For four years the old man in the pickup at my drive-up window wouldn’t so much as glance at me.
He’d push his cash out, stare at the road and say, “Quit holding my beer hostage, I’ve got places to be.”
I begged him for one smile and got a shake of the head every other day.
Then one afternoon he flung a wad of cotton at my face.
Eleven years back, I worked the window at a party store off the county road.
My regulars were basically my family.
Half of them still turn up in my Facebook feed.
They send me pictures of their grandkids and their bass boats.
So I needed every single person who pulled up to love me.
One man wouldn’t play.
He was tiny. Maybe five foot two, in a feed cap and a flannel buttoned to the neck in July.
Every other day he’d pull up, pass a twenty across without once turning toward me, and say, “Twelve of Busch Light.”
That was it.
No hello. No thanks. Not even a look at his change.
It drove me nuts.
After about fourteen months I started reading him the joke of the day.
Toby, one of my morning guys, brought a new one every shift, and I wrote them on the back of receipt paper.
I ruined every punchline. Every single one.
He never said yes and he never said no.
He just sat there with the engine running and let me do it.
“My one goal on this earth is to see you smile pulling out of here,” I said.
He said, “My one goal is beer.”
“Someday you’re going to like me.”
He held his hand out the window and waited.
We did that for close to three more years.
By the end he’d quit ordering.
He’d hold out the cash, I’d lean way out, and I’d drop the twelve-pack in his lap like a Christmas present.
I figured he hated my guts.
THEN one Tuesday he balled something up and threw it straight at my face.
A white T-shirt.
Across the front, in fancy black script, it said TROUBLE.
I held it up against the glass, and he was already rolling away.
But I caught his mouth twitch in his side mirror.
I had it on the next day. And the next. And the NEXT.
From then on I was Trouble. He never once used my name.
He’d see that shirt and do a little thing with one corner of his mouth, like smiling cost him money.
Then the presents started.
Jokes printed off his email, folded in thirds, the bad ones crossed out in pen.
A ceramic pig in a hard hat.
A wind chime he said he pulled off somebody’s curb.
And once a 1989 swimsuit calendar, still in the plastic.
His reason: “the lady had nice sunglasses.”
I laughed so hard I had to slide the glass closed. He laughed harder.
He wheezed until he grabbed the steering wheel to hold himself up.
That calendar still hangs inside my closet door.
Seven years in, he asked if Araceli and I could run an errand for him.
Araceli worked the window across from mine. He’d never said her name either.
She was “the other one.”
He passed over his bank card, plus a list on the back of an envelope.
The card said HERMAN, so now I knew something about him too.
“Get my stuff and take twenty-five for yourselves,” he said.
“I can’t do the store anymore.”
He had an oxygen tank riding shotgun by then.
The tube went over both ears.
I made it until the window closed.
Then I screamed into a bag of ice.
Next it was his hair.
I cut hair Sundays at my aunt’s salon, and he’d come in a few times and sat in my chair without a sound.
One day he pulled up looking like a dandelion.
“You need a trim,” I said.
“I can’t get from this truck to your chair unless you plan on hauling me.”
“I’ll bring a furniture dolly.”
“No, you won’t.”
Fine, then. I’d stop at his place once my shift ended, I said.
I had Peyton with me. She was four.
He met us at the door with a box of cherry cordials.
The kind with brandy inside.
He handed them to my four-year-old.
He cackled so hard he had to turn his oxygen up while I pried them out of her fists.
After that I went over about twice a month. I brought scratch-offs.
I trimmed him at his dinette while he did the word jumble in pen.
He was rotten. The good kind of rotten.
We talked about his brother and my dad and every strange thing in between.
One afternoon I was repeating a line of my dad’s, and in it I called myself Susie, the way Dad always does.
He put his pen down.
“Your name’s Susie?” he said.
“I had you down as Trouble. It’s on your shirt.”
“It’s Susan on my tag. Everybody at home calls me Susie.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because it means somebody loves me,” I said.
He picked his pen back up.
Two haircuts after that, he paid me with a check.
I didn’t unfold it until I got to my car.
In the memo line, in shaky capitals, he’d written FOR SUSIE NOT TROUBLE.
I sat in his driveway and bawled.
