by Joan Bauer
But I think Mr. Webster didn’t get it quite right.
A father isn’t just woven from strands of DNA. A true father is dedicated and unshakably there for his kid every single day.
So, if you ask me what it’s like to have G. T. Stoop as my father, I’ll tell you: It’s like having a huge tree sprout up almost overnight on your lawn. Even though it showed up quick, the steadfastness of it is going to last through the storms and the winds and the seasons.
* * *
G.T. was making a real difference in Mulhoney, too.
He began in several places all at once.
Opened the tax assessor’s office.
Appointed Adam Pulver head of Students for Community Involvement—an action group that looked at the problems in the town and determined how teenagers could help make things better.
Appointed Mrs. Pettibone to head up a committee to plan a geriatric wellness center that would improve the quality of people’s lives.
We had town meetings and people left not hating each other.
Brenda Babcock had slapped another stiff fine on the Real Fresh Dairy for disturbing the peace with their big bruiser milk trucks. She had investigations going round the clock on Eli Millstone’s financial schemes, too. She was redefining honor and professionalism in the sheriff’s office.
As the days went by, the Real Fresh Dairy paid their back taxes and G.T. used that money to help the schools, repair the community center, and fund programs for the poor.
“What’s the best we can be?” G.T. asked an assembly of teenagers, me included. And together we came up with a plan to do volunteer work for people who were short on cash.
We helped at the expanded day care facility. Anastasia was there now, learning to eat with a spoon. She’d hurl applesauce in our faces and start laughing.
We manned the Gospel of Grace’s new twenty-four hour family shelter. Braverman and I tried to work there on Friday nights.
We fixed fences, mowed grass, and painted houses. We were only okay house painters. Jillian said it was good we weren’t charging.
But we kept trying.
And we learned that you don’t have to be famous or rich or physically healthy to be a leader. You just have to try to be a true person. We learned that helping other people brings out the good in everybody.
G.T. had figured out the big concept in government. “Politics,” he kept telling us, “isn’t about power, control, or manipulation. It’s about serving up your very best.”
I love the fact that it took a short-order cook to get it right.
20
The summer I graduated, G.T. started slipping.
Two years from when Addie and I had arrived in town.
One and a half years since he had become mayor.
I’d been accepted at Michigan State for the fall term. Squeezed in with my grades. Wowed them with my personal essay on life and food service. Braverman finally was going to college with help from a town scholarship G.T. had set up. Combined with the money he and his mother had been saving, it was just enough. The University of Wisconsin was the lucky place.
I was going to miss him like crazy.
In early July, the leukemia came back at G.T. with a vengeance, like a huge wind toppling a small boat.
The doctor said it was doubtful he could pull out of this one.
I told myself it wasn’t true.
The thing that had been stalking us from behind was now in front.
My father was dying.
Addie sat with him round the clock except when I relieved her, which I tried to do often. I couldn’t seem to sit in the room with him as long as she could. I needed to go outside, feel life on my face, feel winds of healing.
Braverman seemed ever-present—a huge tree himself; someone to hold on to. He was broken at the prospect of losing G.T.
For four awful weeks we watched him slip a little more each day.
I didn’t think I was strong enough to handle this.
I couldn’t stand the thought of this loss.
I was sick of life being so impossibly hard.
I started sitting with him for longer stretches. When I had to cry, I’d leave the room. But one day he said to me, “I don’t mind if you cry, Hope.”
Well, I lost it full right there. And I said something I hadn’t planned.
“G.T., I need to read you something.”
I sat on his bed and showed him the letter I’d written to Gleason Beal after he took our money. I couldn’t mail it, of course, since he’d skipped town. I’d sealed it up in an envelope and on the outside I’d written, To be read at another time.
I opened the envelope slowly and remembered crying so hard when I was writing it, saw some of the tear-stained ink on the paper. I read the first line, “To Gleason Beal, who I once trusted.” I stopped, looked at G.T.
“Go ahead.”
Big breath. “I think I want to change my name back from Hope to something else because what has happened has made me not believe in things to hope for like I once did. Gleason, I want you to know that I hate you for taking our money, but mostly I hate you for pretending to be a different person than you were. You stole from everyone who trusted you here.
“You took Addie’s savings and her dream. You took my trust and I believed that you were my friend, but I will never be dumb enough to do that again.
“You took Charlene away from her husband because you got her to run away with you.
