The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

The thing I did not understand, and did not understand for decades, was this.

I believed all that winter that my father could not hear a word I said. I believed that was the whole point, and that was why it worked.

And it did work. By Christmas I could say my name in the kitchen without thinking about it. By January I could say it in the school hallway.

By February I could say it in the third-grade classroom, if the room was quiet and if I started slowly.

But somewhere in the back of my mind I carried a hard little stone. It said that he had never really listened. He had stood next to a machine and nodded at noise.

That stone stayed with me for fifty years.

When I was thirty, I finally said it to him. I had come out for Sunday dinner with my first baby on my hip, and Dad was standing on the back porch with a cup of coffee.

I said, out of nowhere, “Dad, you never actually heard me read, did you? Out there with the grinder.”

He looked at the coffee. He took a long time.

“Heard enough,” he said.

That was all.

He went inside and washed his cup, and I stood on the porch with my baby, feeling like I had asked a man to hand me his heart and he had handed me a dishrag.

I told myself it was a joke. I told myself he did not even remember. I think I decided that day that I was done asking.

I became a lector at thirty-two, because our priest asked, and because I was tired of being afraid of a microphone.

I stand up now at the ambo with a book in my hands, and the sound goes out over four hundred people, and I do not stick on a word.

And every time, he sat in that pew. I counted over the years.

I figured it was close to seven hundred times, and he never missed a Sunday I read unless he was in the hospital, which he was twice.

Carry on, he said. Always, carry on.

I sat on that linoleum floor with the paper in my hand and the clock over the stove ticking in the wrong time, and I thought: I am fifty-eight years old and I do not know one single thing my father thought about me.

Then I unfolded the first fold.

It opened slowly, in a way that told me it had been opened before, a great many times, by the same hands. The paper did not crackle. It sighed, the way cloth does.

The second fold was harder. It was stuck at the corner where the hole had worn, and I had to work it open with my thumbnail, and the edge came up in a little feathery strip.

I laid it flat on my knee and smoothed it with the side of my hand.

It was a report card. It was my report card.

At the top, in the faded purple of a mimeograph, it said Report to Parents, and under that the name of the school, and under that, in blue ink in a slanted hand I knew at once: Janet Marie Thobe.