TWO
One dead mother, one layover in Orlando and several hours of weather delays later, I’m here.
In Texas.
As soon as I step off the plane and into the jet bridge, I can feel the late afternoon heat melting and sizzling my skin like I’m made of butter.
I walk lifeless, hopeless, following signs for baggage claim to meet the father I’m half made of, yet somehow wholly unaccustomed to.
I have no negative experiences of him in my memories. In fact, the times I did spend with my father in the summer are some of my only good childhood memories.
My negative feelings toward him come from all the experiences I didn’t have with him. The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me what little effort he’s made to be a part of my life. I sometimes wonder how different I would be had I spent more time with him than Janean.
Would I have still turned out to be the same untrusting, skeptical human I’ve become had I experienced more good times than bad?
Maybe so. Or maybe not. Sometimes I believe personalities are shaped more by damage than kindness.
Kindness doesn’t sink as deep into your skin as the damage does. The damage stains your soul so bad, you can’t scrub it off. It stays there forever, and I feel like people can see all my damage just by looking at me.
Things might have been different for me if damage and kindness had held equal weight in my past, but sadly, they don’t. I could count the kindness shown to me on both hands. I couldn’t count the damage done to me even if I used the hands of every person in this airport.
It’s taken me a while to become immune to the damage. To build up that wall that protects me and my heart from people like my mother. From guys like Dakota.
I am made of steel now. Come at me, world. You can’t damage the impermeable.
When I turn the corner and see my father through the glass that separates the secured side of the airport from the unsecured, I pause. I look at his legs.
Both of them.
I graduated from high school just two weeks ago, and while I certainly didn’t expect him to show up to my graduation, I kind of held out a small sliver of hope that he would. But a week before I graduated, he left me a message at work and told me he broke his leg and couldn’t make the flight out to Kentucky.
Neither of his legs look broken from here.
I’m immediately grateful that I am impermeable because this lie is probably something that would have otherwise damaged me.
He’s next to baggage claim with no crutches in sight. He’s pacing back and forth without a limp or even a hitch in his step. I’m no doctor, but I would think a broken leg takes more than a few weeks to heal. And even if it did heal in that short amount of time, surely there would be residual physical limitations.
I already regret coming here and he hasn’t even laid eyes on me yet.
Everything has happened so fast in the last twenty-four hours, I haven’t had a chance for it all to catch up to me. My mother is dead, I’ll never step foot in Kentucky again, and I have to spend the next several weeks with a man I’ve spent less than two hundred days with since I was born.
But I’ll cope.
It’s what I do.
I walk through the exit and into the baggage claim area just as my father looks up. He stops pacing, but his hands are shoved inside the pockets of his jeans and they stay there for a moment. There’s a nervousness to him and I kind of like that. I want him to be intimidated by his lack of involvement in my life.
I want the upper hand this summer. I can’t imagine living with a man who thinks he’ll be able to make up for lost time by over-parenting me. I’d actually prefer it if we just coexisted in his home and didn’t speak until it was time for me to leave for college in August.
We walk toward each other. He took the first step so I make sure and take the last. We don’t hug because I’m holding my backpack, my purse, and the plastic sack that contains Mother Teresa. I’m not a hugger. All that touching and squeezing and smiling is not on my reunion agenda.
We awkwardly nod at each other and it’s obvious we’re strangers who share nothing but a dismal last name and some DNA.
“Wow,” he says, shaking his head as he takes me in. “You’re grown up. And beautiful. And so tall…and…”
I force a smile. “You look…older.”
His black hair is sprinkled with salty strands, and his face is fuller. He’s always been handsome, but most little girls think their fathers are handsome. Now that I’m an adult, I can see that he is actually a handsome man.
Even deadbeat dads can be good-looking, I guess.
There is something else different about him in a way that has nothing to do with aging. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know that I like it.
He gestures toward the baggage carousel. “How many bags do you have?”
“Three.”
The lie comes out of my mouth immediately. Sometimes I impress myself with how easily fabrications come to me. Another coping mechanism I learned living with Janean. “Three big red suitcases. I thought I might stay a few weeks, so I brought everything.”
