The Girl Who Wrote It Down
My daughter has always gravitated to him the way she gravitated to my father, quietly, without being asked to. She does her homework at his kitchen table some afternoons while I finish up the books for the feed store down the road. She knows which of his tomato plants need water before he does. She keeps a running list, in that same marbled notebook, of things she notices around the duplex and the street: which neighbor’s dog got loose, which car she does not recognize parked too long in front of whose house, what the weather did the day before. It started as a school assignment about the seasons and never really stopped.
Clyde and my father were both longtime members of the VFW post over on the county road, the kind of place with a flag that never comes down and a bar that only ever seems to serve coffee before noon. After the funeral, Clyde kept going to the Friday fish fry there alone, out of habit more than hunger, and he started bringing my daughter along some weeks, letting her carry the raffle basket around to the tables while the old men pretended not to slip her extra tickets. It was one of those old timers, a man who had known my father since basic training decades before either of them ever set foot in Roanoke, who first told Clyde that a nine year old who notices things the way mine does ought to be listened to more carefully, not less, simply because grown people stop noticing half of what passes right in front of them.
Two days after the transfers, Clyde knocked on my door around suppertime, holding that notebook open flat across both palms like it might close on him if he was not careful.
“You’d better sit down,” he said, “and you’d better let her explain this part herself, because I don’t think I’ve got it exactly right.”
The notebook
My daughter sat between us at the table, notebook open to a page dated three weeks before the funeral money had even finished settling into the account, and she talked us through it in the same plain, unhurried voice she uses to explain anything, whether it is a math problem or the plot of a cartoon.
Three weeks earlier, on a Saturday afternoon while I was inside paying bills, my sister had sat parked in her car in our driveway for nearly forty minutes, phone pressed to her ear. My daughter had been playing on the shared carport with Clyde’s old checkerboard and, bored, had started jotting down what she overheard through the cracked car window, the way she jots down anything else that catches her attention. She had written, in careful nine year old handwriting: Aunt Gretchen said if she gets added by Friday it will all be moved by the time anybody notices, and then we are going somewhere for a while until it blows over.
She had not understood what it meant. She told us so, plainly, without embarrassment. She thought it sounded like grown up talk about a trip, maybe a surprise, and she wrote it down the same way she wrote down that Mrs. Pruett’s beagle had gotten loose again on a Tuesday.