The Shoebox My Father Carried In

“Not you, Laura. You stay.”

I was nine years old and I already had my shoes on.

I had put them on at six that morning, the white canvas ones with the blue stripe, and I had sat down on the bottom porch step with my hands tucked under my knees so nobody could say I was in the way. It was the Saturday of the county fair. My little sister Jenny was five. She had on a yellow sundress and she had a dollar bill folded up in her fist that our father had given her for the ring toss.

He came down the steps past me with the truck keys. He did not look down.

“Daddy,” I said. “I’ve got my shoes on.”

“I see that.”

“I could just sit in the truck. I wouldn’t even have to go in.”

He stopped with his hand on the door of the Ford. He had on his good plaid shirt, the one my mother ironed on Friday nights. For one second I thought he was going to turn around.

“Not you, Laura,” he said. “You stay.”

Then he lifted Jenny up onto the bench seat and shut the door, and the truck went down our gravel lane and turned toward the river road, and I watched the dust hang over the soybeans until it was gone.

Jenny waved out the back glass. I remember that. She waved the hand with the dollar in it.

I sat on that step until my mother came out and sat down beside me. She did not say he was sorry. She did not say there would be a next time. She put her arm around my shoulders and said, “Come help me snap the beans,” and that was all the explaining I got for the next thirty-one years.

That was one Saturday. There were eighteen years of them.

The fair every August. The lake every Fourth of July. The fish fry at the river park. Every church supper, every revival under a tent. Jenny went to all of it on the seat beside him, and I stayed in the house four miles out of town with my mother, who always seemed to have something on the stove that could not be left.

When I was little I asked why. By ten I had quit asking. By thirteen I had it worked out for myself, the way a child will when nobody gives her anything better.

He was ashamed of me. There was something about me he did not want people to see.

I never did figure out what it was. I only knew it was there.

I am telling you about the porch step so you will understand what went through me last month, on the afternoon of my fortieth birthday, when the gate in my own backyard swung open and Leonard walked through it.

I had not called him Daddy since I was thirteen. I had not called him Dad since I was eighteen. I called him Leonard, to his face, and in twenty-two years he had never once corrected me.

We live in Cutler’s Landing, which is a river town at the very bottom of Illinois, the kind of place where the Ohio runs wide and brown and the barges go by slow enough to count. I left at eighteen with one suitcase and a scholarship. I came back at thirty with a husband and a baby, because my husband Mark got on at the grain terminal.