“You did all of it for money, but I want you to know something. I never want money to be that important to me that I would hurt someone else. I don’t believe that down deep you’ll ever enjoy that money just like I don’t believe that people who lie or cheat or get away with things really enjoy themselves because there’s a price to pay in this world. You can have the money, Gleason, but I’ve decided you can’t have my name. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I’m going to get the feelings back about being hopeful again. I don’t have them now, but I’m going to get them again. I hope you get caught and thrown in jail. When I find my father …”
I couldn’t read anymore.
“Go ahead,” G.T. said. “Finish it.”
I was crying good now. “When I find my father I know he’s going to do something to get you what you deserve.” I looked at G.T. “That’s all I wrote.”
He looked pretty gray but he asked me, “How do you feel about that now?”
“I feel stupid about it.”
“Why?”
I shrugged.
“Is it because you wrote the part about your father coming to give him what he deserves and I’m not looking much like I can do that for you?”
Now I felt so bad I’d bothered him with this.
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you stick that anger behind you, one day you’re going to turn around and find it’s gone.”
“I’ll try.”
He smiled at me with such promise; I felt at that moment he was going to rise up from the bed all well, but he didn’t.
“I’ve got to tell you selfishly, Hope, if Gleason Beal hadn’t done what he did, you and Addie wouldn’t have come up here and I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without the two of you.”
I took his hand; it felt cold.
I was crying so bad I couldn’t say anything, just squeeze his big cold hand.
He died the next day.
Addie was with him. I was in my room getting dressed. But somehow I knew.
I closed my eyes; felt in my heart a brush of angels’ wings, and sensed those angels coming up the welcome stairways, one from the left and one from the right, to guide G.T.’s spirit on the flight up to heaven.
21
I will never forget the flowers.
Mounds of them everywhere in heaps and piles circling the diner, lining the welcome stairways. Notes plastered on momentary cardboard frames telling of how much G.T. meant to people.
Adam’s: I don’t understand why we lost you so soon when we sti
ll need you so much.
That’s the question. The worst kind, too. There isn’t an answer.
The loss rolled over me like waves.
I moved in a blur of strength and sadness.
Addie closed the diner.
She had a right.
It sat there darkened like a shut-up tomb, lifeless without G.T. walking through it.
We should board up the windows, I thought. Batten down the hatches. This storm has taken too much.
But Mrs. Pettibone came with vases and vases of flowers.
“Put them inside,” she said. “Turn on the lights. Let people see.”
And we did. Lined the counter with them three deep, put some of the flowers from outside in water glasses, clustered them on the tables. Braverman brought his candle from the kitchen and lit it; we got more candles and lit those, too. I got the prism Harrison gave me, put it by the cash register. As the sunlight hit it, dozens of rainbows appeared on the walls.
People stood on the porch pressing their faces against the windows to see the memorial to the man we all loved.
Braverman held on to me, I held on to him. Anchors in the storm.
Addie got through it, stiff faced, trying as best as she could to hide her broken heart.
People clogged the Gospel of Grace Evangelical Center.
Al B. Hall stood by G.T.’s open casket and declared with all his might, “G.T., my good friend, how on this earth can we thank you for the life you lived to the fullest measure? Let our memories of you stretch us every day to live with all we’ve got and everything we know to be true.”
The Gospel of Grace choir started singing something slow and bluesy that made you sway. People walked past, touching G.T.’s folded hands for one last time.
I stood by the casket with Addie and Braverman. I don’t know how long I stood there. I don’t know what was going on around me. All I know is that in the midst of the biggest stabs of loss, I realized that I was the perfect daughter for him.
Everything in my life had prepared me for it.
I knew firsthand about life being hard.
And I knew about being strong.
* * *
In the weeks following G.T.’s funeral, I learned how memory hides in the craziest places. Some days I’d be just fine, on others I would see something—anything. A plate piled with hash browns, a man with a bald head—and the mounds of flowers would stream back again into my mind and I’d start sobbing like Bambi Barnes losing it by the decaf urn.
Then I’d pull myself together and take another order.
The sad heart needs work to do.
But through it all I held Mrs. Pettibone’s words in my heart—the ones she spoke to me after the funeral when she took my hand, looked into my face and said, “You’ve got your father’s eyes.”
* * *
I was leaving for college in three days. Part of me was happy to be going, the other part never wanted to leave this place. Braverman and I decided to leave for school at the same time. Neither of us wanted to be the one left in the diner waving good-bye. Adam had already headed off to Northwestern University. Jillian had left for Purdue.