My final visit, I was packing up my clippers when he said, “See you, sweetheart.”
I stopped in his doorway and turned around and took a good long look at him.
He was so small in that recliner.
“I like Trouble better,” I said.
He waved me off.
Three weeks on, I made the drive to Ottumwa to bury him.
Maybe nine people came.
I stood way back by a row of cedars in my work shirt, sure they’d think I was some weirdo who reads obituaries for fun.
I cried so hard my sunglasses fogged.
When the pastor finished, the whole group turned around.
A woman with his exact chin walked out ahead of the rest.
She said, “You’re Susie, aren’t you.”
“He made us PROMISE we wouldn’t leave here without finding you.”
The envelope
“He wanted us to bring you back to his house,” she said.
“I’m Diana. His daughter.”
I took off my sunglasses.
One arm tangled in my hair, so our introduction included me pulling half my head sideways.
“Did I leave something there?”
“No. Please come.”
A man stepped up beside her.
“Our father’s son. Maurice,” he said, then shut his eyes. “His son. Sorry.”
He held an envelope against my shirt until I took it.
“That’s for everything you did.”
I put it back in his hand.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“We’d rather you had it.”
Diana touched his wrist.
“Not here.”
That was the first thing anybody said that made me wish I’d stayed by the trees.
I put my glasses in my pocket.
Without them, I couldn’t pretend my face was doing anything except leaking.
Diana had been crying too.
She pressed her fingers under her nose, then gave up and used the tissue in her fist.
“Dad mentioned you constantly,” she said.
“Nothing you could prove in court, I hope.”
She laughed once. It hurt her mouth. Mine too.
Maurice slipped the envelope inside his coat.
“We’ve got people waiting,” he said.
I looked past them.
The others stood near the path, close enough to see us but too far away to hear.
One woman lifted her hand.
I lifted mine back, the way you do when somebody waves at the person behind you and you’ve committed.
“I don’t want to interrupt your family.”
“You’re not interrupting,” Diana said.
Maurice had his keys out.
I wanted to ask what Herman had said about me.
Every word of it.
Whether I was still Trouble to him when I wasn’t there.
Whether he told them about the calendar.
Instead, I said, “I didn’t come for anything.”
Diana’s hand closed around my elbow.
“I know.”
I could’ve gone home then. She’d found me.
Whatever promise he’d made them give, they could say they’d done that much.
But his house still had his chair in it.
And these people had known him before I did.
Somebody might tell me what he looked like when he was young, or whether he’d always pretended that being spoken to was a municipal nuisance.
I wanted another hour with whatever was left of him.
So I followed them to the cars.
Maurice waited beside mine.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said. “We settled everything he owed.”
The hook by his door
The last time I’d stood inside Herman’s house, he’d ordered me to hang up my coat.
I usually kept it over my clippers bag.
Coming in to cut somebody’s hair feels different from coming in to sit, even when you’ve done both for years.
He’d point at the hook.
I’d say I wasn’t staying long.
Then I’d stay an hour with my coat halfway on the floor.
That afternoon, he wouldn’t let it go.
“There’s a hook right there.”
“I can see the hook.”
“Then you’re qualified.”
I hung it up.
He looked pleased with himself.
A man who’d successfully explained coat storage to a woman with a job and a child.
His phone rang while I was putting the guard on my clippers.
“Diana,” he said, after looking at the screen.
I stepped toward the doorway with my bag.
He put his hand out.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll give you a minute.”
He pointed at the chair I’d pulled over.
I sat.
He answered, and Diana’s voice came through loud enough that I heard her ask whether he’d eaten.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Food.”
“Dad.”
He rolled his eyes at me. I held up the clippers.
“Trouble’s here,” he said. “She’s threatening me with machinery.”
I gave him the finger below the phone.
He covered his mouth. His shoulders moved.
There he was, ratting me out to his daughter while trying not to laugh.
I could’ve stayed for the whole call. He clearly wanted me to.
But I went to the sink to rinse my comb, because I’d never been good at taking up space in somebody else’s family.
When I came back, the call was over.
“She says thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“The hair. Keeping me presentable.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
He rubbed the top of his head.
I’d heard about Diana often enough to know she worried over him.
