Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 14



“The Games Daddies Play”

In Aunt Dorothy’s kitchen

Emerson, New Hampshire

I’m told there are two prime candidates: Keith and Bruce.

Keith was Shelly’s real boyfriend most of that year, but her friends say that she’d also been running around with Bruce by the end of the school year.

Bruce was the brains and Keith was the brawn. Keith was a good baseball player who had to go to summer school every year. Bruce was good at science and math, and helped Shelly with her trig homework. That’s how she got started with him. Problem was she maybe didn’t know how to stop with Keith before she got started.

My great-aunt Dorothy says there are two types of people in Emerson—the people who leave and the people who don’t. (Shelly didn’t. My mom, Linda, did. And brought me with her eventually.) Bruce was going places. Keith wasn’t going anywhere.

That’s how Shelly’s close old friends tell it. Keith was one of those people you could just tell was going to stay here his whole life. His father had a plumbing and pipe-fitting business and Keith started working there after he graduated from community college. He pined after my mother long after she broke up with him (which was about three months later than she should have, her friends admit). She even returned to him occasionally for a couple of weeks here and there, and once, a couple of years later, when she was around nineteen and in her wildest, most destructive years—when there was no one else interesting to hang out with.

“Poor Keith,” says my mom’s old high school friend Diane. “Each time, he thought it was for real.”

By the time my mother died at age twenty-four, Keith was happily married to another woman.

I can’t tell which guy my mom’s friends or Aunt Dorothy think is the one.

They all say I look so much like my mother—a mirror image, practically—that they can’t see anyone else in me.

I say to them, “No, you’re just saying that. You know.”

Only Aunt Dorothy is willing to venture a guess.

“You’re smart. You can’t write a book if you’re not smart.”

I don’t think this is true. What she means, nonetheless, is that she’s putting in a vote for Bruce. Bruce turned out to be a chemistry professor in southern New Hampshire. So he didn’t go too, too far, but he left Emerson, anyhow.

My mom’s friends Judy and Diane don’t want to say. It could go either way. They think Aunt Dorothy has a point. But they also admit that the timing—and they believe they know a bit more about the timing than Aunt Dorothy would—points more to Keith. Poor Keith, one of them says again. I think that their affection for my mom—I mean Linda, not Shelly—makes them uncomfortable with this conversation. They wish I didn’t need to ask. But no, they say, they won’t tell her I was asking. They will leave it to me to have that conversation with her. They don’t think she knows either.

Shelly just wasn’t talking back then. In high school or ever after.

They say they think that Shelly’s stubborn silence on the matter was very carefully reasoned: She didn’t want to have to marry Keith and she didn’t want to keep Bruce from Going Places. And frankly, by the time she was showing, she didn’t particularly care for either of them anymore.

And what the hell does this have to do with Conway Twitty? Damned if I know! It’s not the daddies playing games in this circumstance.





“Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy”

Randy’s Hot Dogs

Emerson, New Hampshire

Poor Keith proves relatively easy to get in touch with. I know where he lives, I’ve got his phone number, and Judy’s brother’s friend has even got his e-mail address. With all of these options available, I decide to take the gentlest approach. I send him an e-mail explaining that I am Shelly’s biological daughter, that I’m writing my second book about her to some extent (a bit of a fudge, I guess) and talking with people she knew.

The ladies made him sound dumb, but I imagine he couldn’t possibly be dumb enough not to read between the lines.

He responds quickly—within a few hours—to say he’d be happy to talk to me. He remembers my mother fondly and he’s seen my book on display in the library and knows Shelly would have been very proud.

He suggests lunch at Randy’s, Emerson’s famous hot dog joint in a converted gas station. (Unless you’re a vegetarian, he writes cautiously.) We’re gonna do this real townie style. I’m really excited about this—it’s gonna be some good cinematic stuff, meeting your potential biological dad in a hot dog joint.

I arrive early and can’t decide what to listen to in the car while I wait. Something thematically appropriate? Like Red Sovine’s masterfully cheesy “Giddyup Go”? No, too much. I look frantically through my “Daddy” playlist. (You’d be surprised—well, maybe you wouldn’t—how many country songs have the word daddy in them.)

I decide on Buck Owens’s “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy”—a ridiculous choice, to be sure, but it’s upbeat and cheerful and it calms my nerves while I sit and tap the wheel and wait for noon to get a little closer. I’m loath to be the weirdo waiting by the tub of famous Randy’s relish for her illegitimate father (wait—is he illegitimate? Or just me?). A few repeats in, I’m singing along softly and yelp when someone knocks on my passenger-side window while I’m looking in the other direction.

A middle-aged man is peering at me, looking uncertain. He has very tan skin and all-white hair combed back in a way that reminds me of Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

It’s him. I hope to heaven he didn’t hear what I was listening to. Please, please.

When I get out of the car, he tells me he didn’t mean to scare me. He’d just recognized me right away.

“You really look so much like her,” he says. “It’s amazing.”

He tries to pay for my dogs. Santa indeed. I don’t let him. He’s nervous and hesitant and doesn’t know what the dining protocol is under these particular circumstances, so he lets me trump his outstretched dollar bills with mine.

There is something Vegas about his appearance, but his manner is cautious and soft-spoken. He says he never met anyone who wrote a whole book before. Without much prompting, he starts in with high school stories about Shelly.

He tells about Shelly scoring the winning goal at a girls’ soccer game.

I gobble my first hot dog down while I try to listen, then start on my second. Sports stories bore me to death, even, apparently, when they involve my enchanting mother. I’m distracted by the large sign above his head that says NO DANCING. The sign is memorable to me. It’s been here since before Shelly died. She brought me here at least a couple of times when I’d visit. Why would anyone want to dance in here? I remember wondering.

Keith feels my distraction and finishes the second story quickly.

He says, “Are you just writing about your mother? Or was there something else you wanted to discuss?”

“Yes,” I admit.

I’m surprised by his forwardness. He quickly tells me that one of my mother’s friends told him I was asking.

I’m speechless for a moment. I realize that I had no clue how I’d bring it up and am now grateful to him for doing it. I like him.

“The truth is I don’t know for sure. If anyone knew, Shelly did. And I’m not even sure she did.”

“There are ways to find out,” I say softly, focusing on the nub of my second hot dog.

“Were you interested in finding out?” he asks, and watches me, licking a bit of spicy relish from the corner of his mouth, then waiting, still openmouthed.

“I think so,” I say. I hurry to add that it would be simply to know, to set it to rest, that I have a wonderful family who raised me and I don’t expect anything of him.

“And I know it’s a choice my mother made a long time ago.”

I catch myself, realizing I said “my mother” where I meant Shelly.

He didn’t notice. He said he could understand my feeling of wanting to know. And he didn’t want to deny me that. As far as expecting anything of him—we could see what happened. If the results were what he suspected they’d be, he’d like to spend a little time getting to know me. If I decided that was all right. Because he’d always wondered. He’d accepted Shelly’s choice to stay silent and to grant guardianship to her sister and her sister’s husband. They were good people. But he’d always wondered.

I nod and say okay. That we’d have to see.

I listen to “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy” a few times on the way back to Aunt Dorothy’s.

I like Keith. I’m hoping for him without quite knowing why. He’s not what I expected. And that might be kind of nice.