“Thank you. That’s very…nice of you,” I say, taking the bag and walking away, fast.
“And hey, Abby,” he calls, when I’m already almost out the door. “Don’t be a stranger. I never forget a pretty face twice.” Condor’s smile is wide, and maybe, just maybe, genuine.
And I know right then that I’m in trouble.
Chapter Five
Less than a mile from my father’s house, the road narrows and becomes a gravel path, so familiar it shrinks a decade into no time at all. Tiny rocks ping against the car while birds—turkey vultures, this time—pick over a carcass in the road. I lean on the horn and they look up with those dull hooded eyes before lifting into the air.
It’s just dinner, I remind myself. Simple. Quick. My father has no power over me. He is just a person, even if he’s a terrible one. There are bad people in the world; sometimes, they are your own parents. But he can’t see into my thoughts. He can’t read my sins, like I once thought he could.
I can’t avoid him, anyway.
Like so many around here, my childhood home is a modest split-level dumped on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing strange about it, no darkness to its gabled roof or clapboard siding, nothing peculiar in the concrete porch or the patch of yard browning in the sun.
Still, the house seems to rush toward me and not the other way around. Like it’s eager to get me inside. Like it’s been waiting.
For the first time in nearly a decade, I’m home.
I kill the engine and fuss with my hair, which is knotted on the top of my head, killing time, buying an extra few seconds. I almost never wear my hair down, and by now it reaches midway down my back. Every few months I take scissors to it myself, trimming away the dead ends. I’ve always wanted to cut it short, always sworn I was going to. Several times I’ve even been in a hairdresser’s chair before panicking at the sight of the scissors. My dad always told me that my hair is my one good quality, and somehow that idea grew into the very hair itself—that, and the memory of my mom running her fingers through it from scalp to end as she braided it so that it would later fall in waves. Somehow I fear that without long hair I’ll be ugly. But even worse, that by cutting my hair I’ll be cutting away this memory, one of my few very good ones. I’ll have to lose her again. But this time, it really will be my fault.
I climb out of the car and stand for a second, staring out at the line of trees in the forest: acres running down to the reservoir, public land, and my private oasis when I was little. I try and remember the last time I saw my father but I get a composite of images: his hand around my throat, the time he rooted out a thong in my underwear drawer and made me wear it around my neck at dinner for a week. The moments of kindness, strange and startling and almost more painful than the abuse: flowers gathered for me in a cup by the bed, a birthday surprise trip to a carnival in Indianapolis, the time he helped me bury Chestnut after I found him stiff and cold in the woods behind the house, his gums crusted over with vomit.
When I left town, four days after my eighteenth birthday, and two days after graduation, I drove west to Chicago with my heart in my throat and two suitcases in the trunk, certain for every second past the city that God would strike me dead. You’re only safe in Barrens. For more than half my life I thought I would be sent to hell if I jumped ship. Like leaving was the end-all sin. But then I realized hell was right here in Barrens, and that made leaving worth the risk.
Gravel crunches under my boots as I make my way up the path. There’s the bird feeder I made when I was eight. There’s a dirt patch where the grass never recovered from the kiddie swimming pool that sat there through many seasons. There’s my mother’s old wind chime clinking softly from the porch—I feel a pang at this—that she made herself out of tin and painted wood. A splintered cross is still tacked to the front door.
The air smells like charred logs, like summer. But behind the familiar smells of grass and dirt and char that I’ve always loved is another odor, thick and pungent. I know that smell. Reeds. Rot.
The smell of drought. The reservoir is less than a half mile from here, concealed from view just beyond the trees.
Inside, I find my father in the squat little living room, washed in bluish TV light that reminds me of being underwater.
My father looks small. Small, and old. The shock of seeing him nearly causes me to stumble. He was always a big guy, not tall but the kind of person who swallowed a room just by walking into it, and muscled from years of working outside: roofing, carpentry, excavating, work on the local farms. The few times a year we speak on the phone, that’s who I imagine on the other end of the line.
Now his muscles seem to have melted into folds of skin, which is gray and thin and draped like a sheet over his bones. He looks like a powdered corpse, and when he turns toward me, it takes his eyes a second to focus.
For a moment, I’m terrified: he doesn’t recognize me, either.
Then he begins to hoist himself up, gripping the arms of his easy chair.
“It’s okay, Dad. Sit.” I lean down and let him hug me. I can’t remember the last time we hugged.
“Sweetheart.” He pats my shoulder and brushes his dry lips against my cheek. His voice is faint, and his greeting—sweetheart—is one he hasn’t used since I was a small child. “I hoped you were still coming.”
“Of course, Dad. I told you I was,” I say.
“It’s been so long…” He closes his eyes, leaning back in his chair, as if even the small physical effort has exhausted him.
I resist the urge to apologize. He knows why I haven’t come sooner. Everyone knows—about his temper, about his fits, about his dark moods. For weeks after my mother died, everything I did made him erupt in a fury. And then, just as quickly, he would withdraw into silence, would pretend I didn’t exist at all. But everything he did was okay, because he’d “found the Lord.” In town, he wore his religion like armor, and somehow that kept him untouchable. At home, he wielded it like a weapon.
Everyone knew, and at the same time, no one saw; no one said a thing. In the city, everyone is anonymous; but in a small town where everyone knows everyone, it takes real skill to look the other way when you’re looking at a face you recognize.