The buzzer sounds and the carousel begins to turn. My father walks over to where the luggage begins spilling out of the conveyor belt. I pull the strap of my backpack up onto my shoulder—the backpack that contains everything I brought with me.
I don’t even own a suitcase, much less three red ones. But maybe if he thinks the airport lost my luggage, he’ll offer to replace my nonexistent belongings.
I know that pretending to lose nonexistent luggage is deceitful. But his leg isn’t broken, so that makes us even.
A lie for a lie.
We wait for several minutes in complete awkwardness for luggage I know isn’t coming.
I tell him I need to freshen up and spend at least ten minutes in the bathroom. I changed out of my work uniform before I got on the plane. I put on one of the sundresses that had been wrinkled up in my backpack. Sitting around all day in airports and in a cramped airplane seat has made it even more wrinkled.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror. I don’t look much like my father at all. I have my mother’s dull, lifeless brown hair and my father’s green eyes. I also have my father’s mouth. My mother had thin, almost invisible lips, so at least my dad gave me something other than his last name.
Even though pieces of me resemble pieces of them, I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged to either one of them. It’s as if I adopted myself when I was a kid and have been on my own since then. This visit with my father feels just like that…a visit. I don’t feel like I’m coming home. I don’t even feel like I just left home.
Home still feels like a mythical place I’ve been searching for my whole life.
By the time I make it out of the bathroom, all the other passengers have gone and my father is at a counter filling out a form for my missing luggage.
“It shows there were no bags checked with this ticket,” the agent says to my father. “Do you have the receipt? Sometimes they stick them on the back of the ticket.”
He looks at me. I shrug innocently. “I was running late, so Mom checked them for me after they handed me my ticket.”
I walk away from the counter, pretending to be interested in a sign posted on the wall. The agent tells my father they’ll be in touch if they find the bags.
My father walks over to me and points at the door. “Car is this way.”
The airport is ten miles behind us. His GPS says his home is sixty-three miles ahead of us. His car smells like aftershave and salt.
“After you’re settled in, Sara can run you to the store to get whatever you need.”
“Who’s Sara?”
My father looks over at me like he isn’t sure if I’m joking or not.
“Sara. Alana’s daughter.”
“Alana?”
He glances back at the road and I see a tiny shift in his jaw as it tightens. “My wife? I sent you an invitation to the wedding last summer. You said you couldn’t take off work.”
Oh. That Alana. I know nothing about her other than what was printed on the invitation.
“I didn’t realize she had a daughter.”
“Yeah, well. We haven’t really spoken much this year.” He says this like he’s harboring some resentment of his own.
I hope I’m misinterpreting his tone, because I’m not sure how he could be resentful of me in any way, shape, or form. He’s the parent. I’m just a product of his poor choices and lack of contraception.
“There’s a lot to catch you up on,” he adds.
Oh, he has no idea.
“Does Sara have siblings?” I ask. I pray she doesn’t. The thought of spending the summer with more than just my father is already a shock to my system. I can’t handle more voltage.
“She’s an only child. A little older than you, a freshman in college, home for the summer. You’ll love her.”
We’ll see. I’ve read Cinderella.
He reaches toward the vent. “Is it hot in here? Too cold?”
“It’s fine.”
I wish he’d play some music. I don’t know how to have a comfortable conversation with him yet.
“How’s your mother?”
I stiffen when he asks that question. “She’s…” I pause. I don’t even know how to say it. I feel like I’ve waited so long to bring it up, that now it would seem strange or worrisome that I didn’t tell him on the phone last night. Or when I first saw him in the airport. And then there’s the lie I told the ticket agent—that my mother was the one who dropped me off at the airport.
“She’s better than she’s been in a long time.” I reach down to the side of my seat to find the lever to lean it back. Instead of a lever, I find a bunch of buttons. I push them until my seat finally starts to recline. “Wake me when we get there?” I see him nod, and I feel kind of bad, but I don’t know how long of a drive this is going to be and I really just want to close my eyes and try to sleep and avoid questions I don’t know that I can answer.