The Secret My Father Kept In The Garage

Why Lois Called

She told me the rest of it herself, a few days later, standing on my father’s porch with a pound cake she didn’t quite know how to hand over.

Her own dog, a corgi named Peanut she’d had for thirteen years, had died that spring. She hadn’t told anybody on the road, not really, just mentioned it once at the mailbox and let people assume she didn’t want to talk about it, which was true as far as it went. What she didn’t say, because it embarrassed her, was that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to get another one, and some nights the quiet in her house after Peanut was gone felt like a physical weight sitting on her chest.

So when she started hearing dogs coming and going from my father’s garage, dogs that weren’t hers, dogs she couldn’t have and wasn’t sure she wanted and resented a little that somebody else seemingly did, her mind built the ugliest version of the story instead of the kindest one. It is easier, I have come to believe, to be angry at a stranger than to sit with your own grief doing nothing about it. Lois had been sitting with grief for months and calling it suspicion because suspicion, at least, gave her somewhere to point it.

“I should have just asked him,” she told me on that porch, turning the pound cake over in her hands like she still might decide not to leave it. “Twenty six years living two houses down from that man and I called the sheriff on him before I ever once just walked over and asked.”

I didn’t have anything easy to say back to her. I still don’t, entirely. I understand fear that curdles into certainty better than I’d like to admit, because I’d been guilty of my own version of it for years, just aimed at myself instead of at Lois. I had spent six years worried my father was lonelier than he’d ever admit to me, and it never once occurred to me to ask him a real question about what he actually did with his Tuesdays.