bunny prints. In a lot of ways, Mom is kind of badass.
Without a word, she puts her palm on my forehead. Instead of cool and nice, though, it now feels damp and gooshy, like it could melt right into my skin if she kept it there long enough. “You feel warm.” Then she does her ultra-annoying thing of telling me how I feel. “You’re not any better. I’m staying home.”
“No. I’m fine, Mom.” I make my voice hit the right tone: sick enough not to go to band camp but not sick enough for Dr. Queng. “Really. You go on. You’ve got patients waiting for you.” Luckily, at that exact moment one of the many alarms Mom has set on her phone goes off.
“Shit, I’m going to be late! Call me if you start to feel worse.” She rushes out, stops, tells me, “Just call me anyway, OK?”
I promise I will, and then—score!—I have the house and the laptop all to myself. I can think about my dad with no fear that someone will burst through the door without even knocking, demanding to know what I am doing and when I am going to unload the dishwasher.
From under the bed, I pull out the scrapbook Mom made for me of every photo she could collect of my father. She called it the Book of Palms. The name is supposed to be a joke because he has his hand up, shielding some famous person’s face in most of the photos. I think there might be a Book of Palms in the Bible. I never asked. Mom likes to pretend that I’ve lost interest in my father. That it upset me to hear about him. Actually, I stopped mentioning him when I saw how much it upset her. By that time, though, she wasn’t my only source of information. For the past few years, I’ve been Googling my father’s Next name constantly.
I open the laptop and check my Google alerts to see if there is anything new. There isn’t. There hasn’t been anything on the Internet about my father for months.
“My father.” I don’t even know what punctuation mark to put after those two words. Lots of exclamation points!!! One lonely question mark? I need a cartoon balloon with every symbol available in it. Something that stands for stunned/terrified/pissed off/excited/depressed/happy/mad.
I go to Facebook and stare at his friend request until it starts pulsing and glowing like it is radioactive. I close the laptop, get back in bed, and pull the covers up so that just the soft cotton is touching my chin.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010
I drop my swim bag on the floor as soon as I enter the house. In the kitchen, Pretzels—curled up on her rug in front of the refrigerator, strategically situated so that warm air from the vent blows on her and she’s in place to snap up any morsel that might fall from the heavens—doesn’t budge when I enter. We adopted Pretzels when Aubrey was five and always asking when I was going to get her a sister. A big sister, not a little one like Sharalynn Mahan’s mother brought home. A big sister who would come fully equipped with all her own Polly Pockets and be ready to play from day one. Aubrey was the one who noticed that our new mostly golden retriever puppy’s coat was the same color as pretzels.
I get down on my hands and knees next to the sweet old girl and coo, “Hey, Pretz. Hey, girl, you need to pee?” Since she’s almost totally deaf, it startles her if she’s touched while sleeping. So I increase the volume of my cooing gently until she opens her filmy eyes and is transfixed by joy at the sight of my face with all its treasured food-bowl associations.
“Come on, sweet girl.” I loop both hands around her belly and hoist her up, causing a release of one of the paint-stripping clouds of gas that is her signature move these days. The doggie door she’s used for the past dozen years has started to confuse and scare her, so I slide the patio door open and she totters out.
Pretzels pokes her nose around in the grass. As I wait for her to snuffle up an odor that will remind her why she’s outside, I glance around behind me at what the real estate agent had called the “great room” when she invited Martin and me to imagine the entertaining we’d be doing beneath its twelve-foot ceiling.