Mom always wished for the moon for everyone else and settled on dirt for herself. Take Dad. He was gone for months at a stretch even before he ditched us for his new family. Each time he left, he would come back about the time Mom, my little brother, Simon, and I almost forgot he existed. He’d have his clothes shoved in an Adidas duffel bag. His shoulders would straighten out by the second day, about the time Mom’s started to sag. Dad was barely taller than Mom, but you thought he was even bigger since Mom hunched so much around him.
The last time he got home, he sank down into living room sofa with his work boots on the coffee table right in front of Mom. Dried mud clung to those boots from moving soil downtown. The hair on his chin was longer and grayer than the last time I saw him. When his friends showed up to watch the game, they ate up the chips Mom set out, wiped their salty fingertips on the needlepoint pillows and gulped beer until the air got thick and foam hung from their mustaches like puss. Dad’s grin sagged from the crinkled skin under his eyes and Mom rubbed her small red palms on her white pants and tucked stray hairs behind her ears, then disappeared to the kitchen to wipe the kitchen counters with a dirty sponge. I followed her, wondering what I could do to help out, but she didn’t seem to notice.
Things were okay at first. Dad showed us a new scar on his arm that he said he got tripping over a friend’s dog, and let us sit next to him and tell him which kids we didn’t like in school during the commercials. But, Dad’s voice grew louder throughout the day, like turning up the volume on the radio. Late that night, when he and Mom were in the kitchen, the sound of him buzzed through the floor, shaking our mattresses in the next room. Simon and me kept our eyes shut, pretending to sleep, but we could hear. Mrs. McNevin in the apartment upstairs stomped on the floor to get them to pipe down.
Simon and I ended up at Grandma’s the next day. Grandma asked how the visit was going, so I made things up. Stories oozed out of my mouth like honey. I told her how Dad gave us pony rides on his back all day; how he read us a chapter of James and the Giant Peach before bed; how he reached right into sparkling coals to rescue my hot dog at dinner, singeing the course hair above his knuckles. Simon’s face looked as if he could smell the hot dogs on the grill. This egged me on. Despite Grandma’s stare, she didn’t call me on my fibs. I guess that happy stories didn’t count as real lies.
When Simon and I returned from Grandma’s a couple days later, Dad was not only gone, but Mom was curled up on the bed like a sow bug after you touch it. Only the ends of her hair peeked out like yellow lace from under the comforter. She wasn’t pretending that Dad had gone on a business this time.
“What’s the matter?” Simon asked as we stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching the up and down as she breathed. I wondered if Simon noticed how the mattress shook.
“She needs rest,” I said and set a hand on Simon’s shoulder. My stomach felt like it was filled with bees.
Late that afternoon, Simon and I sat Indian-style on the cracked sidewalk outside our apartment, drawing trees and clouds with blue chalk. Summer vacation was close and the days were stretching out. A car drove by and burped a brown cloud at us. I held my breath, waved it away with my hand. Simon kept staring at the sidewalk. His brown hair was messy on top and hid his ears on the sides. He leaned down and plucked an ant from his sneaker. He squeezed it between his thumb and first finger, rolled it into a ball and dropped it to the pavement.
“We don’t need him,” I said.
Simon kept looking at the black speck that the ant had become and stayed quiet.
On Sunday, Simon and I made french toast with real maple syrup. Simon burned it a little on one side. He was in charge of flipping. I yanked the plastic spatula from him, slipped the toast on the plate, burnt side down, and smothered the pieces with defrosted strawberries so you couldn’t tell they were burnt. Even the fancy food didn’t snap Mom out of it.
“Thanks, Peaches,” she mumbled as she reached weakly for the plate. She laid it on the bed next to her. Only small jagged islands of pink polish were left on her fingernails. It took extra work to breathe in that room.
The food stayed there for hours. I kept checking the clock. At noon I went into the room, lifted the plate from the bed and threw the whole thing into the kitchen trash: spongy, strawberry-soaked french toast, dish, fork and knife. I didn’t try to be quiet. She should have yelled at me for making a ruckus. I wished I had Dad’s phone number so I could tell him the wrong he caused. Instead, I looked at Simon.
“Simon, you burned Mom’s breakfast so she couldn’t eat it.”
“No I didn’t.” His striped shirt was on backwards. The white tag peeked out the front.
“Yes, you did,” I said. “You’re such a baby.”
