Dad was waiting at baggage claim with a printed sign that read Teacher Miranda. It was what all the teachers in my Quaker school were called. Teacher Anne. Teacher Tom. Teacher Jay. Jay. I texted to tell him I had landed. He blew me an emoji kiss. While I hated how easy and generic emojis were, I liked that Jay was willing to be corny on my account.
Dad was a reluctant hugger. I knew not to take it personally. Mom was the only person he was comfortable offering physical affection to. I would find them slow dancing in the kitchen as Mom sang an old folk song, or him absentmindedly rubbing her feet as they watched a Nora Ephron movie. To most people, he offered his hand. At least he hugged me, even if there always was that stilted discomfort.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked as Dad released me from the sideways embrace. Every time I came home, Dad’s hair had grown more salt than pepper, his olive skin more leathered, his blue eyes grayer. It made me want to clutch his hand and beg him to stop getting old.
“She went to bed early. Said she’ll see you in the morning.” Mom never missed an opportunity to meet me at the airport. She always pushed her way through the crowd of limo drivers and multigenerational families waiting in baggage claim, so her face was the first I saw.
“How’s she doing?”
Dad took my bag and wheeled it toward the exit. “You know your mom. She’s putting on a brave face, but this is hard on her, harder than she would have guessed.”
Outside the arrivals terminal, the air was thick with exhaust and cigarette smoke. Cars lunged at each other as they tried to weave in and out of rings of unmoving traffic. Only a few palm trees in the distance hinted that we were in Los Angeles, not some neglected airport of the developing world.
Dad pulled out of short-term parking into the outer circle of traffic. “How’d Stanton’s words go over this year?”
I ended every school year the same way, on Lincoln’s deathbed. Moments after the president died, his friend and secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, commemorated the loss, Now he belongs to the ages. Or was it, Now he belongs to the angels? I’d pose to my students. While Lincoln’s doctor had heard Stanton say “ages,” the secretary at the scene had heard “angels.” So which quote was right—did Stanton fate Lincoln to history or the afterlife? The students would evaluate each option, debating Stanton’s true words. In the end, it was a trick question.
“Stanton’s words remain an enigma,” I said to Dad. We have to allow for competing experiences of historical events, I told my students. Then we can decide how to interpret the past, what makes sense to us today. “I think a few of them understood. I hope so, anyway.”
“You can only do your best. It’s up to them to commit to caring about the past.” Dad’s car screeched to a halt as the Flyaway bus darted in front of us.
“Do you remember when Billy showed up that time, in the middle of the night?”
“Of course.” Dad’s attention was focused on the bus, squeezing into an impossibly small space between two cars ahead.
“I’m sure Mom must have told me, but I can’t remember what they fought about.”
“I don’t know.” Dad honked at an SUV that crossed in front of us. “Come on!”
“You don’t know what happened?”
“All I know is Billy showed up drunk and told your mom he never wanted to talk to her again.” He wove around traffic, onto Sepulveda where the road opened up. “Then he bought you that stupid dog.”
“Billy wasn’t drunk.” I thought back to his flushed face, his glassy eyes. “Was he?”
Dad turned onto Ocean Park Boulevard where the air grew cooler and saltier as we neared the ocean. I rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. Every time I returned to LA, the city felt a little more my parents’ home, somewhere I’d been an extended visitor, never a resident. I couldn’t tell Mom this. She was waiting for the time when, like her, I would move back to Southern California, but it was never going to happen. I didn’t want to teach the children of movie stars and musicians. Directors. TV executives. I didn’t want to teach American history in a state that hadn’t been part of the union until the Compromise of 1850. I wasn’t an Angelino, a Californian at heart. The salt in my nostrils was the closest I came to feeling homesick.
“Look,” Dad said when we were stopped at a light. “I don’t want to ruin your memory of Billy. There were sides of him you were too young to see.”
“What do you mean ‘sides’?”
“Nothing. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Don’t do that. What sides?”
Dad turned off Ocean Park into our neighborhood. I took in the familiar scene of our quiet street, knowing the colors of all the houses we passed, even if they all appeared charcoal in the evening’s pale light. Los Angeles never got dark, no matter how late at night, not completely.
“I get that Billy’s death is bringing up a lot of questions. I just don’t feel comfortable speaking on behalf of your mother.”
“I’m not asking you to speak for her.”
“It’s her past,” he said.
“It’s our past,” I corrected. Pebbles crackled under the tires as Dad pulled into the driveway. The house was dark, save the porch light, moths swarming in its glow.
“It’s up to your mom what she wants to tell you.” He hopped out of the car to fetch my bag from the trunk. I watched him in the rearview mirror until the lid of the trunk turned the mirror black and I couldn’t see him anymore. Just before it did, I saw an expression sweep across his face, something I hadn’t seen before, something that looked a lot like fear.
The following morning, Mom was already in the kitchen when I wandered downstairs in search of coffee. Blueberry muffins cooled on the island that divided the kitchen from the dining and living rooms. I knew the fridge was also stocked with foods she remembered me liking as a teenager. Cool Whip and strawberries, bologna, chocolate milk—foods, if you could call them that, I hadn’t eaten in years.
“Where are the other twenty guests?”
“Miranda.” Mom dropped her oven mitts and rushed to me. It was only 7:00 a.m., but she was already dressed in black pants and a coral blouse, her curls set to frame her face, her eyes bright with mascara and brown eye shadow.
“I’m so sorry, Mom.” As conflicted of a hugger as Dad was, Mom was the opposite. She always hugged me like if it was up to her she’d never let me go.
“I’m okay,” she said, like she wanted it to be true.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She pointed to the table. “Sit.”
Mom served me a muffin and a cup of coffee like she was my waitress. She sat across from me, watching as I broke the muffin in two. Steam rose from its center.
“It’s good to have you home.” She reached across the table to brush a matted curl from my forehead.
“Thought any more about coming to the funeral with me today?” I asked casually as I picked at my muffin. “It might offer you some closure.”
“I got closure years ago.” She stood and headed to the sink, where she began scrubbing the muffin pan.
I finished eating and brought my empty plate to the sink. I stood