“I can’t, Dad. I . . .”
“You can’t? Why? You prefer to live in a tiny apartment all alone and avoid us?”
He’d never spoken to her like this—the sudden sarcasm like barbed wire digging in. “Dad.”
He shook his head, shaking free from the words that had just tarnished their house that had held kindness, love and warmth. “Will someone please take me to the pub? Whatever y’all need to discuss, I know you’ll do without me anyway.”
Shane stepped up. “Dad, it’s only ten in the morning.”
Gavin touched his son’s face, such a tender gesture, before taking deliberate steps to leave. Just before he walked out, he picked up the photo once more. He stared at it, squinted; and then he glanced at his children, his eyes seeming to see something far away, misted with private memories.
He tossed the photo onto the table, and then he left with the quick slap of the screen door.
“He’s obviously confused.” Shane brushed his hands through the air. “I shouldn’t have brought that one. It just doesn’t have anyone else in it to ask and . . . I thought it might jog a memory.”
Colleen stared at the photo. “That’s the problem, Shane. You can’t shake loose what’s already gone. So it looks like what he does is create memories, or facts, to fill in the empty spaces. We can’t make this harder on him. He’s too embarrassed to say he doesn’t know, so . . .”
“Should I go check on him?” Hallie asked, her hand already on the screen door handle.
“Leave him be.” Shane rubbed at his weary face. “He’ll probably go mess around in his shed or get the fishing pole . . .”
Hallie went to the window and pulled aside the green-and-white-checkered curtain. Their mother had sewn it twenty years before on her Singer machine in the spare bedroom, whistling and singing. With that image, Colleen felt so very young again, aware of a world full of possibility, buoyed by the certainty that she was both safe and loved.
Hallie glanced over her shoulder. “He went to the shed.”
Shane also glanced through the window and then asked, “What progress have you made on the book? The party is in a week.”
“Eight days,” Colleen said. “And I have notes from four more interviews. I just need to turn them into stories.” She set the photo on the side table once again. “So that’s nine so far. How far are you, Hallie?”
Hallie spoke without turning toward them. “I’ve been planning the party. I haven’t really . . .” She spun around. “I have two and that’s it. I’m sorry. The party planning and the kids keep me buried. I still don’t have permission to block off the street and if we don’t get that we’re—”
“I can call,” Shane said. “The city commissioner owes me a favor anyway.”
“Well, can you wiggle your nose and find me a pastry maker? I wanted shamrock cupcakes, mini ones, and the baker I hired said it was too much. So no, I haven’t done any more interviews.”
“That’s eleven out of the twenty.” Shane picked up the typed stories they had already completed.
“I’ll do the rest in two days,” Colleen said. “I can do that many, I think. As long as I can reach everyone.”
“You don’t have to do them all.” Hallie set her palms behind her and onto the windowsill and then leaned back, her hair falling into her eyes. “I will do a few. I’m sorry.” She paused. “Tomorrow I’ll bring the timeline for us to go over after we meet with the social worker.”
“What do you mean?” Shane asked.
“I’d like your help.”
How hard could a timeline be for a man who’d led such a simple life? Colleen wondered. They weren’t tracking ancestors without records or names. Smart-ass comments lurked on her lips, but the sadness in the room felt prescient, as if at any moment another piece of terrible news would wander through that slapping screen door.
Instead she said, “It’s confusing, what some people say. But no one remembers things exactly right, do they? If you ask thirty people about the same night that happened thirty years ago, each person will remember it differently.”
“Yes,” Hallie said with an agitated flip of her hand in the air. “We never know the whole truth about a memory. It can be . . .” She took another breath, as if filling her lungs with courage. “Memories aren’t always the truth. They aren’t always true.” She paused and glanced between her sister and brother while she bit the right side of her lower lip. “Let’s try this.” She glanced at her brother and then at Colleen. “Do you remember my thirteenth birthday party?”
Colleen closed her eyes, searched the past. “Help me out. Princess or circus theme?”
“Neither. It was the Olympics. We had little stations and we divided our friends into teams. You were the captain of one and I was captain of the other.”
“Yes.” Colleen opened her eyes. “Mother made the cake and it had the Olympic circles with your name straight across it. We had a piñata that looked like a gold medal and Dad made stations for high jump and sprint and then created fun ones like beanbag toss and watermelon-eating contest.”
“Yes.”
“So we remember it the same. How fun it was. How nice.”
“Do you remember which team won?” Hallie asked, tenting her hands under her chin.
“Yes. Yours.” Colleen smiled.
“Do you remember what you did when it was time for the medal ceremony and Dad gave out the candy necklaces with a circle of chocolate in gold and silver foil hanging from the middle?”
Colleen shook her head, confident in her memories. “He didn’t do that. You just won and we had cake and . . .” Colleen paused. “There wasn’t a medal ceremony.”
“Yes, there was. But you sulked off and went inside with your piece of cake and ate it alone in the kitchen until I started opening presents.”
“No way.” Colleen laughed and rolled her eyes toward Shane. “That didn’t happen. First off, why would I do that? Second, I would remember it because that’s just mean.”
