From Tom’s apartment on Lower Main, we’d get into his truck—floorboards littered with coffee cups and oily rags and receipts, window cranks too rusted up for me to operate myself. He’d take me out for ice cream, or to a movie a few towns over. He always moved slowly and spoke quietly; he seemed unsure of what to say. I was seven or eight and had no memory of living with him. We talked about school a lot, because I always did well. It was a happy thing to focus on, an easy thing to talk about with a kid. I didn’t notice, then, how much we look alike—same small nose, same round cheeks and square hands. It was years before someone told me that we walk with precisely the same gait, each step ending in a little bounce onto the toes. I still don’t know quite what this walk looks like on a man.
Tom once took me shopping at the mall just over the New Hampshire state line. At the Hallmark store, he bought me a stained-glass sun catcher with a horse etched into it. When I showed it to my mother, I knew to downplay my pleasure in this shiny, magical thing. I’d heard her talking about him plenty of times, sitting over coffee with her sisters or on the phone with friends. They described him with words that I knew I wasn’t allowed to repeat. But I think she was trying to make it work: after a few visits, she pointed out that he’d be happier if I called him Dad instead of Tom. I complied, embarrassed that I hadn’t already known to do this, worried that I had hurt his feelings without meaning to. It wasn’t clear what was expected of me, how I was supposed to behave with this man I barely knew.
On another visit, Tom bought me an old swing set and we painted it together. He took me to Sherwin-Williams and I got to pick out the colors. I chose yellow and orange, and we spent a sunny afternoon laughing and slinging paint everywhere in his weedy backyard, finally having a genuinely good time. When I got home, Mom was angry that I had so much paint in my long hair—we had used oil paint, so there was really no way to wash it out. She did her best to strip some of it off with turpentine, but I had sticky yellow and orange strands threaded all over my head for weeks. I got a sinking feeling about Tom every time I saw them, as if I’d been tricked somehow.
Not long after, Tom made another mistake, bigger this time. I had the sense that he’d shown up drunk, or late, or not at all, but I didn’t dare ask. Mom sat me down and asked me if it was important to me to continue visiting my father. “Not really,” I said. “I don’t really know him.” It was Dale that I saw daily, that I loved. He was the one who was there when I came home from school. He was the one who caught big fish and made Mom laugh and made the cat do funny voices. Tom was just a big man who smelled like motor oil and seemed to want something from me, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I’d like to think Mom didn’t show that she was pleased with my answer, but I’m sure I knew there was only one answer to give.
* * *
Years later, I discovered that Tom hadn’t shown up late or drunk. He had moved in with a woman named Teresa, who once tried to attack Mom when she dropped me off for a visit, right after I went inside. Teresa had a reputation for violence, unpredictability, and substance abuse that made Tom’s drinking look mild. She had a metal plate in her head from a childhood accident involving her father and a gun, the details of which remained murky. She was from Massachusetts, and it was impossible to tell if the mob connections she bragged about were true. To say the least, she was a tough woman, with big opinions. Sensing that Tom still loved his ex-wife, Teresa disliked my mother intensely from the start.
Although Tom insisted that I would have no contact with Teresa, that was hard to guarantee. Mom wanted to be sure that I was nowhere near this potentially dangerous person, or anyone else Teresa might invite over to the apartment—she knew that people determined to live in darkness will always find each other. Mom wanted me to go to college someday; she didn’t want me around a bunch of people so defeated by life that they spent most of their time drunk and high. After checking to see if I would miss my father, Mom told Tom that as long as he was living with Teresa, he couldn’t see me. He ended up staying with Teresa until a few months after Mom’s death. By then it was far too late for us.
Still, I carry Tom’s last name, because Mom never got rid of it. When I was about ten, I braced myself and asked her why she had never gone back to her maiden name. She waved a hand dismissively, said that it was just easier, she didn’t want to deal with the paperwork and hassle. At the time, I didn’t question her explanation, but now it seems incomplete. Although she regularly visited her sisters and was a devoted and helpful daughter, I think she wanted to forget the years when she was a Farnum, years of fear and difficulty, years in which she naively hoped that taking a new name could make things better.
* * *
After the visits ended, I’d see Tom around town every once in a while. He was known for walking everywhere—his drinking meant he rarely had a license—which made him more visible than other people, who passed one another swiftly, in the relative anonymity of cars. To me, he seemed omnipresent but somehow still unreachable, like a vision in the corner of my eye, like a haunting.
But a few times a year, my father and I would intersect, most often at my grandmother’s. Her neighbor Bruce was a contractor and an old friend of Tom’s. We’d see them together, getting out of Bruce’s work truck, the bed crammed with ladders and two-by-fours. I knew this meant Tom was working “under the table,” getting paid in cash. Usually, when a father didn’t pay child support, the state could withhold his wages, but Tom officially had none, so we rarely received our twenty-five dollars a week. Mom would stick her little rectangular 110 film camera through the curtains and take pictures to prove that Tom was working, the plastic shutter emitting an angry clack, then send the prints to the relevant state office along with long, angry letters. But it did no good. By the time I was ten, we were on a waiting list with eight thousand other single mothers who had petitioned the state to investigate the deadbeat fathers of their children.
Looking back, I can absolutely understand Mom’s rage, and I shared it for a long time. But I wish she could have stepped back from the fight and admitted defeat, if only to have had a bit more peace in those last years.
But then I think of her persistence, her unwillingness to let the injustice of the situation go. Even if she knew that winning was unlikely, fighting was sometimes a way for her to maintain dignity. And I’m glad she struggled for more when others would have given up or settled. It taught me how.
12
* * *
after