dress. I make a face at myself in the window.
As Mom talks, she begins to cry, which for my mother, is not unusual. Believe me, we’ve seen a ton of tears from her. Mom catches herself, lowering her voice. Even though I can’t hear as much, it’s obvious it’s my Dad. I knew it was Dad because she never talked this way with anyone else. With Dad, she didn’t talk like a mom, more like a girl. She doesn’t talk like a girl when she’s talking to Ned. I was only eight when he left six years ago, on March 16, 1959. I don’t know why I remember the date, except that it pretty much changed everything for us after that.
Since we can’t hear much, we pretend everything’s ok and go back to the spaghetti, but no one’s paying much attention to the food. We could have been eating worms and not noticed. Bart even stops picking on Kenny, which is his favorite pastime.
Mom told us when Dad left that he was in trouble with the law. He took money from the company where he worked as an accountant, and because he hadn’t been in any trouble before, and had been what Mom calls a “contributing member of society,” he only had to go to jail on weekends, so that the rest of the week he could look for another job. But Dad was too proud to go to jail at all, Mom said, so he left the state.
I say she pushed him out. They fought with each other ever since I can remember, but when the police came to search the house when Dad was out, finding the money he had stolen in the thermos at the bottom of the kitchen drawers, Mom was really mad at him. She said he embarrassed the family. Mom was always worried about what the neighbors would think, and she was nagging him all the time about not having enough money, and then not having a job. And every now and then, in the middle of the night, I could hear her crying that he didn’t love her anymore. […]
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