by Gary Parker
Gladys put a hand on Allie’s chin and turned it toward her. “His eyes were as black as yours, like hockey pucks,” she said. “Never seen anybody with eyes as dark as the two of you.”
Allie studied her dad’s eyes again. “I’ve got his eyes,” she said.
“I know,” Gladys said. “I just never wanted to tell you.”
“You think he’s still alive?” Allie asked.
“I have no way of knowing.”
“I wish I knew one way or the other.”
Silence fell on the room for several seconds. Allie finally lowered the picture and faced her mom again. The spell of her dad’s eyes had ended.
“You planning on spending the night?” Gladys asked.
“Why not. I’m already in my pajamas.”
“Good to have you home.”
Allie smiled, hugged her mom, and plopped back into the middle of the mess on the floor, the picture of her dad placed beside the clock radio next to her bed.
“I need to clean up the kitchen,” Gladys said.
Allie waved her away, then glanced around her childhood room. “I’m getting married,” she said to the walls.
The walls seemed unimpressed.
“Kind of scary.”
The walls said nothing.
2
Allie woke the next morning to the sound of music pouring from her radio alarm clock. She rolled over to turn it off, but the radio sat on her dresser five feet away. To turn it off, she had to get out of bed, and she didn’t want to do that yet, so she stayed put. Sunshine streamed through the bedroom windows and fell on her face. For a few seconds, she didn’t move, just lay still and enjoyed the sun’s warmth and the smell of her pillow under her cheek. She heard her mom rumbling around down the hallway and, pretending to be upset, called out to her. “Mom!”
“Yes?”
“Did you set this alarm to go off?”
“No.”
“It came on by itself?”
“I guess so.”
Allie wrapped her pillow around her ears to shut out the music, but it drifted through anyway, so she put the pillow back under her head and tried to relax. “What’s for breakfast?” she called to Gladys.
“Got some pancake mix ready. Just need to throw it in a pan.”
Allie rubbed her eyes and tried to decide if she wanted to get up yet. The music continued, and she tried to ignore it but couldn’t. The song’s chorus repeated a phrase over and over again.
“Her father’s eyes, her father’s eyes.”
A shot of electricity jolted Allie’s spine, and she sat up straight, her back against the headboard. What was this song? The music continued. Allie wondered who had written it and why. The chorus started again.
“She had her father’s eyes, her father’s eyes.”
Unable to listen to any more, Allie rolled out of bed and flipped off the radio. For at least a minute, she stood by the dresser, her body trembling slightly. The picture of her dad lay beside the radio where she’d left it. Her dad gazed up at her, and just as it had happened last night, she felt his eyes boring into her, penetrating, cutting through some shell she’d wrapped around her heart without ever knowing it. She started to pick up the photo but knew she didn’t dare.
“Pancakes are almost ready,” her mom said as she entered the room, a red apron tied around her waist over tan slacks and a darker brown blouse. “Wash up and come on down.”
Allie glanced back at the picture, then set her jaw and headed to the bathroom. A few minutes later, dressed in black heels, black dress pants, and a white silk sweater, she sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the cup of coffee her mom had fixed for her. Gladys brought a plate of pancakes and a bottle of syrup over and plopped them down. Allie took a pancake, poured syrup on it, and began to eat. A cardinal landed on the birdbath just past the back deck, and Allie gazed at it through the window. The cardinal pecked at the food her mom put out every morning.
“You going to the florist after school today?” her mom asked.
“Right after I check on my girls.”
Gladys smiled. “You can’t practice the team right now, can you?”
“No, but I can make sure they’re doing their individual workouts on their own.”
Allie and Gladys ate without talking for a couple of minutes. The chorus from the radio kept playing through Allie’s head. She tried to push the words away but couldn’t.
The cardinal chirped a couple of times and flew away. Allie laid down her fork and stared at her mom. “You ever hear a song named ‘Her Father’s Eyes’ or something like that?” she asked.