We were all going to be scattered.
I hate leaving places I love.
I was standing behind the counter getting things ready for the dinnertime crowd—filling the salt and pepper shakers, getting the good grainy mustard in the little glass jars, putting the sugar in the canister, setting places so I wouldn’t have to do that when the customers showed up. Lou Ellen waved good-bye. She was going to pick up Anastasia at day care. Anastasia could say mama and bye-bye now. Lou Ellen said she was learning at her own pace and that was just fine.
I was moving in and out with the grief these days, not crying every day like I had been in the beginning.
I had a few more things to pack before I left. Addie had given me the painting of the little ship on the choppy ocean that G.T.’s mother, my grandmother, had painted. My grandmother. I loved saying that. I was going to put it right above my bed in the dorm. I was wondering about everything, like who my roommate would be, would I do well in school, what was it like to be in college?
So much had changed here. So much was the same. Brenda Babcock was appointed the acting mayor to fill out G.T.’s term by the new Town Council. She was the best choice in the world, too. Like Flo said, she’d protect all the paths G.T. had laid, but would also leave her own footprints. Eli Millstone had his share of things to explain. He was letting his big-deal lawyer do most of the talking. So far he’d managed to stay out of jail. I heard he had a talk radio show and was busy running seminars for people who wanted to get into politics.
“Lord, preserve us,” cried Flo when she heard that.
Day after day people poured into the Welcome Stairways talking about G.T. and what he’d meant in their lives. It was a privilege to know how many people had loved my father.
I knelt down, looked under the counter for just the right place. I took out my blue marker and wrote HOPE WAS HERE in small letters right above where we kept the honey jar. I’d taken my mother’s advice—a small bowl of lemon wedges sat next to the honey; I kept a large bottle of Tylenol there to refill the small one I carried in my apron in case a customer had a headache. A good waitress has to be ready for anything.
I looked at the HOPE WAS HERE, so different from the ones I had written before. This time, I was coming back. This was really home.
Then the front door of the diner opened. A sea of people filled the window booths. More came in, sat at the counter.
I look at Flo and grin.
We’re in the weeds.
“Look sharp now,” Addie shouts from the kitchen.
Michael, our new busboy, rushes with menus and setups. Yuri, now a waiter, bows to the two women at the corner table.
“I am pleased to serve you tonight.”
Those women grin so bright.
Flo’s running past me saying we’ll split the window booths.
More people crowd the tables. A bus must have pulled in.
I’m cutting a wide berth around Yuri—he tends to veer left before he makes a right turn like a bad driver.
“I shall now bring to you the coffee, ladies. This is all right?”
I’m at the six-top near the window. Everyone has ordered except the big man in the yellow shirt. He looks tenderly at Addie’s chicken pot pie special and sighs deep.
“I haven’t had chicken pot pie since my grandmother made it. Is it really good here?”
I lift both hands like, Are you kidding me? And right there two people from different backgrounds and generations find connection in this crazy world.
That’s the power of comfort food at work.
I’m at the galley calling in orders. Braverman and Addie are moving like machines. I’m back to the first day I saw G.T. flipping eggs.
Come get this miracle breakfast, Florence, before I eat it myself.
Braverman raises an eyebrow, throws his spatula and catches it behind his back. Addie smiles at me. I grin back.
I’m rushing back and forth with coffee, tea.
Sweeping through the counter, getting orders. Adrenaline pumping. If you want a thrill there’s nothing like in-the-weeds waitressing. You never know what’s coming next. You could wait on a maniac or a guy passing out twenties.
I deliver buttermilk fried chicken with biscuits and warmed chunky applesauce to the couple on table five. The man grabs a drumstick, takes a bite and says, “Ohhhhh. I’m in heaven.”
I grin. “That’s what we aim for here.”
I hear the two dings.
Going to miss that sound.
I run to the galley. Joy and sadness mix together like cream in coffee.
People say it’s so awful that I only had a real father for less than two years and then had to lose him.
I wish like anything he was still here, but it’s like getting an extraordinary meal after you’ve been eating junk food for a long time. The taste just sweeps through
your sensibilities, bringing all-out contentment, and the sheer goodness of it makes up for every bad meal you’ve ever had.
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Books by
JOAN BAUER
Backwater
Best Foot Forward
Hope Was Here
Rules of the Road
Squashed
Stand Tall
Sticks
Thwonk