The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

That was the man my husband found on the floor of the machine shed with the oil can still in his hand. And then that man was gone, and Glen had to be him now, and I do not think Glen knew how, and I think the not knowing came out as the hardness.

So when I told him about the bandage, I watched the wall go up.

“A bandage,” he said.

“Glen.”

“On her arm.”

“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “Let her be tonight. We’ll talk to her in the morning.”

He stood up. He did not raise his voice. That was the thing about Glen after Pop died, he never raised his voice anymore, and somehow the quiet was worse than yelling would have been. “Casey,” he called down the hall. “Come out here, please.”

Nothing.

“Casey Jean. Kitchen. Now.”

I heard her door open. She came down the hall slow, and she stood at the end of the table with her arm still held against her, and Ty looked up from his crackers with his eyes going back and forth between his dad and his sister like he was watching a storm come across the section.

“Sit down and eat,” Glen said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then sit down and don’t eat. But you’re going to sit at this table with your family.” He said family like it cost him something. “What’s on your arm.”

“Nothing. I burned it.”

“You burned it.”

“On the curling iron.”

Glen looked at her a long second. “Take the bandage off.”

“Dad.”

“Take it off, Casey.”

I said his name. I said, “Glen, come on, let her eat, we can,” and he held his hand up to me, not mean, just done, and he kept his eyes on our daughter.

“I have changed every kind of bandage there is on this family,” he said. “I have pulled splinters out of your feet and I have held a towel on your brother’s chin in the truck going eighty down Route 9. I’m not going to be lied to at my own table about a burn. Take it off or I will know you are hiding something worse than whatever it is.”

And here is the part I think about. Casey’s chin came up. She had Pop’s chin, that square set to it, the exact thing Glen was doing right back at her and could not see. And she said, “Fine.”