When my father was young, he was in a car accident. He and his friends were driving home from a party, and they were going down a twisty road and hit a deer. This was when my father lived in western Pennsylvania.
It felt like a story I’d learned in history class, repeated again and again each year. My father’s friend’s name was Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend’s name was Kay. Kay was sitting in the front passenger seat. The car crashed in such a way that her side was crumpled, but Mark and my father were unharmed. My father got out of the car and saw the deer, dead and bloody on the ground. Then he ran over to Kay’s side and took one look at her and passed out. He woke up later in the hospital. Kay was in a coma. Later, she died.
My father brought it up at the oddest of times. The last time he talked about it, we were walking into the Village Vanguard jazz club-I was the only one in the family who would go there with him. ‘I basically saw the girlfriend of my best friend die,’ he whispered, just as an older black man hobbled onstage to the piano. ‘Sometimes I think about how different my life would have been if that accident hadn’t happened.’
Different how? He wouldn’t have gone to Penn State or met my mother? He had been a senior, and my mother had been a freshman. They’d met in line at one of the university’s dining halls. But my mother paid my father no attention. Even though he was handsome, he had a strange accent. He was from a part of Pennsylvania that people from the Philadelphia area shunned.
My father won my mother over with persistence. There were gaps in the story; next, it jumped to the part about my mom getting pregnant with Steven. My father was in med school by then. He’d gotten an offer to intern at the NYU Downtown Hospital. My mother, who was fascinated with New York, dropped out of her sophomore year of college, moved to New York with my father, and had Steven.
I once asked my mom if she and dad would’ve been friends in high school. ‘Probably,’ my dad said right away. ‘I was well liked back then.’
Behind her hand, my mother shook her head. When my father left the room, she said, ‘We grew up in very different places.’
My father was a collector. He collected fossils, bugs preserved in blobs of amber, ships in bottles, and snow globes. ‘I like things that are trapped,’ he explained. ‘Too many things leave us forever.’ He even had a way of trapping memories-every time we got a ticket from a parking garage, he wrote a few details about where we’d parked and where we’d been and what we’d seen on the back of the stub. He did this with drycleaning slips, movie-ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, throwing it all in a big leather box at the foot of the bed. ‘All of these things are important,’ he said. ‘We’ll want to be reminded of it later.’ He’d been doing it the whole time I’d been alive.
Sometimes, when my father spent whole weekends in bed, I crawled in with him, and we watched cartoons. My father laughed at them as much as I did. When I got out of bed, he stayed, but I still thought I’d accomplished something. ‘Mom thinks you’re being lazy,’ I said to him once, not that long ago. ‘I’m not lazy,’ he answered, ‘I’m just sad.’
He got sad a lot. Once, my father started crying in a line at the movie theater, putting his face in his hands and shaking. My mother made him go around the corner to an alley because everyone was staring at us, wondering what was wrong. I thought I should go after him, but my mother grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘What’s he crying about?’ I asked.
My mother just shrugged and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know why he can’t just pull himself together. But it’s like he can’t help it.’
I wanted her to explain. What was so embarrassing? Crying? Feeling? Should I be angry at him, too? The movie posters blurred in front of my eyes. When it was our turn to buy tickets, we bought three, one for me, one for my mother, and one for my father. We waited for him to return from the alley, and then we went in the theater together.
Last Friday, when I came home from school, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, looking at an envelope. His name was written on the front in my mother’s handwriting. She’d made the R in Richard very big, but the letters got smaller and smaller, descending into almost nothing. The d at the end wasn’t much bigger than a pencil point.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ He covered it up with his hand.
We went to the ice cream parlor on the Promenade despite it being early December and cold. My father, well over six feet tall, towered over everyone else in the little shop. He was wearing the black wool overcoat my mother had bought for him. His face was clean-shaven, his thick, light brown hair combed off his forehead. He bought me an espresso milkshake, which I loved, even though they made me twitch. We sat in a little booth in the back, and he ate a whole scoop of butter pecan before he told me that Mom had gone on a work trip. She’d probably be back in a week or so; in the meantime, could I help him keep the house clean?
I said sure, no problem. I’d been helping keep the house clean for the past few months anyway, ever since my mother’s job had become more demanding. But I could tell there was something more. It was so easy to tell when my father was lying-his cheeks got very pink, and it looked like he was literally holding something in, like a sneeze. ‘Okay, okay, Mom isn’t on a trip,’ he blurted out, as if I’d harshly interrogated him. ‘She’s gone.’
His facial features seemed scrambled, like those tile puzzles where you have to move the pieces around to make a coherent picture. ‘What do you mean, gone?’ I asked.
He blotted his eyes with his sticky ice cream cone napkin. ‘She wrote a letter. But it wasn’t very clear.’
I felt an uneasy stab and let out a whimper. ‘No, Summer, please don’t cry,’ he said desperately. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
He bent over until his head touched the top of the table. His shoulders shook up and down. A few minutes went by, and he didn’t stop. ‘Dad?’ I touched his shoulder. ‘Come on.’
‘I just don’t know why this happened,’ he blubbered.
By this time, a horrible feeling was sloshing through me. I thought of the things I’d done wrong, all my shortcomings. This could be because of me. Because of something I wasn’t.
But I couldn’t have my father sitting in the ice cream shop, bawling. ‘Dad.’ I took him underneath the arm and pulled him up. ‘She’s probably just…overworked. I saw it on Oprah. People in this country get only ten days of vacation, but people in Europe get thirty. She probably went somewhere where there aren’t any ringing phones.’ It poured from inside me. When I finished, I reviewed what I’d just said, not sure if it made any sense.
He raised his chin. Some old ladies in the next booth over were staring. ‘Do you think?’ my father asked, his face red and wet.
‘Yes.’ I said it so confidently, I almost convinced myself.
My father ran his hand over his hair. ‘Jesus, Summer.’ He bumped into me, hugging my head to his. ‘I’m sorry I just did that. That’s the last thing you want to see, huh? Your crazy old dad, losing it in the ice cream parlor?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said.
He looked at me, nodding. ‘You’re right. She’s on a trip.’
‘She’s on a trip,’ I whispered back.
It wasn’t much to hold onto, but I held onto it anyway.
Another weekend passed. Another Monday, another Tuesday. Her mail, a week and a half’s worth by now, teetered unopened on the hall table. None of us