The possibilities were endless, and it didn’t matter if you played it safe or not. Here one minute, gone the next.
I pulled the blankets over my head, blocking out the morning sun, attempting to block out the thoughts that were making my heart speed up, my breathing skip.
“Get it together, Lottie,” I whispered into the darkness of my sheets. “You haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.”
It was nine o’clock. Abe was still sleeping, and Mom and Dad were gardening, with matching sunhats and gloves and two glasses of lemonade. I joined them in the backyard with a glass of iced coffee.
“There’s my girl!” Dad said.
“Do you want some blueberries, honey?” Mom asked.
“We’re up to our eyeballs in blueberries!” Dad said, tossing one into the air and catching it on his tongue. He looked very proud of himself.
“Any raspberries?” I asked.
“We are not as up to the eyeballs in raspberries, so you can have just a couple,” Dad said, pointing toward a cereal bowl almost half full of the berries. I sat cross-legged in the grass and ate one at a time, examining each for spiders first. A very disturbing encounter with a spider in a raspberry had scarred me for life. Raspberries were Dad’s favorite; he watched me out of the corner of his eye as I ate.
“Hey, Dad, what are you doing today?”
“Do you mean besides harvesting food to feed my beloved familia?”
“Yes, besides that.”
“I was going to see if anything new had been added to Netflix. I haven’t checked in a while.”
“Do you want to go thrifting with me?”
Dad’s faves: raspberries, Netflix (he had recently figured out how to use it, and he was now an unstoppable force to be reckoned with), and thrift stores.
“I think I could arrange a thrifting break,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I need some more ironic T-shirts.”
“I could use—”
“If you buy another used pocket square, Sal, I swear,” Mom said, interrupting him.
“Vintage,” Dad whispered, winking at me. “Give me an hour?”
“I’ll go get ready.”
We left right on time. I drove; our preferred thrift store was about thirty minutes away, just over the Massachusetts border. It was big, and the housewares section was enormous, rows and rows lined with shelves filled with glasses and plates and pots and pans and knickknacks and things I didn’t need and wouldn’t buy but loved to sift through. Dad was in charge of the radio, and he refused to settle on a station for more than a few minutes at a time. He’d be singing along one minute then changing halfway through a song, suddenly bored, looking for something specific that he never articulated.
“Have you read anything interesting lately?” I asked, fishing, wondering if Abe showed them Angeles yet.
“Fascinating little article about the likelihood of a devastating seismic event on the West Coast.”
So, no. Abe was probably waiting until today to show them.
“How about you, Lottie-da? How are you doing lately?”
Good. Fine. Terrible. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced the normal darkness of my room was a coffin. Sometimes I read the obituaries in the morning paper and googled things like most unusual deaths and weirdest deaths and worst ways to die and accidental deaths. I’d come across a Rilo Kiley song that way, something upbeat and positive but really dark and uncomfortable, and I’d listened to it twelve times in a row one night, falling asleep with the words still crawling across my ceiling.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you okay?”
Aunt Helen had written that she and my father were like Margo and Alvin, and that had ripped out all my insides, leaving me empty and sadder than I thought was possible. There was Abe and me, and it was easy to see us as brother and sister, but somehow it was harder with parents. Aunt Helen was my aunt, but it wasn’t easy to really understand that she was my father’s sister first. They had been close for years and years before I even existed.
I felt terrible that I needed Aunt Helen to spell it out for me, that I hadn’t thought to do it myself. I’d driven across the state to get my father’s suit jacket, but I hadn’t sat across a table from him and looked into his eyes to see how far the sadness had traveled. Whether it was receding or multiplying, diminishing or growing. I had watched him wash his car and brought him lemonade, but it had seemed too impossible, too heavy, to really ask him how he was, to really make sure he told me the truth.
“Oh, some days are harder than others,” he said.
“Today?”
“Today? Today had raspberries and my favorite thrift store with my favorite daughter. And it isn’t even noon yet. Today is doing fine so far.”
We got to the thrift store a few minutes later. I found a parking spot in the shade. I turned the car off and looked at my father, really looked at him, studying his face to the point where he noticed and touched his chin.
“Do I have something . . . ?”
“No. No, you’re fine.”
“Are you ready for this?”
“Ready.”
We went inside and grabbed a cart, which we would inevitably fill with things we didn’t actually want and wouldn’t actually buy. It was all about the hunt for us and not about the purchase. That was why I liked going to thrift stores with my father, because he took just as much time as I did. We sat in chairs and tried on shoes and opened the cabinets of curios and peeked inside and made up stories from stuffed animals and put on coats like we were going to Narnia.
We pushed our cart up and down every single aisle, sometimes putting things in it only to take them out a few minutes later. I found a pair of tea light lanterns. A nightlight shaped like a lipsticked mouth. An eight ball keychain. My father popped around a corner with a chest-high flamingo, intricately woven with different scraps of pink metal.
“Do we need this?” he asked.
“How much?”
“Seven.”
“Yeah, we need that,” I said.
Into the cart it went.
I found an ice bucket shaped like a pineapple, and my dad added a light-up antique globe to the pile.
We made our way to the book section, and of course there they were, a dozen copies of Alvin, hardcovers and paperbacks with cracked spines and dog-eared pages (Abe would have died). My dad picked up a copy of Alvin Hatter and the Return of the Overcoat Man and turned it over in his hands.
When he looked up, his eyes were bright, and I felt a momentarily jolt of panic. Dads can’t cry, dads can’t cry. But then he blinked and he was okay again, still sad but holding it together.
“Shit,” he said. “It just sneaks up on you.”
“I know. It sneaks up on me too.”
“You never think . . . ,” he said. And even though he didn’t finish his sentence, I heard it in my head: it will happen to someone you know. He tossed the book up in the air and caught it and then replaced it on the shelf, cover facing out so it was easily recognizable. Then he put his hands on the handle of the cart and said, “How’s about we put this stuff back and go get some ice cream. I’m in the mood for ice cream. Are you?”