began to hurt so she put me on the floor. Since I was walking, she’d brought “new to me” shoes from the Goodwill. They were heavy roach stompers with a few scrapes on the front, but I pranced in them as if they’d just come out of Bradlees. I was small for my age and the chubby parts looked foreign on my body. I teetered forward fast, periodically looking back at Momma, waiting for instruction, but she just smiled, waiting to see how far I would go without her. Nurses and patients stopped and smiled as I walked down the corridor. Momma, still behind, walked slowly, keeping her eyes trained on my movements, ready to dart if I appeared to be losing ground.
There was more snow that morning than Momma had seen in her whole life. The flakes, as large as rocks, were falling hard enough to crackle against the snowdrifts. Momma felt ice pangs in her hip, and the muscles in her back were taut like a timing belt. She trudged, one baby on her hip, one at her side, one in her belly. Her eyes were squinted so tightly, she could barely see my father walking toward us. He, too, was bent, face turned to the ground, snowflakes jamming around his head, wrapped in a skullcap. But for his strut, off balance, vacillating side to side like he was walking in two directions at the same time, Momma wouldn’t have recognized him.
She smiled when she saw him, even though the last time they’d spoken they had argued about the other woman, the one she had stabbed him over when she caught her in our house. But none of that mattered on that snowy morning because I was dead weight, and Champ, only two, was tripping on every bump in the snow, and Dathan, the baby inside, was kickboxing her bladder, her ribs. Momma worried that he too was cold.
Carl walking right at Momma saw her, but didn’t see her. When he realized it was his wife and children emerging through the fog of snow, he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Momma did not stop. She walked faster, harder, pulling Champ so quickly he left drag marks in the snow. She stood face to face with my father. She didn’t ask where he had been or why he hadn’t come home for days. She just pushed me into his arms and wrapped the blanket tightly around my face. He looked into her eyes, the same eyes he’d promised forever and said, “Lois, take this girl. I’m not going home with you.”
Momma’s eyes widened, as if they would help her hear better. My father’s mouth was moving, but Momma refused to hear. She focused on the warm breath escaping his mouth, clouding around his face, and the clumps of snow cutting through the haze. The sides of her chapped lips split even as she thought of forming words. But her eyes, like her daddy’s, spoke sentences without words. “Help me get these kids out of the snow, then you can go where you want. You know Laurie just got out of the hospital. Do not leave us now.” This, her eyes said.
Carl’s eyes were not as vocal, so he shook his head, and rolled his eyes when he didn’t want to see what Momma was saying anymore. She took Champ’s hand and left me in my father’s arms. She walked, pulling Champ behind her, hand massaging the knotted muscles beating in her back. She walked, no intention of looking back. She had said all she had to say. So, she walked, snow crackling against ice, listening for the crunch of my father’s feet behind. She stopped and listened. No crunch, just a crackle. If she could have looked into her own eyes, she would have said, “He is behind you. Even he would not do that.” But the eyes, in her case, couldn’t stop the mind. She turned her head, praying it would not be. She turned her body, still listening for the crunch of two feet. A bundle, still, me, in overstuffed coat, socks on hands, sat in the snow, and there bobbed a retreating figure, crooked almost, vanishing in the haze.
It had been weeks since my father had seen his wife and children, one year since he’d placed me in the snow. That morning, with the stale taste of vodka coating his teeth, he decided it was time to go home. He swiped his tongue against the inside of his mouth. Clumps of morning mouth-lint stuck to his gums. He contemplated cleaning himself before his visit, but he was the daddy and the husband, so we would take him as he was. He might have reconsidered if he had realized alcohol divided time, which meant what he thought were weeks had actually been months and wives weren’t wives once husbands stopped coming home.
He was not drunk, but he wished he were. Better to mute Momma cutting her eyes at him when he walked in the door. The last time they spoke, they argued. He couldn’t remember what the argument was about, but he knew it had been a good one. Could’ve been about his drinking, his women, or his disappearing. The matter didn’t matter. Her words all sounded the same when libations had lubricated passage. He made his way to the door of the small house on Victory Boulevard, where he believed his wife and children were waiting for him. He didn’t even think to knock on the door. He was a father and husband after all. He turned the knob expecting it to welcome his entry, but his turn met resistance. The ball wiggled loosely in his hand as if avoiding his touch.
He paused, in that moment realizing how much space was between him and the home he used to have. His heart free fell into his stomach, where it remained, as he stood eye to eye with the marble-eyed man who answered the door.
Momma exhaled when she saw him. Hip pressed against the arm of the chair, she steadied herself for a punch, a slice, a “Motherfucker, I wish you would.” But none of those came. There was just silence ping-ponging between them. Momma looked at her husband or what was once her husband. Half of himself, body so drained by vodka and anything that burned going down, she couldn’t remember what she once loved about him. His brown skin had grown gray, like a thunderstorm had wrapped itself around him. He looked taller, but only because his frame was wearing skin as if it were a hand-me-down. His clothes hung, sliding off of his arms. His pants sagged around the thick of his thighs as if they were pulling themselves down.
The man moved away from the door. My father walked in. He pressed his shoulders back, puffed his chest to add inches to his stature. Carl had been known to rumble with men twice his size when he was drunk, but he was not drunk enough to buck, so he turned to Momma.
“Where are my kids?” he asked.
This question sounded awkward even to him. He had not gone there for his kids. He’d gone there for his family, but his family wasn’t his family anymore because his woman wasn’t his woman. So, he called for the thing that was still his, that which another man couldn’t slip himself into, yet. Momma tilted her head to the closed bedroom door. He followed her gesture.
With eyes trained on the door, he felt his throat closing. So many things he wished in that walk across the living room, that he had a drink, that he hadn’t taken that first damning drink, that he’d never touched her with anything but affection, that he’d gotten to know those three kids in that room, the ones he had decided to say goodbye to.
“If you want to see your daddy, look in the mirror.” This Momma said whenever I asked why I was lighter than everybody else and why my eyes were caramel drops and hers, my brothers’, and sister’s were Milk Duds. This she said when I asked, “Who do I look like, if I don’t look like you?”
I never found answers in the face looking back at me from the mirror. Yet, I ventured, time and time again, into that bathroom, with the tub scrubbed so ferociously it shined, to the place where Pine Sol was the breath of porcelain fixtures. I gawked in the mirror, stretching and scrunching my face, holding my lids open with my fingers, examining the specks of chocolate in my eyes. I never found him there. I covered my mole, the one set between my lip and nose, large, obtrusive, like a raisin in an oatmeal cookie. I did not find him there either. I sometimes pulled back my hair, turned my chin to the right, squeezed one eye closed, in an attempt to piece together my father. Still, all I saw was me.
Then I turned from that mirror to the father in my mind, the one who’d said, “See you later” right before my second birthday. In that version of him, my father had a hairline that swooped across the