I’d heard about Maurice too.
He checked things around the house when he came over and sent his father emails.
Some of the printed jokes came from him.
Herman had told me that while crossing one out so hard the pen nearly went through the paper.
“Your son sent that?”
“He’s not getting better.”
“You should encourage him.”
“I am. I didn’t send it back.”
He kept the folded pages beside his recliner until he could bring them to the window, or until I came over.
Sometimes he’d put one in my clippers bag.
Sometimes he made me read it aloud.
“No, start over,” he’d say. “You put the ending in the middle.”
“That’s an improvement. Saves everybody time.”
At the end of that last visit, I gathered up my things and checked under his chair for the comb.
I always lost something.
He’d hold it until next time and charge me imaginary storage.
Then came sweetheart.
Then came me in the doorway, looking back.
I kept returning to that doorway after he died. In the car.
At work. While I brushed Peyton’s hair.
There were a hundred things I could’ve said instead of making another joke.
I could’ve put my bag down.
I could’ve hung my coat back up.
Now I was driving to his house behind his children, with another chance to go through the door and no chance at all of finding him on the other side.
Diana opened it before I reached the step.
I still had my coat over my arm.
She pointed to the hook.
“That’s where Dad said you never put it.”
His recliner
I hung up my coat.
The recliner stood where it always had. Its footrest was down.
I stopped so abruptly that Maurice nearly walked into me.
“You can come through,” he said.
“Sorry.”
Diana moved a chair closer to the recliner and offered it to me.
I took the one near the doorway instead.
There I was, performing the very trick Herman had spent years trying to stop.
A few relatives had come back with us.
They introduced themselves, and I forgot their names before their hands left mine.
Grief had reduced my brain to the customer-service setting.
Smile, nod, apologize if necessary.
One woman said, “You’re the girl from the window.”
“I’m getting a little long in the tooth for girl.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
She pulled a chair around to face me.
Diana stayed on her feet.
“Can I get you something?”
“No, thank you.”
“Water?”
“I’m fine.”
She got me water anyway. I was grateful. My throat hurt.
Maurice remained near the hall with his coat on.
The envelope made a square against his chest.
“I didn’t know the store ever came up,” I said.
“Oh, we heard,” the woman across from me said.
“We heard about that shirt.”
I pulled my jacket aside enough to show the word.
Diana covered her mouth.
“You wore it.”
“I thought he might complain if I didn’t.”
My shirt wasn’t funeral clothing.
I’d stood in front of my closet before leaving, holding a plain blouse, then put it back.
Herman had never seen me in that blouse.
The shirt had a mark near the hem that wouldn’t wash out.
I tucked that part into my pants.
That was as formal as Trouble was getting.
“Did he really throw it at you?” Diana said.
“Like I was a raccoon near his garbage.”
The woman laughed. Diana sat down.
For a few minutes, it worked.
I told them how he’d waited until my hands were empty.
How I’d almost dropped the shirt out of the window.
How he wouldn’t look over his shoulder afterward, even when I leaned out and shouted after him.
“What did you say?” Diana said.
“I told him he’d bought the wrong size.”
“Had he?”
“No. But I wasn’t letting him have the last word.”
She laughed with both hands over her face.
Maurice took his coat off.
“He bought things for people,” he said. “He liked doing that.”
“He certainly found things,” I said.
“I’m still not sure the wind chime was legally his.”
Another laugh.
Maurice laid his coat over the chair beside him.
“He could be generous with people who helped him.”
I drank some water.
“I wasn’t much help at the beginning. Mostly I delayed his beer.”
“He appreciated the service. That’s all I’m saying.”
Diana’s eyes went to him, then back to me.
“Tell us about the calendar.”
So I did.
I could picture him saying sunglasses with a face so straight that I nearly believed he’d never seen a woman in a bathing suit.
I got as far as hiding behind the glass before I started crying again.
Diana reached across and took my hand.
“I wish I’d seen that.”
“He was awful,” I said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean championship awful.”
“I know.”
Maurice pulled a tissue from the box and passed it over.
It was a kind thing. I took it as one.
Then he said, “Dad needed company. We’re grateful you were available.”
I wiped my nose.
Available. Like a parking space.