“Am not. I’m four,” he said, holding up his fingers, still sticky from syrup. It took him a couple seconds to hold up the fingers without the thumb. I grinned. He tightened his hand into a fist then reached up and hit my arm before running from the kitchen. It didn’t hurt.
“See, you proved my point. If you act like that, I won’t make you any dinner and you’ll starve to death.” My voice bounced down the hall.
A week later, school was out and Mom was still in her room, so Grandma decided that Mom should take Simon and me to Cape Cod. Grandma said Mom needed fresh air and sunshine to make her whole, and Simon and I needed some sand in our toes. Grandma insisted she didn’t want all her money at her age anyway. Grandma talked about her age as if she could be gone any time, but she didn’t seem that old really when she slathered on lipstick and went dancing with her friends at the community center.
Grandma called every day for a week to tell Mom that the rental woman said the saltbox she picked for us on the Cape was real nice, a stone’s throw from the beach. She said the cottage was heaven. To warm Mom to the idea, I placed seashells on her bedside table, in front of the Kleenex box so she couldn’t miss them. One day, I caught Mom cradling one of those shells in her palm outside the covers, and petting its coral belly with her thumb.
I spent so much time at the pool that first week of summer that my hair started to turn green. One afternoon, on my way back from swimming, I heard my name float up from our kitchen window when I rounded the corner to our apartment. You had to walk down four steps from the street to reach our front door. Mom called it our garden apartment, but it was really where the roots should be. I sat down outside with my back propped against the iron fence that protected our building from the sidewalk.
“I’m not having you laze around, ignore the kids and waste my money. You’re better off without him,” Grandma was saying.
“Don’t say that, Ma.” Mom sounded muffled, as if still under the covers, but I knew she was out of bed because she was in the kitchen with Grandma.
“He wasn’t a great catch,” Grandma said. I wasn’t sure what a great catch was, but it didn’t take a genius to see that Dad was the kind of fish that you’d throw back in.
Fingers poked from behind the lace curtain and pulled it back. I scooted farther from the kitchen window.
“Doesn’t look like you’ve been watering your dahlias,” Grandma called out. “They’re near death.”
I looked down at the mostly-brown sticks in the clay pot next to our door. Dead flower petals were scattered on the soil like long brown fingernails. Three or four leaves held on.
“Hope you’re taking better care of Clara and Simon,” Grandma said. Mom didn’t say anything. She started sniffing in and out as Grandma said softly: “Sweetheart, you can’t take him back now that you know for sure about the other family.”
Grandma’s words rang in my ears. Other family. Dad went missing to be with the other family. What was wrong with us? My eyes started to blur and my fingers shook. When I was younger, before Simon was born, Dad was around more. He worked construction in the neighborhood, and Mom and I would sometimes take him deviled egg sandwiches and sit on the curb with him and watch him eat. I think I remember Dad calling me his bear cub and carrying me around on his shoulders, but the bear cub thing might be something I made up after looking at the photo of me on his shoulders that Mom keeps in her bedside table drawer, under her barrettes and hair ties. Right after Simon was born, Mom stayed in bed all the time, and Dad almost never made it home before I went to sleep. I was only six, but I spent a lot of time mixing Simon’s formula and holding him bent over on my lap to burp him when I wasn’t at school. Simon used to spit up a lot back then.
Bad enough not to have a dad, but to have a bad dad you had to share with someone you never met was worse. I hoisted myself up and padded toward the baseball field, trying to keep my eyesight from getting blurry, swinging the see-through plastic bag that held my wet bathing suit. The bag kept banging me in the leg, reminding me to get the thoughts of Dad out of my head. I wondered if the other mom made Dad his favorite beef lasagna for dinner and if the other kids left him alone better than Simon and I.
At the park I saw Timothy and Andrew, two boys from school, dragging their shoes in the dirt next to the baseball diamond. I don’t think they saw me brush my wrist across my left eye and my nose.
“Whacha doing?” I hollered as I stepped through the gate.
“Nothing,” they said in unison, and I could see they were telling the truth.
“Wanna know something?” I asked. A dirt devil started spinning toward us, then blew away.
“What?” Andrew said, glancing to the side at Timothy. Andrew’s lip was split red. Timothy didn’t raise his head.
“My Dad’s going to the moon,” I said.
“No he’s not,” Timothy said, still not looking interested. Not much caught his attention except putting thumb tacks on chairs, or pulling the seat out from under some poor kid as he sat down.
