ago, I would have listened to this one, even pulling a chair up to the table and turning off my phone. He would have started with a man taking off from the people he loved in difficult times, using great care in the way he invented this man, the look in his eyes, his rumpled clothes. Dad was an impeccable dresser then, so this last detail would have been his effort to set himself apart from the man he conjured. After a while Richard would have reached into his suit pocket to give me the handkerchief that was laundered and pressed for the road, trying to make me feel that things were going to be all right. This idea would have lingered in the light penetrating the blinds. But once he was gone, it would have dropped to the linoleum and left a mark as if a heavy jar had landed there.
The thing I couldn’t say to my mother was this: Lola was too little to be left, and Mom wasn’t fragile exactly—I never saw her as someone who would crack—but she was unprepared. And I really had no idea what he expected me to do about any of this.
I listened to the familiar thump in the pipes as the water was shut off upstairs. I went into my room. There I curled up and fell back to sleep, the only place where I knew how to cry openly.
After he left, we began to move around the house like dogs trying to settle, each of us showing the tension. Yet Mom continued to make him sound like the mail carrier that comes through. “I don’t know a better man than your father,” she said too often. There was a feeling that stood behind or off to the side of those declarations, something about his departure I couldn’t name.
Lola began to hide things under her bed. Popsicle molds, favorite toys and clothes, small boxes of cereal, light bulbs, cotton balls, and photographs of him. She clung to us in ways she hadn’t before. And Mom thought too much about the dangers that might befall us if we weren’t vigilant, now that we were living alone. She watched an endless string of safety demonstrations online and wanted to reenact some of them with us. At least Lola was willing. I began sleepwalking again, and when I gravitated to the neighbors’ dry fountain next door where they found me curled up in my pajamas, Mom worried about me walking into the street, and she worried about me being out in the cold, and she worried about the upcoming summer when the fountain would be full. She got her drill bits out and installed chain locks high up on the front and back doors.
I knew his going wasn’t only about a job in New Jersey. She made a point of telling me he sent money every two weeks without fail. Though she never broke this down, the money was never enough. Once a week she talked with him by phone. I was convinced they were pretending at something. Mostly she talked to him deep in her room, sometimes in her closet.
When she emerged, Lola would get on. She could be very chatty, and Mom often helped her to say goodbye and let go of the receiver so Mom could budget and call next week. Once, Lola didn’t like this idea at all and pulled so fiercely to keep the phone, it sprang back and hit her in the forehead. Mom sat for a long time with her, holding ice against a swelling bump, whispering and rocking her, and telling Lola everything was going to be all right. I described the scene to Dad because Mom insisted I keep him on the line—until she realized this was only making Lola cry harder.
Lola got phone shy after that, so he started sending her postcards. They came with pictures of fairgrounds or restaurants or caves—the kind of free cards advertisers give out where he found enough room to write around the pitch. Mom helped her start a scrapbook with the cancellation marks and smudged town names.
One of his letters arrived from New Jersey. That was his way, to send letters in blue ink. He didn’t like the idea of email or texting. He laughed at social media, made stupid jokes about Skyping. I was about to throw the letter in Mom’s bill pile when I realized it was addressed to me. It took me two days to open it.
Dear Mona,
Do you remember when you were a little thing like Lola, and Mom gave you her old Brownie camera? You wouldn’t let anyone show you how to work it and before long there were dozens of black-and-white photos of shoes and ceilings and noses. She pulled a box down from her closet and searched around and handed you one particular picture she had taken and said, “I could show you how to put a ghost in a photograph.” Your first lesson was on double exposures.
I’ve been thinking we’re all double exposures in a way, that there are things we sometimes miss in the layers. What am I trying to say? I know things haven’t been easy between us for some time. But I was wondering if we couldn’t get a fresh start. Maybe if we wrote once a week for a while and talked a little on paper I could get to know you better. I’ll begin with this letter and hope you drop me something, even a sentence. I know you’re busy.
Next letter I’ll tell you a story about your Great Uncle Sorohan, who could see through the layers, right to the bottom of your soul and a couple of ticks further.
Please take care of your mother and Lola, and know that I love you.
Dad
In my whole life I hadn’t taken a single double exposure.
I went out behind the garage, where Mom kept her cleaned-out oil drums for scrap metal. I set a small fire in one of them. I opened a photo album I had started years ago. There was the picture where he was guiding me on my first two-wheeler, one at the beach in his swim trunks, one standing by a new car. I took them out of their sleeves one by one and dropped them into the fire and watched them bubble and curl at the edges.
A few days later I learned that he hadn’t received his commissions at his new job. Mom increased her part-time phone sales—pushing her real work, her giant sculptures, off to the evenings, sometimes late into the night. She had only taken that job as a stopgap right before Dad left, while her résumés and applications circulated in a shrinking job market. Now that selling ad space was the big thing in her day, Lola and I weren’t supposed to pick up the landline. If she had to go out or use the bathroom during her shift, she called another salesperson by dialing a code into the phone. I recall one conversation in particular when Mom switched to speakerphone so she could fold laundry before starting dinner. She hugged Lola, who was lingering in her arms, and handed me the shoe-tying board so we could continue the lesson they had started between calls. Lola quickly pulled it out of my hands, saying, “I can do it myself.”
“Okay, I think we’re all set. I’ll repeat the message,” Mom said after a while. She rolled a pair of Lola’s socks while she reviewed her notes. She had learned early on that if she got the message wrong, it came out of her pay. In a flat voice, at a good volume, she said, “Quote: We met in the best of times, you made it the worst of times. You’re a total witch, Debbie, and I hope you and your whole family go to hell. End quote. You want this to appear in Friday’s paper, in the Personal Regrets column in twelve-point type, inside a bold box, to run for six days. Wednesday will be the last day it will appear unless you call in on Tuesday by noon to extend the ad.”
“I didn’t say witch. Who says witch?” The guy’s voice boomed out of the speaker. “That’s bitch, bitch. Bitch with a capital B.”
My mother stood up, and a dozen pairs of neatly tucked socks left her lap and bounced and rolled across the floor. She signaled to cover Lola’s ears while she struggled to turn off the speakerphone. But Lola broke away and chased the socks, kicking them here and there as I pursued her.
“The newspaper has a policy against—” Mom began.
“Just tell me what it’s going to cost to get the fucking message I want in the paper.”
Lola stopped, and her eyes got wide. She was alert to the tone or the word or both.
“Even if you understood Dickens or the French Revolution or why they stormed the Bastille …” Mom began.
The