I wanted to make a joke because that’s what I did when somebody put something sharp in a polite sentence.
But Diana was still holding my hand.
“He was my friend,” I said.
“Of course,” Maurice said. “Plenty of people become fond of their regulars.”
Diana let go to pick up her water.
Maurice reached for his coat.
The envelope came out again.
Five hundred dollars
He laid it on the arm of my chair.
I didn’t touch it.
“We wanted to make sure you weren’t out anything,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“The trips. The time. Whatever he might have forgotten.”
“He paid me for his hair.”
“Yes. Diana said.”
“And we took the errand money when he gave it to us.”
Maurice nodded as though we’d reached the useful part of the conversation.
“Then this should cover the rest.”
Diana looked into her glass.
I picked up the envelope because I couldn’t bear having it beside my elbow.
Inside were five hundred-dollar bills.
For a second, my brain went straight to what five hundred dollars could do.
It didn’t ask my heart for permission.
There were shoes Peyton needed.
There was the shift I’d traded away to come to the funeral.
There were ordinary things I’d grown sick of making do with.
Anybody who says money never crosses their mind has probably never stood in a store calculating which card will embarrass them least.
I put the bills back.
“What rest?”
Maurice sat opposite me.
“Susie, please don’t make this uncomfortable.”
I looked at the envelope in my hand.
He’d brought five hundred dollars to a funeral in case the woman in the T-shirt needed settling.
Apparently I was the one making it strange.
“I came to say goodbye.”
“And we appreciate that.”
“You don’t have to pay me for it.”
“We’re trying to do something decent.”
Diana touched his sleeve.
“Maybe put it away.”
He moved his arm.
“She drove all this way.”
“So did you,” I said.
He stared at me.
The woman across from us lowered her eyes.
One of the other relatives shifted in his chair.
I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Then I wished everybody else would stop waiting for me to.
“I don’t mean you didn’t do things for him,” I said.
“I’m saying I came because I wanted to.”
“We know.”
But he said it the way people said they knew the card machine was broken and still wanted you to try their card again.
I held out the envelope.
He didn’t take it.
“Was there something else you were expecting?”
“No.”
“Because Dad could say things. He’d make plans and forget he’d made them.”
“I didn’t come for his things.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
Diana put her glass down.
“Maurice.”
“What? I’m trying to make sure nobody leaves unhappy.”
Well, he had his work cut out for him.
I leaned forward and set the envelope on his knee.
“There.”
He covered it with his hand before it could slide off.
I expected the conversation to move. Somebody would ask about the drive.
Somebody would mention the weather.
All the little things families use to cover a hole before somebody falls in.
Instead, Diana said, “He did pay you, Susie. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I know there isn’t.”
“I think that’s all Maurice means.”
I looked at her.
She’d come across the grass and found me. She’d taken my elbow.
She’d brought me through Herman’s door.
Now she was looking at me as if I needed a gentle explanation of what my job had been.
“He paid me fifteen dollars for a trim,” I said.
“He never bought the rest of the afternoon.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know what a haircut costs. I do them.”
Maurice rubbed the envelope against his leg.
“Then perhaps we can stop discussing money.”
I nearly laughed.
He’d managed to bring it out twice, make me count it, and leave me looking like the woman who wouldn’t stop talking about cash.
Diana stood.
“Come outside with me a minute?”
I got up too fast and bumped the chair behind me.
She put a hand against my back as we went through the doorway.
I wanted her to say she was sorry.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry too, even though I couldn’t have said what for.
At the door, she stopped.
“There’s something about those last days I should tell you.”
The driveway
We went as far as my car.
Diana held her arms across herself. I hadn’t put my coat on.
“He asked for you,” she said.
I kept my hand on the car door.
“When?”
“Near the end.”
I waited.
“He said you were due to come. He wanted to make sure you knew he couldn’t do a haircut.”
My next visit had been on the calendar. I’d called before going over.
Nobody answered.
I’d called again later, then waited. People got taken to appointments. Family came over.
He wasn’t obliged to report to the woman with the clippers.
Then I saw his obituary.
“I would’ve come without the bag,” I said.
“I know.”
“Did he know that?”
Diana looked down.
I had gone through my last visit so many times that I’d worn a groove in it.
