“Is this me, Leo, and a shopping cart?” I ask, accepting it from him. Cringing at a physical reminder of the man I thought I had to leave behind to right myself.
“Yeah, it’s not finished yet,” he says, taking it back from me. “I got some more whittling to do this week, but when it’s done, would you like to come with me to the cemetery?”
Only now does it dawn on me that I haven’t been in a year or two? Maybe more. It says a lot that I can’t even remember. The act of driving past the cemetery was always painful for me. Going in felt like ripping out infected stitches. I couldn’t put myself through that.
“Does visiting help?” I ask.
“The grief? No, the grief is always going to be there, but visiting gives me routine. It reminds me that she was here. She’s still here.” He’s looking at me now, cradling the figurine he’s working on. “When I saw your face on my seventy-five-inch TV last night, I thought, ‘Wow, he looks so much like his mother.’”
The tears come quickly. “I’ll come with you on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
I point to the figure in his hands. “Teach me how to make my own?”
He agrees, and I spend most of the rest of the week in the wood shop taking tiny blocks of wood and turning them into memories. It reminds me a bit of peeling an apple but with more dexterity needed. Each rolling cut allows me to shed more and more of the pressure that’s been mounting inside me.
I’m bad at it, mostly. It’s not like I’ve uncovered a hidden talent. There’s no denying my novice skill set. I’m impatient and not the safest with the small, sharp blades Dad entrusts me with, so I end up wrapped in a myriad of waterproof Band-Aids, but it’s worth it because by Sunday I’ve created a figurine that’s at least somewhat close to the shape I intended it to be.
I even paint it for added flair—using the craftiness I picked up out in LA with ourMadcap Marketsweatshirts. While this piece may look more like an abstraction, it encompasses the big feelings I’ve been carrying with me all this time. I’ve packed it in a bag alongside Dad’s weekly figurine and we ride over to the cemetery together on a crisp, overcast day. Dolly Parton sings on the radio.
The parking lot is mostly empty. Dad leads us on foot to Mom’s headstone—past angels, flower arrangements, and a frisky squirrel holding a nut.
Mom’s burial spot is marked by a gorgeous granite mound with a curving tree carved into it, which nearly mirrors the one a few paces away that is swaying in the breeze, giving the sunlight a dazzling effect.
Dad’s offering from last week sits on the lip near the ground. It’s a small airplane. “I wanted to make sure you had safe travels.”
I don’t know how I got so lucky to have a dad like him. Patient, supportive, always looking out for me.
Dad swaps out his figurine. The likeness of me and Leo are true to form and make me go misty-eyed. “Hey, Julia. Hope you don’t mind but I brought company with me this time.”
Dad’s speaking to Mom’s headstone like it’s a person. This should probably weird me out, but it doesn’t. He sounds so relaxed, at-home, normal. So why every time I try to speak do my words get caught in my throat?
“Holden just got back from Los Angeles. Thanks for looking out for him while he was away.” Dad’s always been steadfast that Mom is our guardian angel, even after I grew too old to believe in divine intervention. “He went through a lot of trouble to get to compete on your old favorite TV show and guess what? He won.”
I shake my head at that. How had winning still left me feeling like a loser?
Dad pauses, maybe choked up, but he’s facing away so I can’t fully tell. “I’m sure you knew that already, and it seems like it was quite the experience. Maybe he’d like to tell you a little more about it?”
Dad looks back at me, giving me permission to step forward. I’m scared and shaking. He reaches out a hand, pats my shoulder, then nudges me closer.
A chill rattles through me as if I’ve passed through an invisible portal.
“I’m going to take a little walk,” Dad says. “Give a shout if you need me.”
Dad disappears in the direction of the whistling tree. Part of me wants to call after him right away. Being alone with this is frightening. I have no idea where to begin. Then, I notice I’ve been fidgeting with my wooden figurine in the bag.
I pull it out, hold it up to the light, and inspect it from all sides. It took a couple failed attempts and a lot of cursing, but I was finally able to make a semi-re-creation of Mom pushing a young me in a shopping cart.
When I think of Mom, there are so many ways I could remember her. I could remember her on bring-your-child-to-work day reading a picture book to a room full of eager students. I could remember her sick and frail, hooked up to machines that made scary noises. But most of the time, when I think of her, I think of this.
“When Dad showed me all his figurines, I knew I needed to make one for myself.” I offer up my creation. “As you can see it took some trial and error, but I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s not perfect, but neither am I, so.” I sit down in the grass, careful not to disturb the neighboring grave. I dig my fingers down into the soil to ground myself.
“I chose to make us like this because you had a way of making even the mundane magical. A trip to the grocery store with you was a visit with friends—you doing all those voices for the brand mascots, getting me my favorite snacks from the candy aisle, reading the age-appropriate articles aloud to me from the latest issue ofPeoplein the checkout line. I was a kid. I shouldn’t have looked forward to trips to the grocery store but somehow, I did,” I say. I take a sharp inhalation of breath, ready to launch into everything else I’ve been pushing down.
“Even when I was older, you were sick, and you still made my first trip to the DMV to get my permit a game of who-was-that-person-in-their-past-life. When you left us, I thought you took that magic with you. I was mad at the world for tearing you and that joy away from me, so I did everything to avoid confronting it.” I hiccup, my body overwhelmed with emotion. “I took out ridiculous loans so I could go to school far away, I obsessed over a relationship with a boy for years who I was clearly not meant to be with and I avoided coming here.”
I look around, half hoping for zombies or ghouls to materialize and chase after me. For day to turn to night in an instant. For anything scary to happen to justify the way I avoided this place for years on end.