Gladys shrugged. “No. Why you ask?”
Allie sipped her coffee and started to tell her mom about the song, but it sounded odd as she rolled it around in her thoughts, so she dropped it. “No reason, not important.”
Gladys stared at her for a moment—eyebrows knitted—but then let it go. “You seeing Trey tonight?”
“Yeah, we have to make final decisions about boutonnieres.”
“I’m sure he’s up for that.”
“Trey’s up for anything related to this wedding.”
“What about his mother?”
Allie smiled slightly. “I think she would rather sit in a tub of scalding butter than have anything to do with any of it.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“Least I know it’s not me; Trey said she’s been against every girl he’s ever had any interest in. She wants Trey at home with her forever.”
“You ever feel he’s just a bit too much of a mama’s boy for you?”
Allie studied the question as she munched a pancake. “Mrs. Thompson has been ill a lot,” she finally concluded, avoiding the hook in the question. “She needs Trey, says he’s all she’s got.”
Her mom chuckled. “Getting sick is the oldest trick in the book for a mom who wants to keep a child close to home.”
Allie set down her coffee cup. “Trey is marrying me three weeks from tomorrow,” she said. “Sick mother or not... Ruth Thompson will just have to deal.”
Gladys wiped her mouth with a cloth napkin, and Allie quickly finished her pancakes, stood, and kissed her on the cheek. “Got to go,” Allie said.
“Call me later.”
“I’ll do it.”
The rest of the day passed quickly for Allie. In addition to her coaching during the basketball season, she taught two classes—Marketing 101 and an upper level Advertising and the Media course. At 3:30 she finished up the advertising class and hustled to the gym to check on her team’s after-school workouts. Although she couldn’t officially coach the girls in the off-season, she still expected them to lift weights four days a week and spend some time on the court shooting and playing informal pickup games.
As expected, she found a number of the girls in the locker room changing into their basketball clothes. One of the girls—a tall redhead named Sarah—stood by a mirror, her index finger shoved toward her left eye. Allie stepped to her and patted her on the back.
“Got a contact lens problem?” she asked Sarah.
“Just got these new ones,” Sarah said. “They’re bugging me. Needed to clean them.”
Sarah pushed the contact toward her eye, set it in place, and positioned the second one on the tip of her finger. Allie looked at Sarah’s reflection in the mirror as she arranged the second contact. High cheekbones, dimples, long lashes—a beautiful, five-foot-nine-inch-tall forward who wowed the boys in the hallways of school and took no prisoners under the rims in a basketball game. Sarah caught Allie’s eye and smiled.
“Wish I had your eyes,” Sarah said.
Allie stepped back a half step. “Your eyes are gorgeous,” she said. “Hazel, aren’t they?”
“Not as pretty as yours.”
Lisa, the starting point guard, walked up. “She’s right. You got the best eyes any of us have ever seen.”
Allie wanted to melt into the floor and disappear. Not only did she try to avoid talk
ing about looks with her basketball team—comparisons like that never helped anyone, particularly sensitive young women—but she specifically didn’t want any attention brought to her eyes right now.
She turned to walk away, but four more girls suddenly appeared beside her, and she knew that leaving right then would feel odd—like the four who had just walked up had run her off or something. The six teammates clustered around Allie, all of them looking into the mirror, opening their eyes wide, pulling at their eyelashes, moistening their lips, checking out their profiles.
Sarah pointed to the point guard’s face. “Lisa’s got a pretty blue thing going on with her eyes,” she said.
Lisa turned to Sarah. “Are yours green?”
“Based on my mood,” Sarah said. “Sometimes green, sometimes hazel.”
Allie tried to relax and enjoy the chatter of her girls. Nothing quite like the locker room with a bunch of young women to remind her of the reason she loved coaching. Here she got to know her charges, got to influence them in ways nobody else could. Although not religious in any conventional sense, Allie saw the locker room as a holy place, an inner sanctum dedicated to the worship of companionship, teamwork, discipline, and hard work.