“It did happen. And it happened because you couldn’t stand when I won. You were my best friend and biggest fan unless it meant I showed you up, even at my own party.”
“It’s not true.”
“Except it is.”
Shane stepped in. “Point taken, Hallie. We remember events differently. Interviewing these people or even asking Dad about an old photo isn’t going to give us the facts . . . but it could give us a story that contains a more essential truth and allows him to see himself for a flash of a moment.”
“I don’t think that’s her point, Shane.” Colleen stared at her sister. “I think her point is that I can’t stand for her to be happier than me or to have more than me. She’s taken a very old and not accurate memory and used it to prove I’m a terrible person and that she is in the right. She wants to prove that my memory of the wedding day isn’t fully true.”
“Oh,” Hallie said, her eyebrows drawn down, her voice low. “Your memory of your wedding day is factually correct. I’m just telling you that not all of your memories are true.” She glanced at Shane. “And not all of Dad’s are true either. And not all of his friends’ stories are true. But a timeline is based on fact. It must be right.”
“I get it.” Shane sat down again. “Please work together on this. Please.”
“Why can’t you do what Dad wants?” Hallie’s words burst forth, rushing into the room.
“Me?” Colleen held her hand over her chest.
“Yes. Why can’t you just come live with him?” She took two steps forward to face Colleen. There was no avoiding her now. They were almost touching.
Colleen stood her ground. “Why can’t you?”
“Because I have a house and a family and—”
“A husband,” Colleen said. “So because you have a husband and kids you don’t need to move in, but because I have no one and nothin
g, I have to move in? Uproot my life?”
“That’s not how I meant it.” Hallie shook her head. “He loves you best anyway. You’re his favorite daughter.”
“That’s ridiculous. And if it’s true at all, then Mother loved you best—you were her favorite. And all of that doesn’t matter. We all love Dad.”
Shane stood and stepped between them, both taking a step back.
“I’m sorry,” Hallie said and sat at the table. “I keep screwing this up. All I want is to help Dad and . . .” She paused and then looked at Colleen. “And fix things between us.”
“You think embarrassing me in front of Walter was a good start? Yelling at him about me. About me!”
Shane made a groaning noise in the back of his throat. “Please, enough already with Walter.”
Colleen composed herself. “Let’s focus here. Shane, we’ll meet at your apartment at ten tomorrow. We’ll make a plan.”
On cue to cut the tension in the room, the little nieces came rushing in. It was Rosie who spoke, but they both waved their magic wands in the air, glitter scattering like dust motes. “The movie is stuck. The little wheel keeps going around and around.”
“It’s the Internet,” Shane said. “Let me reboot it.”
Rosie waved her wand at Colleen. “Where’s your wand, Aunt Lena? Maybe it will fix the movie.”
How could she not smile? Was it their fault their dad was a cheating liar? Or that their mom was a betrayer? “Hold on.” Colleen winked at them and ran to the back bedroom to seize her wand and returned waving it.
Holding hands, Rosie, Sadie and Colleen tiptoed back into the room where the girls had been watching the movie and waved their wands with all their might, glitter catching in the morning rays that washed through the dusty windows. And just like that, the screen image disappeared and a moment later reappeared showing an old man and his dog running after a house being pulled skyward by balloons. They burst into laughter, the girls grabbing Colleen around the waist.
Colleen, of course, knew that Shane had booted the Internet just as they’d waved their wands. There was no magic.
The girls made whooping noises and plopped onto two small pink beanbag chairs, each labeled with one of their names in a loopy monogrammed script. Colleen’s heart opened another inch or maybe two; she could almost hear the creaking noises of the rusted hinges. But it was only for the girls. When she turned to leave the room, Hallie stood at the doorway with a smile, big and bright.
“Hold on,” Shane called from the kitchen. “I’ll fix the Internet and then I have to go.”
Colleen burst into laughter and Hallie stared at her in confusion. “What’s so funny?”
Colleen held her wand high. “If only these worked with Dad.”
Chapter Twenty
Memory creates our frames.
Dana Walrath, Aliceheimer’s
SEVEN DAYS UNTIL THE PARTY . . .
Often the world awoke when Colleen wanted it to sleep. She’d shared that sentiment with her dad one morning when she was very small. “Please tell Saturday to sleep in,” she’d said. “I want to, and I can’t if I think I’m missing something.”
He’d laughed heartily. Now at thirty-five, lying in her childhood bed, her wishes weren’t any different, and she yearned to make Dad laugh as he had then. She threw off the covers and stepped onto the knotted rug her mother had bought at a craft shop in Charleston. Colleen remembered the day. “Oh, darling, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for to match your room. Now your little toes won’t be cold when you hop out of bed.” She’d kissed Colleen’s cheeks, then wiped the lipstick mark off.
Colleen smiled at the remembrance and closed her eyes for a moment, sent her mother some love and began the day with fatigue itching beneath her eyelids.
