The Day Dad Gave Me Away

I didn’t say anything. I looked at the bill and I looked at her hands. Her knuckles were red and chapped from winter, from shoveling the ramp herself every morning before Dad got up.

“I’m sixty-one,” she said, more quietly. “I’m not on Medicare myself for four more years. If something happens to me, too, who takes care of him? I have to think about that, Haley. Somebody in this family has to think about that.”

That was when the old thing crept into her voice, the thing I’d heard a few times over the nine years she’d been married to my dad.

Somebody in this family. As if she’d been the only grown-up in the house since the day she moved in.

My mother died when I was fourteen. Ovarian cancer, fast and mean, one autumn to the next.

Dad and I were alone in that house for five years, eating hotdish out of the casserole dishes the church ladies brought until the dishes ran out and then learning to cook.

Connie came into our lives when I was nineteen. She did the books at the co-op elevator, and she was kind to Dad when he needed kindness, and I never once held it against her that she wasn’t my mother. I just never let her be my mother, either.

Sitting at her table that April, I could have pushed. I could have gone into the living room, knelt down by the recliner, and asked my dad straight out in front of her.

I could have called the lawyer in Hillsboro and asked what the papers actually said.

But Connie had the legal say over Dad’s money, and I was not going to start my marriage fighting over five thousand dollars at my father’s bedside.

Not with him in the next room, listening to every word he could no longer answer.

“Okay,” I said.

Connie blinked. I think she’d braced for a fight, and the lack of one confused her. “Okay?”

“Okay. Jake and I will figure it out.” I stood up and pushed my chair in. “I’m going to go say goodbye to Dad.”

He was watching the game, but he turned his head when I came in.

His left hand came up off the armrest, his good hand, and I took it the way I’d been taking it since January. He squeezed. He always squeezed twice.

“Bye, Dad. I’ll come Wednesday after work.”

His mouth worked. “Ha,” he said. “Ha. Ley.” Then something that sounded like “good,” or maybe “girl.” He looked frustrated with himself, and I kissed his forehead so he wouldn’t have to finish.

I made it out to the car before I started crying. I cried the whole eleven miles home, past the Goose River bridge and the elevator and the blinking red light at the county road, and I was still crying when I came up the steps of our little rented house.

Jake was at the kitchen table with a plate of leftover sloppy joes. He took one look at me and pushed the plate away.

“She said no,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“She said he doesn’t remember.” I sat down across from him. “She said she’s the power of attorney and she has to guard every dollar.”