The Shoebox My Father Carried In

We bought a house on Locust Street. By then Leonard had sold the farm ground and moved into a little white house by the elevator, eleven blocks from mine. In ten years he had been inside my front door four times. He always stood. He always left before the coffee was done.

Mark had tied balloons along the fence that morning. Our daughter Amy, who is twelve, had baked the cake herself, a yellow one that leaned a little to the left, with a four and a zero spelled out in chocolate chips. There were twenty-five or so people in the yard. Our neighbors. The women from the school office where I work. Pastor Neil and his wife. Old Doris Kemper, eighty-four years old, who had farmed the place next to ours when I was a girl and had held me on her lap before I could walk.

And my sister.

Jenny had driven down from Mount Vernon with her husband Jeff and a fruit tray from the grocery. She is thirty-six and easy in a crowd, and she ought to be. She had a lot of practice.

She was standing by the picnic table with a paper cup of sweet tea, telling a story to Brenda and Kim from my office.

“Daddy and I had a standing date,” she was saying. “Every single fair. Funnel cake first, then the Ferris wheel, then the hog barn, because he liked to look at the Durocs. He’d put me up on his shoulders so I could see over the rail.”

“That’s sweet,” Kim said. “Did you all go together, Laura?”

Jenny answered before I could.

“Oh, Laura never went. Laura was a homebody. Weren’t you, Laura? She didn’t care for crowds.”

Brenda looked at me. Brenda has known me ten years and she knows when something has gone across my face.

“Something like that,” I said, and I picked up the knife to cut the cake.

“Honestly, I think Daddy just knew which one of us was good company,” Jenny said, and laughed, and touched my arm to show it was a joke. “I’m teasing. You know I’m teasing.”

“I know,” I said.

I did know. She had been teasing me about it since she was six years old and stood in the kitchen doorway with cotton candy on her chin and told me Daddy said I wasn’t any fun. I had let her, every Christmas since, because the alternative was to say out loud that our father did not want me. I would rather be called a homebody.

I had the knife in the frosting when the latch on the gate clicked.

I looked up, and he was standing there.

He is seventy-eight now. He has gotten thin the way farmers get thin, all at once, so that the clothes still remember a bigger man. He had on a pressed plaid shirt and his green seed cap, and he was holding an old shoebox against his chest with both hands, the way you would carry something alive. It was tied shut with white kitchen string.

And he was crying.

I want you to understand that I had never seen it. Not when the hail took the beans in the summer I was eleven. Not when we buried my mother, when I was sixteen and he stood at the grave like a fence post. I did not know his face could do it.

The yard went quiet in pieces.

“Daddy!” Jenny set down her cup. “I didn’t know you were coming. Jeff, get him a chair.”