The doorway. Sweetheart. My stupid joke.
Now there was another afternoon somewhere. Him asking for me.
Me behind the counter, probably complaining about the card machine or trying to get a bag of ice loose.
“Why didn’t somebody call?”
Diana pressed her lips together.
“We were taking turns with him. Things were changing. Maurice said we shouldn’t make it another obligation for you.”
“An obligation.”
“He thought you’d feel you had to come.”
“Did you?”
She looked at the house.
“I agreed with him.”
I took my hand off the door.
She started crying.
I wanted to put my arms around her.
I also wanted her to stop crying long enough to tell me exactly when she’d decided I wasn’t worth a phone call.
Both things fit inside me. I didn’t much like that.
“His phone had my number,” I said.
“I know.”
“My number was on the paper by his chair too.”
“I know.”
“And when I called?”
“We let it go. I’m sorry.”
There it was.
Not a wrong number. Not somebody forgetting to pass on a message.
They’d let it ring.
I turned toward my car because the house was right behind her, and the window beside his chair faced the driveway.
I’d waved through it so many times.
“Was he upset?”
Diana wiped her face with the tissue she’d been carrying since the cemetery.
“He asked again.”
I bent over and put both hands on my knees.
She reached for my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I said.
Her hand dropped.
I needed one minute where I wasn’t making somebody else feel better about how much I hurt.
There was nothing to fix with that information. No errand I could run.
No day I could trade for it.
I’d missed him while he was still there.
Diana stood beside me without speaking.
When I straightened up, she said, “You should’ve been called.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t change it.”
“I know.”
I didn’t add anything kind after that.
She had to stand there with the answer she’d given me.
Through the front window, Maurice moved past the recliner.
“I thought family meant just us at the end,” Diana said.
“I wasn’t thinking about the people he’d miss.”
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.
I’d forgotten about makeup hours earlier.
At that point, my face probably looked like I’d repaired a carburetor with it.
“Did you tell him I’d called?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He said you were going to tell him off.”
I laughed. It came out badly.
“I would’ve.”
“He knew.”
For a few seconds, that helped.
Then I pictured him waiting for the telling-off that never came.
Diana took a step toward me.
“I’m not asking you to make me feel better.”
“Good. I’m pretty booked up.”
She nodded.
The front door opened. Maurice stood on the step.
“Everything all right?”
Neither of us answered.
He came down into the driveway.
Diana turned toward him.
“I told her we should’ve called.”
He looked at me, then at his sister.
“This isn’t the time.”
“When was the time?” I said.
He put his hands in his pockets.
“Dad was very ill. We had to make decisions.”
“You decided I couldn’t answer my own phone.”
“We decided to keep things quiet.”
I stared at the pocket where he’d put the money.
He drew one hand out but left the envelope where it was.
“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” he said.
I opened my car door.
My coat was still on Herman’s hook.
My coat
I went back inside to get it.
Diana followed. Maurice stayed behind us.
Everybody looked up when we entered, which was exactly why I’d wanted to remain by the cedars in the first place.
I could handle crying with a customer.
I could handle a fight at the window.
I’d once explained to a man that the ice machine couldn’t take responsibility for the weather.
I couldn’t handle being the reason a room went careful.
“Thank you for having me,” I said.
It was the sentence you say after a nice visit.
I said it with a wet face and my car door standing open.
The woman who’d asked about the shirt started to get up.
“Don’t go yet.”
“I should.”
Diana reached for my coat before I did, then stopped with it in her hands.
I took it from her.
Maurice came through the door and shut it.
“I think there’s been some confusion,” he said to the room.
I pushed one arm into my sleeve.
He had that tone people used when they wanted the witness statement done before the witness left.
“Susie was a great help to Dad. We’re all grateful. But the last few days were difficult, and we kept them private.”
The woman across from me said, “He asked for her?”
Diana nodded.
Maurice looked at his sister.
“People ask for all sorts of things when they’re ill.”
“Was I one of the unreasonable ones?” I said.
“Nobody’s saying that.”
“You just did.”
He exhaled through his nose.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
I wanted him to say he should’ve called.
I wanted him to say I wasn’t foolish for thinking Herman would have wanted me there.
