sidewalk. Like my father, my tongue hangs out, my face frozen in studied concentration. My arms are bent with a death grip on the handlebars, I’m riding my bike! And I have left my father behind. The ends of my long hair blow off my back, the squares of concrete rush beneath me. But I want my father here, running alongside. I turn to find him and see him back at the house, a block away. I tap my toes to the sidewalk to stop and the bike shimmies. My foot catches in the frame and I topple over, skinning my knee, my hair tangling in the chain. I look to my father and scream but it’s not the pain that brings hot tears. It’s my dad talking to the neighbour, only stopping long enough to wave wildly for me to walk back to him.
That night, Dad pads down the hallway to the bathroom where I soak my knee in the tub. He rummages through the medicine cabinet for a hairgrip.
He sticks the curved end deep into his ear and scrapes, sinking his eyes closed.
“Honey, don’t ever let me see you do this.”
He jiggles the grip and looks at it, then presses it to the leg of his shorts, popping a crescent moon of burnt orange ear wax onto his leg.
“If you ever want to clean your ears, honey.” He sticks the bobby pin back in the cabinet. “You come get either me or mommy. You never want to run a bobby pin in your ear without one of us there to supervise.”
It was just after the first Christmas in Phoenix that the call came in from the base. Dad had tangled himself up while clearing out industrial drains and been spit out again, with both elbows snapped.
My father sits at the dinette in the kitchen, his casted arms folded to his chest like a mummy, anchored by double slings that criss-cross over him and tie around his neck. His fingers rest under his shoulders and look like garden grubs, curled black and blue.
Our mother forks three poached eggs from pan to plate, “Here, feed your father,” she says and drops the plate on the table, walking out.
I butter his toast and spoon a bite of egg onto the corner. I stand at his knee and lift it to his mouth.
My father leans forward, armless. He bares his teeth and bites. A bit of yolk dribbles down his chin and I dab it with a napkin. The bottom rim of his eye wells, one giving way to a quiver.
“You’re so good to me, baby.” A tear splashes down his cheek.
I stand before my father, lift my small hands to his face. His drops his head into the cradle of my palms and I bear the weight of my father’s heavy head.
“You’re so good to your Daddy,” he sobs.
“It’s okay, Daddy.”
“Will you take care of me, baby?”
“I’ll take care of you, Daddy.”
“I got nobody else but you.”
He lifts his forehead from my hands.
“I love you so much, baby.”
A tear drops from his chin to my face.
“I love you, too.”
It trickles down and we are bonded; his tear in my eye, sealing me as my father’s keeper.
With Dad at home in his slings, Mom tries another approach with Grandma Madge. We pick her up at her own crack jack house a mile away and drive to a pool party of one of the neighbours.
“Whatever you do Madge,” Mom warns in the car, “for God’s sake don’t embarrass me.”
I spotted her first when she stepped out of the changing cabana. My grandmother ran a band of long black hair from her belly button to her thighs and there it was in all its glory. When she spotted me and Mom across the patio at the bowl of chips, she waved over the heads of a pool of people, “Sannndy, Jeweeelly, over here!”
Mom walked straight in the front door that night and said, “Dan, I could have died.”
When Dad’s casts came off he returned to the base, only to find he no longer had a job. In the time he’d worked as a plumber, he’d racked up almost more time off with pay than he’d spent working.
And that’s how we ended up leaving Phoenix, and back in Ohio, moving through a series of apartments and mobile homes in a never ending quest to be settled. I went to four different kindergartens alone; just making a new friend before being yanked out again. We finally spent six months in a rented trailer, long enough for Dad to till a garden and mound rows of dirt to plant cantaloupes. On Saturdays, he’d load great baskets of ripe melons into the back of the car and drive us over to the new base where he worked, parking at the edge of the gates to wait for the military men coming and going on shift. I sat on the tailgate of the family station wagon, swinging my legs, happy as a clam to be with my father. Dad was a master melon grower and the men of the base always pulled over to share a joke or a story with my dad and walk away with an armful of juicy cantaloupes. I watched them as the sun set and laughed with them, even though I didn’t know what they talked about. But it was just the warmth of the people who sought out my father that I liked so much; men who smiled and laughed and didn’t carry the weight and anger of my mother. And Dad was never like this when they were together. I experienced my parents separately—and it was my father who stole my heart.
And who knew that it would be in the hollow of Burns Road where we’d finally settle or that I’d come of age on the same track of isolation in which my life began? But we were driven to the ends of the earth by the 22 different jobs Dad had over the years and his increasing need for shelter, each loss a slit in the fabric of my father’s well-being and an obvious indication that the world was conspiring against him. After all, the proof was all around us. Grandma Madge was crazy. Former bosses were crazy. The people who got him fired were crazy. The only one who was not mad, my father insisted and I wholeheartedly agreed, was him.
I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.
We weave our little fingers together;
Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.
When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.
“Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.
Ooooga-ooooooooga.