“Yes he is. He’s going in a spaceship,” I said. Andrew had this bug-eyed look all the time, so I couldn’t tell if he was with me or not.
“They call ‘em shuttles,” Timothy said, all matter-of-fact. “And your Dad’s no pilot.” He pulled a dented ping-pong ball from his pocket, and tossed it into the air. The wind pushed it away, so he had to run forward a couple steps to get it.
“Well, he’s going,” I insisted.
“You’re such a liar,” Timothy said. “Come on Andrew, let’s get out of here.”
“You’ll see,” I yelled as they slammed the gate I had just walked through.
The next day, Mom packed two small duffel bags for Simon and me, and a big rolling bag for herself, and tossed them all in the trunk of the Corolla with a Stop & Shop bag Grandma had brought over filled with canned tuna, Doritos and toilet paper. We stayed quiet in the car except for Mom’s sniffing. The mainland disappeared as we drove over the Sagamore Bridge to the Cape.
Mom finally stopped crying the next morning when the summer storm slammed into the Cape Cod beach house. Wind had picked up off the coast, past the frothy surf and weeble-wobble fishing boats. Rain clawed at the shingles of our Cape Cod saltbox as a long branch broke free of the beech trees outside. I stared as the limb turned cartwheels, paused, then headed right at me, smashing my bedroom window into blades.
I shrieked. Mom flew into my room and folded me in her arms. Her hair was flat and greasy.
“There, there,” Mom said. She rocked me as she had when I was little, even though I was almost eleven. The tender skin around her eyes was still puffed, but the tears had dried up.
“That was scary.” I was not sure if I was talking about the broken window, or about the way Mom had been carrying on since Dad ditched us for good.
“It’ll blow over soon,” she said.
By morning, the storm had blown over, just like Mom said it would. I swept up the glass from my broken bedroom window and put binder paper and masking tape over the opening to keep out the mosquitoes. Mom hummed to herself and washed off all the dishes in the kitchen cabinets, waiting for the window man to come. It was good to see her up. Maybe Grandma was right that she needed salt air, but I thought it was the storm that had brought her back to us.
I pulled on a green t-shirt and jean shorts. In the mirror, I could see what I was thinking in my pale blue eyes. Blinking didn’t help. Simon walked into my room as I was smoothing peach lip gloss on my lips.
I asked Simon if he wanted to go to the beach with me. I was determined to find a good catch for Mom before it was too late.
“Sure. What’s that?” he asked, pointing at my lips.
“Lip gloss. To shine your lips.”
“Ooh, so you can kiss boys,” he said, shaking his head like the bigger kids did when they teased.
“I’m not kissing boys. How about you?” I asked, flailing my arms and taking a couple quick steps in his direction. Simon ran shrieking from my room.
When Simon and I reached the sand, I slipped off my sandals and let my toes, tipped with polish, sink into the warmth. Simon picked up two fists of sand, letting it seep between his fingers. This was the first time he had been to a beach. He kept petting the sand like it was alive. The sea and sky joined together to make a big blue calm. It was as if the earth had forgotten the storm; the only hint was the wet sand my toes found an inch from the surface.
Groups of people dotted the beach before us. Some kids built sand castles the shape of their bright plastic pails and others flopped in the sun. The noise of the people almost drowned out the surf. Salty sharpness tickled the inside of my nose.
I decided to use the money Mom had given me before we left the cottage to get an ice cream before testing the water. I turned and was halfway to the Dairy Queen between the dunes and the parking lot, when I noticed Simon wasn’t with me. I looked around and spotted him, standing stiffly. He was staring at a young boy using a long stick to scrape letters in the wet sand near the water. A man hunched over the boy, calling out each letter, as the water licked at the edges of their sand chalkboard. Simon’s whole body leaned toward them as if he was being pulled, forehead first. I called to Simon, but he didn’t answer.
“Come on Simon,” I yelled. “Let’s go.” It came out too whiny.
Simon saw me as I strolled up to him, slow and controlled. We stood together and watched the man and boy. The man wasn’t good looking, but he had a shine to his cheeks that caught the light and brightened his face. The bristly hair on his chin was darker and thicker than the hair on his head, but I didn’t think Mom would mind. I hoped the boy was a nephew, or the child of a friend, not his son. I didn’t want to share. The boy continued to drag the stick in the sand. Then the boy said the word. He said: “Is this right, Dad?” and my shoulders dropped. We waited a minute longer. I realized Mom wouldn’t have liked him anyway. Lines sprang up between his eyes when he concentrated on the letters, his skin hung in folds above his knees and he kept wiping his nose with his thumb and rubbing it on his shorts.
