The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

I had never heard Glen say any of that. Not to me, not to the grief counselor the church lady kept pushing, not to anyone. It took a sixteen-year-old girl and a needle in Pratt to break the wall, and it broke all at once, and I stood there in my own kitchen and watched my husband come back to me across six months of silence.

We did not eat the chili. I will tell you that. We sat at that table until almost ten o’clock and we talked about Pop for the first time since the funeral, really talked, the good and the ridiculous, the time he drove the grain truck through the back of the machine shed, the way he salted his watermelon, the fact that he called every grandchild Bug because he said he could not be trusted to get the right name out fast enough in an emergency. Ty told a story about Pop teaching him to whistle through a grass blade that I had never heard. Casey laughed so hard she cried and then just cried. Glen held his coffee and listened and every so often he would look at her arm again like he could not quite believe it was there.

I got up at one point to make a fresh pot of coffee, and from the stove I watched the three of them at the table under that one yellow light, and it struck me that none of us had sat in that kitchen together past eight o’clock since March. We had been a family of four eating in shifts, Glen out in the shop with a plate going cold, Casey in her room, Ty in front of the television, me standing up at the counter because sitting down alone felt worse than not sitting at all. Grief had scattered us to the corners of our own house and we had called it getting by. It took Casey’s arm to pull us back to the middle of the table, and once we were there, it was like none of us wanted to be the first to get up.

Glen told the one about the meadowlark then. How Pop could call a meadowlark down out of the sky with a whistle, how he taught Glen to do it when Glen was six, standing out at the end of the drive at dawn, and how the first time a bird actually answered back Glen had been so startled he cried, and Pop had knelt down and said, that is not something to cry about, son, that is something to remember, and now here was that same bird on his granddaughter’s arm and Glen could not stop looking at it. He said he had not been able to call a meadowlark since the funeral. He said he had tried, out at the fence, and nothing came, and he had taken it as a sign that the part of him that could do it had gone in the ground with his father. Casey told him he was being dramatic. Glen said that was fair.