The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

Here is the part Casey does not know I know.

In December, the week before Christmas, Glen drove to Pratt on a Saturday and told me he was going for a hydraulic fitting. He came home with the fitting. But that night getting ready for bed he had a square of gauze taped to the inside of his own left forearm, same place as hers, and he would not look at me, and I did not say a word. I let it be his. On Christmas morning, after the presents, he rolled up his sleeve at the kitchen table without any announcement and laid his arm down flat next to his daughter’s, and there it was, the same crooked heavy hand, the same little whistling bird, steady on, Bug, father and daughter with the old man’s handwriting pressed into both of them under the same light.

Casey looked at it a long time. Then she put her arm next to his so the two birds faced each other.

“He’d think we were idiots,” Glen said.

“He’d love it,” I said.

“Both,” said Casey. “Both things are true.” And that was about the most Dale Mercer thing anybody could have said, so we left it there.

People in town found out, the way they do. The Rath girl told somebody her mother drove Casey to Pratt and then it was all over the co-op and the church and the Dairy Queen, and I braced for the clucking, a sixteen-year-old with a tattoo, what are those Mercers letting that girl do. Some of it came. But more of it was women my age stopping me in the aisle at the grocery with their eyes gone soft, telling me about their own fathers, their own mothers, the handwriting they wished they had saved, the voices they could not hear anymore either. One of them, Donna Prewitt from the Methodist kitchen, got quiet and said she had her mother’s last grocery list in a Bible and had never known what to do with it, and I told her there was a man in Pratt who traces them exact, and she looked at me like I had handed her something.

I think about that. I think about how one scared girl who could not stand to lose the sound of her grandpa’s voice ended up handing half the women in this county permission to grieve out loud. That is not what she meant to do. She meant to keep one line of his handwriting. But grief in a small town runs underground until somebody is brave enough to turn it up, and my daughter turned it up at a kitchen table with a bowl of chili going cold, and the whole family came up with it.