There’s no such thing as love without commitment—without putting your heart and your pride on the line.
“I do miss you, Samantha.”
I stand. “There’s probably a cuter version of me in your office.”
He shakes his head. “Not cuter.”
It’s probably a lie. A well-meaning omission. It tastes a little bitter. Like biting into an unwanted piece of fennel or something. Because no one really wants to eat fennel, comeon.
After we do an awkward hug goodbye—the kind of hug you give a college friend you weren’t really close to, but everyone’s hugging so you have to—I let the apartment door shut and I don’t feel like crying. Even though I suspect I may not see him again. Even though I suspect in the next few years I’ll notice a social media post featuring Hal and his new girlfriend, fiancée, or wife. A year ago just thinking about that possibility would have made my eyes wellup.
Now? It’s okay. I wouldn’t really give a damn.
I’m done giving.
Some panels don’t have borders. No hard stop. It’s like they linger on the page, only to fade away in the reader’s mind.
Walking down the hallway, I hear the scratch of the pencil lead against the paper, making a line at the edge of the drawing. A bold, definitive end to that story.
39
I’m Romily’s replacement roommate. She’dbeen sharing the apartment with a first-year grad student who fled Ohio two weeks into the semester and took her furniture with her.
The search for inexpensive, nonshitty furniture has been Romily’s winter break obsession. I half expect her to present a PowerPoint deck, comparing and contrasting various Facebook Marketplace posts.
I’ve barely begun to unpack when she asks me to accompany her to a nearby estate sale where she’s planning to purchase a pair of midcentury accent chairs at an excellent price.
That’s the last place I want to go, with all those memories of my dad’s business: sorting through other people’s junk, looking for anything especially valuable, haggling with resellers. But she needs me to drive to the sale in my mom’s Subaru Outbackbecause both chairs will not fit in her car. And, as she points out, I’m also in need of furniture.
While she inspects the chairs, I browse. I admit, I still like looking around at other people’s things. An estate sale can be a little morbid, but it’s a portrait of one person as told by their stuff. It scratches the same itch as researching artists—you look at all this evidence and piece together what might have been important to them, knowing that you’ll never have the complete picture. There’s always that gap. That’s what makes certain artists so exciting: it’s up to the viewer to look at the art and fill in that complete picture. The magic.
Now, I’m not sure about the magic in ninety-three-year-old Hazel Abernathy’s estate sale. She hasn’t left hundreds of abstract paintings like Giuseppe Baggio. She definitely didn’t leave any comics for me to scoop up at rock bottom prices.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with an older lady and sort through boxes of miscellaneous things: 1960s lace seam binding; rickrack; a spool of ribbon with tiny cows on it. So many packs of playing cards.
“C-minus, not so good, Danny,” the woman says. I tilt my head to peek at what she’s reading. It’s a fragile-looking report card from Deer Valley Junior High. I bet Hazel kept all of Danny’s drawings.
The womanoohs andahhs over a pile of doilies that someone’s grandmother worked so hard to create a hundred years ago, only to have them tossed into a box and sold for fifty cents. “These are beautifully yellowed,” she says approvingly.
I dig through a pile of notebooks, address books, diaries that were only used for a week or two. There’s one in the pile that looks brand-new. The embossed title readsDad, Tell Me Our Story.I open the cover and the spine makes a cracking sound. There’s an inscription reading “We love you Daddy!” witha child’s attempt at signing their name. Anna? Annie? Flipping the pages, I deduce that it’s supposed to be a journal filled with prompts for a father to fill out throughout his daughter’s life. The last page is to be completed on her wedding day and then given to her.
The entire thing is blank, aside from the inscription.
Blank.
The neon-pink sticker on the cover is marked twenty-five cents. It’s the thrifting equivalent of “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
I beg myself to keep calm. Tonotthink about how this book would’ve looked the same today if my own father had received it when I was barely old enough to scribble my name. Tonotsee this as a physical manifestation of all my contradictory feelings about him.
For a few seconds, I brace myself for public crying. There’s a swell of emotion churning in my chest, making my throat tight, drawing the unstoppable grief up to the surface.
I drop the journal back onto the stack of other books. It slides off the pile and onto the floor with a loud smack.
The lady flinches at the sound and turns to me. “You okay, hon?”
“It’s blank,” I mutter.
“Oh, did you find a brand-new one?” she asks, reaching down for the book even though I suspect her knees aren’t the greatest. “I’m always drawn to the most worn-out ones myself. I always say if they’re pristine, they haven’t been well loved. I like some damage.” She hands the journal back to me. “It adds to the character.”
