Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,16

tried to calm the dog.

We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, when my father had thrown Tim from the house, so to find him like this now at my window, after all those months of agonized and impassioned letter writing, seemed almost too good to be real. I even began crying a little.

Tim indicated that I should open the screen, and I tried to do so without much noise. The screen was an old one, the kind that hinged at the top and fastened at the bottom, and it hadn’t been opened in years. I had to pry the hook loose with a pen. As I was doing this, I heard my father pass through the hallway just outside my door. And seconds later the light suddenly doubled on the lawn as my father switched on the overhead lamp in my parents’ bedroom.

Tim crouched closer to the tree trunk, trying to keep to the shadows. Working quietly, he pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his top shirt pocket, unfolded it, and crumpled it into a ball. Seeing what he meant to do, I knelt on my bed and opened the screen as wide as I could, holding it up and away from the windowsill. Tick eagerly watched all of this. Then Tim took aim and lobbed the ball of paper underhanded across the yard and over the boxwood hedge at the side of the house. The ball arced smoothly through the window, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the rug at the foot of the bed. Tick started barking again. Tim couldn’t quiet him—the dog thought we were playing.

I heard my father grousing in the next room, and then he yanked open the curtains on their window, throwing light like a spotlight onto the side yard.

Tim ducked behind the tree. I could see the shadow of his body standing out along the left side of the trunk. Tick ran back and forth at the tree, barking.

“Hey! Hey!” my father shouted from his window.

“It’s okay! I’ll get him!” I shouted back, and ran out of my room, past my mother sitting in the parlor watching TV, and down the front porch steps. “Here boy! Come on!” I called, and the dog came running. “It’s okay. I got him now!” I shouted, and my father let fall the curtains again on their bedroom window.

Holding Tick in my arms, I lingered on the porch long enough to watch Tim, my brave, clever boyfriend, steal along the edge of the yard, down the side of the gravel drive, and away into the night.

Back in my bedroom, I closed the door and unwadded the note. He knew it was impossible for me to see him because of my parents, Tim had written, but if I could somehow get out Saturday night and come to the Greenwoods Mall, he’d be waiting for me behind the A&W. “I got something important to tell you.” He signed it “Love always.”

I smoothed the crinkles out of the paper and excitedly folded it into The Scarlet Letter, where Hester Prynne sat with her daughter in the cottage at the edge of the village, working her strange and mysterious embroidery as she waited for her redemption, however it might come.

Tim stood up out of the cab of his father’s truck as I ran across the parking lot to meet him.

He had begun to grow sideburns and a mustache since his graduation from Zachary High earlier that month, and when we kissed his new hair tickled my nose. Between kisses I told him his mustache made him look like Paul McCartney. He said he didn’t like the Beatles, and could I pick someone else? In that case, I said, how about Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? He said that was better, and we went on kissing.

I had fashioned an elaborate lie in order to see Tim that night, telling my parents I was meeting some girlfriends for a movie in town, and then having one of them phone the house so she could casually mention this to my mother, and then studying a review for the movie I had found in the paper just in case I was asked about it. I even begged money from my mother for a Coke and popcorn before I borrowed their car for the night. All of this deceit didn’t come naturally to me. I had never lied to my mother before, not in any big way. Lying, I