My dad steps up beside me as I’m distractedly packing the trunk of the van, quietly pleasing myself by deliberately setting Jess’s suitcase right next to mine. It’s a pretty sappy move, I know, but I’m practically marinated in sap at the moment.
Thoughts of last night coat every part of my brain: Jess above me, beneath me, beside me. Her words whispered against my skin, her drowsing sleep and her reluctance to part outside her bedroom when we finally came back in from the fields.
Her pleasure, her laughter, her trust.
“Pretty much,” I say to Dad, stepping back from the trunk, raising an arm to close its door. I use the extra second to arrange my face into something slightly less sap-struck.
I don’t know if I succeed, but looking at my dad is enough to bring me back down to earth for now.
He’s pretty much the earthiest guy I know.
It’s barely eight a.m., but he’s been up and at it for a while—fresh mud on his boots, his jeans smudged with dust, one of his old navy-blue bandanas tucked messily into the front pocket of his work shirt, as though he’s already taken it out multiple times to wipe his gray-stubbled face.
“Good, good.”
He shifts his feet on the gravel drive, looking off into the distance. Since I’ve been seeing my dad do this stance for as long as I can remember, I know he’s gearing up to make his version of conversation, which is most often monosyllabic. He’s a quiet guy, an undemonstrative guy. Beth says his parenting style is “loving brick wall.”
I turn and lean my shoulder against the rear of the van, waiting him out. It hasn’t been all that long since I was home—I visited back in April for my mom’s birthday—but I haven’t had any one-on-one time with either of my parents on this particular trip. Most times, Dad and I keep our conversations confined to simple stuff: how work’s going, how the farm is doing, how Grandma’s faring. It used to be that we’d talk a lot about football, but those days are done.
He’d never say, but I think he misses it.
I watch as his eyes track over the fields. When it’s been at least a full minute of silence, he settles on a simple, “You doin’ all right?”
For a loving brick wall, these four words are about the deepest expression of concern imaginable, and I’d know, because Dad said them to me a lot when I was back here after Cope. Multiple times a day, no matter if we were sitting in front of the TV or out doing chores or driving around doing errands Mom would send us on, her effort to keep me off my phone as much as possible.You doin’ all right?
Sometimes, if he was really worried, he’d add abudat the end.
So I’m familiar.
But I’m surprised to hear them this morning, of all mornings.
The morning after what’s got to be one of the best nights of my life.
“Yeah, Dad. I’m good.” I say it with a smile, a genuine one.
I’m better than good.
But he doesn’t look convinced. He takes out the bandana and sets about folding it neatly.
“She’s got problems. Jess, I mean.”
I straighten, my body stiffening. “Got problems” is my dad’s code for a lot of things he doesn’t know how to talk about it. He said it about my sister Carly, when she went to a therapist for a year and a half because she got bullied at school after she came out. He said it about Cope, too, when he got blackout drunk during his first visit here, nearly starting a fire in the kitchen because he got a two a.m. craving for a tuna melt. He said it about me, after I blew up the internet.
He even said it about himself, in an early morning conversation I can still remember, not long after Cope died.I still got problems, you know. About losing my brother. Some days’ll be worse than others.
I’d known, of course, that my dad’s only brother had died in a car accident when he was sixteen. But that morning was the only time I’d ever heard him talk about it directly.
So when my dad talks about “problems,” he means loving-brick-wall business.
But hearing him say it now puts me immediately on the defensive. First, for Jess, because I don’t want anyone talking about her out of turn. I’ve become as protective of her privacy as she’s always been. And second, selfishly, for myself, because I don’t want anything I’ve had with Jess over the last two days tainted by what my dad’s saying.
“Everyone has problems, Dad.”
“I like her. Don’t get me wrong.”
I stare at him. It doesn’t matter if he likes her.Ilike her.
I more than like her, but I’ve been trying since last night not to focus on how much more.