“You’re Irish, aren’t you?” Lisa asked Sarah.
“Halfway at least—on my mama’s side. That’s where I got my red hair.”
Allie figured she could leave now without anybody wondering why. She started to turn.
“Where did you get your eyes?” Lisa asked Allie.
Allie gulped. What was it with all the attention on her eyes in the last twenty-four hours? The same prickly feeling the picture of her dad and the song had caused returned to her spine. This time a slight rise of the hair on her arms also occurred.
“Must be her dad,” Sarah said. “I’ve seen her mom’s eyes.”
“Yeah, they’re kind of grayish,” Lisa agreed. “Not black like yours.”
“Yours are black as coal,” Sarah said.
All six girls focused on Allie, and she wanted to duck and slink away but felt trapped again. The girls stared at her eyes through the mirror, and she knew they expected her to say something, and since she didn’t know how to avoid it, she obliged them. “My mom says I have my father’s eyes.”
“They’re fantastic,” Lisa said.
Sarah asked the question Allie had hoped nobody would ask. “Does your dad live around here?”
Allie shook her head. “No.”
Lisa threw the last punch without even meaning to. “Where does he live?”
Allie patted Lisa on the back. “Get dressed, ladies,” she ordered. “I’ve got things to do, and you do too. I’ll check back in on you in an hour or so.”
With that, she hustled away from the locker room before anybody could ask any more embarrassing questions she had no clue how to answer.
Allie met Trey for dinner about two hours later at a small Italian restaurant about a mile from her school. He offered her a casual peck on the cheek as she walked up, and she took it, then sat down with him. They ordered quickly—lasagna and salad for him, spaghetti and salad for her.
“How’s your mom?” she asked.
“Some better but not a lot.”
“I hope she’ll feel better by the wedding,” she said genuinely but without knowing whether she was really sick or not. A mom giving up her only child to another woman never came easy, especially not to a woman like Ruth Thompson.
“She... she mentioned that too,” Trey said, his chin downcast. “She said she wanted to be there more than anything and hoped she got stronger before then.”
Allie’s antenna went up, and she got a little frustrated. “She’s trying to scare you,” she said.
Trey glanced up, then nodded.
“You need to let her know that the wedding goes on regardless.”
Trey rubbed his eyes, and Allie felt sorry for him. His mother put him in some hard spots sometimes, came up sick a lot when he and Allie wanted to do something special. More than once they had postponed outings so Trey could stay with his mother through one of her bouts with various illnesses. The last couple of times, Allie had suggested to Trey that they go anyway, that his mother was manipulating him, but he’d refused.
“She’s fragile,” he explained. “What kind of son leaves his mother when she needs him?”
Unable to argue with that, Allie had dropped her suggestion. Now she took Trey’s hands and decided to stay positive, to put all negative thoughts away. No more worry about Ruth Thompson, no more anxiety about her missing dad. Time to talk about the wedding plans—the golf outing Trey had planned for his groomsmen, the menu for the dinner after the ceremony, the vows they would take before the minister at the Methodist church on the main street in Harper Springs.
“One thing we haven’t talked about,” Trey said, nibbling a bite of salad.
“What’s that?”
“Who’s going to walk you down the aisle?”
Allie straightened up, surprised that Trey had chosen this particular evening to bring up a question she’d considered a couple of times but then discarded as useless to worry over. As far as she was concerned, she would make her way to the altar alone.
“I know it’s not fun to think about,” Trey said, reaching for her hand. “I suppose that’s why you haven’t mentioned it. Not having a dad around at a time like this has to be hard... but we do have to ask somebody, don’t you think?”
Allie stared past him out the window. “I can walk the aisle by myself,” she said. “Or my mom can walk beside me.”
“You think that’s appropriate?”