I wanted a ridiculous number of things from a man I’d met beside a grave.
“I would’ve held his hand,” I said.
Diana put her fist against her mouth.
Maurice looked away.
“I wouldn’t have brought the clippers. I wouldn’t have made him talk. I could’ve just sat.”
“We were sitting with him.”
“I’m glad.”
He turned back toward me.
“We were there through things you didn’t see.”
“I know.”
“So please don’t come into this house and make it sound like we didn’t care for our father.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’ve been here an hour.”
That one went straight through my shirt.
I’d been in that house for years. But not as his child.
Not on the bills. Not in the family photographs.
An hour, if he wanted to count it that way.
Diana said, “Maurice, enough.”
But quietly. As if the problem was volume.
He took the envelope out once more.
“Take this. Please. Let us thank you properly, and let’s leave it there.”
I stared at it.
Five hundred dollars, offered in front of everybody.
For the trips. For the haircuts he’d already paid for.
For any loose ends that might walk into his father’s living room in a shirt with writing on it.
I almost took it.
That is the part I don’t make prettier when I tell this.
I could’ve put it in my pocket and gone home.
I could’ve called Araceli on the drive home and told her the whole thing while she swore on my behalf.
I could’ve bought Peyton’s shoes and pretended the money had nothing to do with the way it was handed over.
Maurice held it farther out.
Diana didn’t stop him.
I put my other arm into my coat.
“I’m going.”
He tried to place the envelope in my hand.
I folded my fingers closed.
The woman by the recliner stood up.
“She said no.”
Maurice lowered it.
I walked into the little space by the front door.
Diana came after me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
I pulled the door open.
Outside, my car waited with its door still wide.
I’d been standing in Herman’s house arguing for a place in it while anybody could’ve helped themselves to my purse.
He would’ve had a field day with that.
I could almost hear him telling me I was Trouble because Common Sense wouldn’t fit on the shirt.
Diana touched my sleeve.
“Please don’t think he didn’t care about you.”
I turned back.
“Then tell me his words.”
The step inside
“What?”
“At the cemetery. You said he made you promise. What did he actually say?”
Diana let go of my sleeve.
I stayed on the step inside the door.
She looked past me toward the car, then back into the house.
“Susie.”
“His words. Not the nice version.”
She pressed the tissue against her nose.
Maurice appeared at the end of the hall.
“Diana, she’s trying to leave.”
“No,” I said. “I’m asking her something.”
Diana looked at him.
Then she looked at the shirt under my open coat.
“He said you’d come,” she said.
“He said you’d stand somewhere at the back and wait until everybody left.”
My hand slid off the door.
“He said you wouldn’t know where to put yourself.”
The coat hook was beside my shoulder.
That stupid hook.
I could hang a coat anywhere else on earth without asking permission.
“What else?”
Her face crumpled.
“He said, ‘You find my girl. Don’t let her stand outside.'”
I put my hand over my mouth.
Diana kept going.
“He made me say I’d bring you in. I told him of course I would. Then he said Maurice had to promise too.”
Maurice stayed in the hall.
I looked at him.
“Did you?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“We found you.”
Diana shook her head.
“Oh, Maurice.”
“We brought her here. That’s what he asked.”
Diana started to cry harder.
I couldn’t help her with it yet.
All afternoon, I’d been waiting for some reason I hadn’t understood. A message.
A thing he’d forgotten to give me.
Something in a drawer with my name on it.
Herman had known exactly what I’d do.
He’d known I’d come, then hide behind a tree because I didn’t want to intrude.
He’d known I’d apologize for taking up a chair.
And he’d asked his children to stop me.
I pulled my arm out of my coat.
Maurice looked at the open door.
Diana took a step aside.
“Would you stay?” she said.
I hung the coat on the hook.
The chair beside Diana
When I went back into the living room, nobody pretended they hadn’t heard.
Diana pulled the chair beside hers away from the wall.
I sat in it.
My knees were close to the recliner.
I could’ve reached over and tapped Herman’s shoe if he’d been sitting there.
Maurice remained standing.
“I don’t appreciate being made into the villain here,” he said.
Nobody answered.
“I took care of my father. I came when he needed me. I did the things that had to be done.”
The woman across from us said, “Nobody’s taking those things away.”