She’d stayed up most of the night writing stories from her notes and interviews. The stories mattered. All of it mattered and that thought had made her stay awake to get it done. From a day of interviews, she’d learned about her dad’s aversion to ghost stories; his high school record for most home runs on the baseball team (a record still held to that day); how, as a toddler, he’d bang his head onto pillows when he was angry; how his first dog had been run over by a car in front of him (and the reason he’d never wanted another). They were just anecdotes from a normal life—but they were also all the parts of a man she loved, whom she loved more with each telling.
As she wrote, she’d included her own birth on March 2, 1981, in Richmond. Next was Hallie in 1983 and then Shane in ’88. Her parents’ wedding story was the one she’d struggled to put into words, as no one else had been there to tell her about it. She imagined how they felt and what was said. It was a simple photo that caught the moment in the courthouse when Dad handed Mother a bouquet of wild roses. Neither of her parents had ever said much about that day, only smiled at each other with a shared look of private love.
When she’d finished, she gathered the pages and prepared for the meeting at Shane’s. Dad was safe with Bob for the morning and Colleen girded her heart for what would come next, and then next.
* * *
• • •
Shane’s apartment smelled like the local coffee shop. Colleen inhaled deeply as she stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. Hallie and Shane looked up from the paper-strewn table.
“Well, good morning to the two of you.” Colleen reached into her bag, her finger snagging on an open safety pin somewhere in the recesses of all the random doodads she stored there “just in case.” Then her fingers grasped the papers she was seeking. “I think I have something that will cheer you up.”
“I don’t think anything can do that,” Hallie said with such sadness that Colleen wondered if she’d missed something.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’re just going over the finances,” Shane said. “Everything costs more than we could have imagined. We’re going to have to share the burden.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.” Colleen set the stack of stories on the table. “Tell me what you need and where we are.”
“Well, Dad doesn’t have long-term care insurance—he thought it was a waste of money—so we have to find out what that means. He’s eligible for disability through social security, but it will be small.” Shane spoke in a robotic voice as if reading off a teleprompter, his eyes askance at the far wall. Then he looked directly at Colleen. “His resources . . . our resources won’t last more than six months if he needs in-home care. I hope the social worker has some answers, but we’ve all got to find a way to help.”
Hallie held up her hand. “And we are not talking about memory care homes or anything like that. Not yet. Not now.”
Colleen placed her hand over her chest, where she could feel her heart rolling, picking up the pace. “I will do anything I can. I will. I promise.”
Shane pointed at the stories she’d dropped onto the table. “Thank you so much for this, big sis.”
He bent over the pages, Hallie doing the same, their heads close enough to touch. Hallie’s tangled hair was pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, just as it had been when they were children and came off the johnboat. Shane scratched absently at his temples, leafed quickly through the pages without reading them word for word. He looked up first and smiled at Colleen; she felt warmth and a swooping feeling in her stomach—this was her family. Her family.
“Lena, this is simply amazing,” he said.
“Well, thank you.” She bowed with her coffee mug held high. “I stayed awake most of the night and it was like Dad was with me. I just wrote and wrote and the little vignettes came.” She glanced at Hallie, who was sorting the pages, lining them in order one after the other. “You don’t like them?”
“I do.” Hallie looked up and Colleen saw the circles under her sister’s eyes, dark and swollen. “But like I said, some dates are funky.”
“I took the dates straight off the photos . . .”
“I know.” Hallie stood and stretched, rubbing at her already obviously irritated eyes. “It might just be how tired I am. I’m preoccupied with planning the party.”
“The party . . .”
“Yes.” Hallie’s unwavering gaze suggested she’d found her gumption again. “The party. The one I am planning alone.”
“So give me something to do. I’m here to help.” Colleen broke eye contact to stare out the stained glass window. It was hard to look directly at Hallie; it was too much for Colleen to hold the gaze, as it caused her breath to catch, her heart to fly upward in a need for something that felt like reconciliation.
“No, you’re not,” Hallie said.
Colleen glanced back, but only looked at Shane. “What?”
“You know we don’t have enough money to get a helper for Dad and you could stay.”
“Not now,” Shane said in a voice as firm as their mother’s when they came running into the kitchen with muddy shoes. He looked up from Colleen’s stories. “I’m reading these and I’m thinking about Dad, and I want you two to quit throwing jabs and punches.”
“I’m trying to solve this.” Hallie’s voice came with a juvenile whine.
Colleen stepped forward. “You sound five years old, Hallie. For God’s sake, we’re all trying to find solutions to a challenging situation. Shane lives here in an apartment—he could move in. You have a family, so you can’t. We can pool our money or look for other solutions, but me moving here is not the only possibility, so enough already.”
“Maybe . . .” Hallie swallowed and sat. “Forget it.”
“Maybe?” Colleen asked.
“Maybe we just want you here. Have you considered that at all?”
A knock on the door saved them all. Shane opened it to greet the social worker, Susan Clements, a tall woman confident in her stance, her shoulders back. She shifted the tortoiseshell glasses on her face and held out her hand to meet the three siblings as they introduced themselves one by one.
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