Simon and I were almost to Dairy Queen when I spotted him. A red dog’s leash dangled from one hand and he gripped a newspaper in the other. His fingers were clean.
I grabbed Simon’s small hand and dragged him beside me. He must have noticed my determination because Simon didn’t yell when I pulled too hard. We walked right up to the man.
“Mister, excuse me?” I said, raising myself up a bit on my tiptoes.
“Yes?” The man’s soft voice flowed deep inside me. He looked up slowly. His eyes were bright as green marbles glowing deep in his leathery skin.
“Did you lose your dog?” I asked. “You have a leash in you hand, but no dog,” I continued
“Oh, right. Very observant.” I liked the way his eyes puckered at the corners like a crumpled paper bag as he laughed.
“I just wondered because my little brother, Simon, loves dogs.” I casually stuck a thumb in Simon’s direction, not taking my eyes off the man.
“Really?” he asked, bending a bit toward Simon. The man was taller than Dad, but he leaned over when he was talking to you so he didn’t seem so far away. His brown shoes bulged out where his toes nudged the tips. The man’s hand flew up and scooped hair out of his face, holding it with his fingers for a moment before letting it free again. He had so much more hair than Dad. Dad never had to use a comb, just his dirty fingers to fluff his thin brown hair.
“Yup,” Simon confirmed. “Not when they lick too much.”
The man smiled again. Teeth lined up. I smiled with him. Simon started to squirm, so I put a hand on his arm to steady him.
“Henry should be back soon. Surprised you haven’t seen him.” He twisted in each direction, glancing down the beach. I searched the beach too. I had a knack for finding things.
“You kids don’t have a dog?”
“No, our Dad wouldn’t let us,” I explained. “But Mom really likes dogs.”
“That’s too bad. Your Dad’s allergic or something?”
“No. Didn’t like dogs. But, he’s dead,” I blurted out.
The man’s lips came together and he sucked air through his nose. “I’m really sorry to hear that.” His voice went flat.
I worried I didn’t give enough feeling the first time, so I went on: “He just died, our dad, I mean, passed-away, so maybe we can get one now.” I tried to inject my voice with the correct amount of grief. “I want a Lab.”
“That’s gotta be tough on you guys.”
“Maybe you could bring your dog by our place to visit?” I suggested, moving to fill the gap he made by stepping back.
Simon looked at me with his mouth falling at the corners, and pulled at my wrist. “Dad’s not dead,” he whispered to me loud enough for the man to hear.
The man glanced from Simon to me, and back again. I felt warmth flood up my neck to my face. He was looking to read my eyes.
“Yes, he is, Simon.” I said each word slowly, giving him time to catch on. “Remember the boat? He drowned?” We had seen a show like this on television, but Simon might have dozed off. Mom hadn’t kept track of what we watched lately.
“No, no, no. Dad’s not in the water,” he screamed, his eyes became wet.
The man shifted his feet and looked around to see if anyone noticed Simon crying. His knees crackled as he crouched down to Simon’s level.
“You okay, buddy?” he asked Simon. Simon’s cheeks were blotchy and I noticed a dirt smudge across the bridge of his nose. His shoe had come untied.
The man reached a hand, palm-down, toward Simon’s head.
Simon jumped back. “You’re not my dad!” he screeched.
The man stood up and stepped away from us. He blinked as the leash slipped from his grasp and hit the pavement. He leaned over quickly and snatched it up.
“Maybe you guys should be getting home.” The smile was gone. The sun sneaked behind a cloud. “I better go find Henry, anyway.”
“We could help,” I suggested.
“No, no.” He was already slowly retreating. “Are you sure he’s gonna be okay?” he asked.
“He’ll be fine.”
The man raised a palm in the air, turned and trotted down the sidewalk.
“See what you did?” I said, watching the messy head disappear down the path. Simon opened his hand to show me a small blue piece of sea glass he was holding.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I found it for Mom,” Simon said, then flipped his palm over and let the glass fall to the ground.
About the Author
Diana Corbin divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Lake Tahoe, with her husband, their son, two dogs and two cats. She holds a BA from UC Santa Cruz and a law degree from Cornell University. She enjoys skiing, hiking and, most of all, eating artichokes.