“Then why am I standing here defending myself?”
Diana wiped her face.
“Because you keep talking over her.”
He turned toward me.
“Fine. What would you like to say?”
For once in my life, almost nothing.
“You should’ve called.”
He looked toward the ceiling.
“I’ve explained that.”
“I heard you.”
“Then what else can I do?”
“Stop trying to pay for it.”
The envelope was still in his hand.
He laid it on the arm of the chair he’d used earlier.
“It’s a thank-you. That’s all it’s ever been.”
Diana shook her head.
“I should’ve stopped you at the cemetery.”
“We discussed this.”
“We discussed offering to cover her drive.”
“And her time.”
“She said no.”
He pulled the envelope back toward himself.
“Apparently accepting a kindness is out of the question.”
The woman opposite him leaned forward.
“Maurice. Put it away.”
He did.
It took him a few seconds.
Every edge had to go into the inside pocket without bending.
I looked down at my shirt.
One corner of the word was hidden under my arm.
Diana reached over and straightened the cotton.
Then she cried so hard she couldn’t speak.
I took her hand.
I was still angry with her.
I could hold her hand and be angry.
I didn’t have to finish one before I started the other.
Maurice sat.
After a minute, he said, “You got a different side of him.”
I kept hold of Diana.
“He didn’t make everything a joke with us.”
Nobody rushed to answer.
“I’d come over and ask what needed doing. He’d say nothing. I’d ask if he needed groceries. He’d say he had it covered.”
I looked at him.
He was staring at the recliner.
“Then I’d hear he’d sent you.”
“He sent Araceli too.”
“I know.”
“He liked bossing two people around for the price of one.”
The woman across from us almost smiled.
Maurice didn’t.
“You don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“I think I do.”
He turned toward me.
“No. You came here and had a nice afternoon. There were other afternoons.”
There must have been.
There were things I hadn’t seen, years I hadn’t been part of.
I wasn’t going to argue his childhood away because his father had bought me a shirt.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He rubbed both hands over his face.
Diana let go of me long enough to pass him the tissue box.
He took one.
For a moment, I thought that might be where we left it.
A room full of people missing different parts of the same man.
Then Maurice looked at me again.
“But that doesn’t make you his daughter.”
Diana stood up.
Her chair scraped against the floor.
“She hasn’t said she is.”
“He called her his girl. That’s what everybody keeps repeating.”
“Because that’s what he said.”
“I am his son.”
“We know.”
“I don’t need to be told who mattered to him.”
Diana pointed toward my chair.
“Then stop telling her.”
He opened his mouth.
She didn’t sit down.
“You didn’t call her. Neither did I. Dad asked us to find her, and she nearly left here thinking we’d brought her back to pay her bill.”
“I never said she didn’t matter.”
“You called her available.”
He looked at me.
I wasn’t going to rescue him from his own word.
Diana sat again.
“I want to hear about him,” she said.
“I want Susie to finish what she was saying before you got that envelope out.”
Maurice’s eyes went around the room.
The woman across from me nodded.
A man near the hall moved his chair so he could see me.
Nobody got up to follow Maurice when he stood.
He pulled his coat on.
“Well. Enjoy yourselves.”
It was an ugly thing to say in that room, and he knew it the second he’d said it.
Diana bent her head.
I nearly called him back. The urge was so strong my mouth opened.
One more person. One more smile I could try to earn.
He stopped at the door.
“I was only trying to make sure you got what you came for.”
I looked at Diana beside me.
“He invited me.”
Maurice went out with his envelope.
Diana stayed in her chair.
For a while, nobody spoke.
Then the woman opposite me pointed to the shirt.
“So did he ask your size, or did he guess?”
I wiped my face.
“He guessed.”
“Was he right?”
“Annoyingly.”
Diana laughed into her tissue.
I leaned back in my chair.
“He did make me work for that shirt, though.”
“Four years,” Diana said.
“Four years. I’ve had appliances give up sooner.”
She put her head against my shoulder.
And I told them about his side mirror.
The pages beside his chair
We stayed until there was no reason to keep checking the clock.
People told me things I hadn’t known. Ordinary things.
How he’d refuse directions and then blame the road.
How he could make a minor errand take the whole morning.
