remember the man whose imprint on my life has been nothing but shame—and pain—and brokenness?”
I wasn’t sure when I’d crushed the rose. I hadn’t meant to. One minute it was in my hand, held up for my mom to see, and the next . . . the next it was reduced to splinters on my palm. Disintegrated. Dust.
My mom took my hand and brushed the remains into hers, holding them like fragile flakes of all of us. “This flower,” she said, “this rose—your father gave it to me the day Trey was born.” She took a feeble, uneven breath and said, “Your father gave me you, Shelby. He gave me you and Trey. And to erase him—” she looked at the letters and pictures and garter—“to erase him would be to erase you.”
I nodded. She leaned forward to brush a tear from my cheek.
“So I have to remember him, Shelby. I have to remember that the person who created you was not all bad—not all cruel. He was a troubled man. I know that. But he was part of you. I can’t deny his legacy without denying you.” She replaced the letters and pictures in the box, then sprinkled the rose’s ashes over them. “Will you remember him, Shelby, please? Please remember him—for me.”
Shayla and I spent our first Christmas morning together opening the presents we’d wrapped and set under our hideously decorated tree. The tree had become something of a bone of contention, as Shayla was of a more contemporary-slash-chaotic decorating school and I had graduated summa cum laude from the International School of Anal-Retentive Christmas Tree Design. I liked things symmetrical and matching. Shayla liked things random and clashing. I liked things classy and she liked them homemade with a pair of kitchen scissors and a bunch of out-of-ink markers. We were polar opposites when it came to trimming trees, and the end result proved it.
Every night when Shayla went to bed, I’d sneak around the tree and rearrange things just so, and every morning when she got out of bed, Shayla would boldly march up to the tree and put things back exactly as they’d been. Which led me to conclude that there had to be some kind of rhyme and reason to her artistic deviance.
When we opened the presents—my gift from Shayla was a clothespin hot pad she had made at kindergarten—I gathered up my courage and talked with Shay about her dad. It wasn’t the first conversation we’d had about him, but he had died just before Christmas last year, and it felt important to acknowledge him that day.
“Do you remember what you used to do for Christmas with your dad?”
She squinted a little, trying to remember. “We had a twee,” she said.
“Did he give you presents?”
Vigorous nod. “My blue wabbit.”
“That’s right! That came from him, didn’t it.”
“It used to be pwettier, but it’s still soft.”
“It’s really soft, Shayla. Because you’ve loved it so much, probably.” Her eyes veiled with melancholy, and I drew her in, planting a kiss on her temple and holding her close. “What else do you remember about your dad?”
“He was funny,” she said.
Funny. The man I had known had been anything but funny. But I was thankful all the way down to the bottom of my emotional scars that Shayla had been loved by this father I couldn’t imagine, this man who had given her bunnies and made her laugh.
“Do you still miss him a lot?” I asked a little reluctantly.
“I miss his Wondoh Bwead,” she said, and I could tell by the unsteady breath she took that she missed more than that.
“It feels sad to not have your daddy anymore, doesn’t it?” I tried to picture another man when I said daddy so the images of Jim Davis in my mind wouldn’t interfere with my compassion.
“Uh-huh.” Her chin puckered a little bit and her eyes welled with tears.
“Maybe we should draw a picture and leave it under the tree for him. Would you like that?”
She turned her watery blue gaze on me and nodded eagerly—gratefully.
“It can be your Christmas present for him, okay?”
She was already heading for the dining room table, where she liked to draw.
“What do you want to draw for him?” I asked, going to the box next to the couch where we kept her paper and crayons.
“A volcano,” she said without hesitation. And she did just that in the minutes that followed, giving special care to the lava that flowed from the mountain’s red peak. When