“Who’s to say? It’s my wedding, isn’t it?”
“True, but...”
Allie sighed, and the picture of her dad rose in her mind again. Deep sadness swept through her. She wanted Jack Wilson to take the trip down the aisle with her more than anything, but what could she do?
She focused on Trey again. “Do you believe in God?” she asked.
Trey leaned back a little. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just humor me for a second,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”
“Yes, sure, everybody does, don’t they?”
“Okay.” Allie hesitated, not sure how to say what she needed to voice but knowing she had to get it out. “Let’s agree for the moment that God exists. But does God ever try to speak to us, to tell us something we might need to know?”
Trey propped his elbows on the table and intertwined his fingers. “You’re asking a crazy question, don’t you think?”
Allie recalled the picture from the previous night, the way her dad’s eyes seemed so intent, so fixed on her. She quickly told Trey what had happened—the photo she’d found, the song that morning, her girls’ comments about her eyes in the locker room. “I feel like somebody, something, a higher power, a cosmic force, God maybe, is trying to get a message to me,” she said.
“I’ve never even heard you mention God,” Trey said, his voice rising slightly. “Now you think you’re hearing messages from him? Or her. Whichever. You’re not about to go all ‘Jesus’ on me, are you?”
Allie smiled but only briefly. “I know it’s bizarre... but...” She paused, unable to go on, unable to convince herself, much less Trey, of what she was suggesting.
Trey rubbed his chin and shifted into his counseling mode. “Let’s pretend for argument’s sake that God is talking to you,” he offered. “What’s the message? That you’ve got eyes like your daddy? So what? Millions of girls, boys too, can say that.”
“It’s more than that,” Allie insisted, although still not certain of what she was saying, feeling like an ant trying to explain quantum physics. “It’s... it’s...”
“It’s what?” Trey asked, obviously perturbed.
“I don’t know.”
The waiter interrupted them with more rolls, and they both leaned back, almost as if agreeing to take a break from the intensity of the conversation.
Trey l
ocked his fingers again. “Look,” he said, “every girl wants her dad to walk her down the aisle. But you won’t get to experience that. You should expect to feel some sadness about it. You should expect that your missing father will become important to you right now.”
“But what about the feeling I had when I saw the picture last night, the song, the girls? Even your bringing up the fact that my dad won’t be walking me down the aisle?”
“A series of strange coincidences,” Trey said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“So you don’t believe God is trying to tell me something?”
Trey chuckled. “I believe in Sigmund Freud,” he said. “Carl Jung too, maybe even B. F. Skinner if you catch me on a bad day. I believe in the science of psychology. Your subconscious is talking to you, that’s all. You want your dad with you at this transition point in your life, and you’ve found this picture, and now you’re interpreting everything that happens through the lens of your loneliness. But God talking to you, a celestial message from on high? Come on. Just because you heard a song and some high school girls commented on your eyes—and they are magnificent, by the way—don’t go off half-cocked and get all mysterious on me. It’s not like you.”
Allie took a sip of water and realized Trey held the logic card, and it trumped all her coincidences.
“I know you’re right,” she said. “I’ve never thought of God in any personal sense. It’s not that Mom and I don’t go to church every now and again—every Easter and Christmas we show up at Main Street Methodist.”
“You told me you went through confirmation classes too.”
“When I was twelve. But God has always seemed pretty remote, a spiritual ooze of some sort—ill-defined and absent, not more than that.”
Trey nodded. “Same here,” he said. “I believe God exists, I guess... but doesn’t get much involved in what happens to individual humans.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, eager to say out loud what she had always felt but rarely expressed. “Like a cosmic engineer or something, somebody who tinkered the universe into being but then left it alone.”
Silence fell for a moment, and Trey took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I got a little defensive when you mentioned God,” he said, “but I’ve seen some bad examples of what religion can do to people. Makes some folks almost scary they get so wrapped up in it.”