I didn’t have to defend my place between their stories.
When someone spoke about his stubbornness, I could say, “Yes, that sounds right,” and nobody explained that I’d only known him as a customer.
Diana brought out the folded jokes from beside his chair.
“These were waiting for you.”
I reached for them, then stopped.
“Are you sure?”
She put them in my hand.
“He crossed out the ones he didn’t want you to waste time on. Does that sound like something meant for me?”
I unfolded the top page.
Halfway down, he’d circled a word.
Under it, in his handwriting, he’d written, SLOW DOWN HERE.
I bent over the page and cried.
Diana leaned forward with me. Her arm went across my back.
“Even now,” I said. “Even now he’s criticizing my delivery.”
She made a noise somewhere between crying and laughing.
I tried to read the joke.
I got the setup wrong.
“Start over,” she said.
I looked at her.
She put both hands over her mouth.
“Oh, God. Sorry.”
“No,” I said. “That’s exactly right.”
I started over.
It wasn’t a good joke. Herman’s editing hadn’t saved it.
We laughed anyway, then sat with the pages between us.
Before I left, Diana took my number out of her phone and called it.
Mine rang in my pocket.
“There,” she said.
I answered while sitting beside her.
“Party store. We don’t deliver.”
She laughed, then wiped her eyes again.
“I should’ve called you.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t make you say it’s all right.”
“Good.”
At the door, she took my coat off the hook and handed it to me.
Then she held on.
I held on too.
Outside, my car door was shut.
One of the relatives had closed it while we were talking.
My purse was still on the seat. Nothing missing.
Herman would’ve found that disappointing.
It would’ve made a much better story if I’d had to explain myself to somebody.
Diana walked me down the path.
“Can I come see you?”
“At work?”
“If that’s okay.”
“Use the window side. I’m very important over there.”
She touched the sleeve of my shirt.
“I can see that.”
Tuesday at the window
Diana came the following Tuesday.
I was reaching for a bag when her car pulled up.
For half a second, I did the old turn toward the window expecting a pickup, a feed cap, a hand held out with money in it.
Then she lowered her glass.
“Am I holding up the line?”
“Not yet. Give yourself a chance.”
Araceli came over.
I introduced them properly.
“This is Araceli.”
Diana smiled.
“The other one.”
Araceli put a hand on her hip.
“He made it sound like I was a replacement part.”
Diana laughed.
She’d brought one of the folded pages.
She held it up between two fingers.
“I practiced.”
“Oh, that’s cheating.”
“You should try it.”
There was enough of him in that answer to make my eyes sting.
She read the joke.
She got it right.
I laughed, and she hit the steering wheel with her palm, pleased with herself in a way I recognized so hard it hurt.
Then we both cried.
Araceli passed tissues through the window.
“Family discount on those,” she said.
Diana pressed one under her eyes.
She didn’t become a substitute father. I didn’t become a substitute daughter.
We didn’t rename anybody or rearrange the years we’d missed.
She came back.
Sometimes she stopped long enough for a joke.
Sometimes she parked and came inside when I had a break.
When Peyton was with me, Diana asked about her day and listened to the whole answer.
At that age, the whole answer could require a chair.
Maurice never called me. The five hundred dollars stayed with him.
Diana didn’t carry messages between us, and I didn’t ask her to.
There was plenty to talk about without spending our visits dragging him through them.
The shirt stayed mine.
I kept wearing it until the black script started breaking into little cracks.
Then I got more careful about how I washed it, which would’ve given Herman something else to make fun of.
One afternoon, Diana pulled up while I had it on.
She looked at the word, then at me.
“Hi, Trouble.”
I leaned both arms on the sill.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
Her mouth trembled.
For a second, neither of us could get another word out.
Then she held her hand through the car window, the way her father used to hold out his cash.
I reached through mine and took it.
If somebody became family to you across a counter or through a window, share this with them, and tell me in the comments the name only you call them.
For more stories about grief, family tensions, and the surprises people leave behind, read “My Sister Wanted Our Spare Room Again After His Funeral” and “My Manager Took My Seat At Grant’s Counter”. And for another family moment that cuts deep, there’s “My Mother Told Paolo To Wait Outside With The Coats”.
