Excerpt from Dear Henry

by Shoshanna Wingate

A foul, rotten smell stopped me in my tracks. It could have come from anywhere, but most likely it was the living room where the aftermath of my dad Henry’s temper tantrum last night lay scattered all over the floor: leaking take-out containers, dented beer cans, unopened mail dusted with ashes, the coffee table flung on its side.

“Where you been Moira? You’re late.”

I found Henry in the kitchen with Caleb, his friend and on-again-off-again work partner, hunched over the table in their undershirts. The overhead fan spun lazily, pushing hot air around the room.

“No, I’m not,” I said, as I dumped my bag on the kitchen counter. “I told you I had to pull a double.”

He rose and tugged his dirt-caked jeans back up to his hips with both hands. Deep circles of sweat under his armpits mirrored the circles under his sand-colored eyes.

I lifted the kitchen window as high as it would go to air the place out.

Henry slid a slice of pizza onto a paper plate and pried loose strands of cheese off the bottom of the box. At the table, Caleb ran his palm back and forth across the stubble on his chin, his hair clinging to his head like a swimmer’s cap. He winked at me before he drained his beer.

The sight of the two of them slick with sweat, their pasty white beer bellies poking out from their undershirts was enough to kill my appetite. I searched for my makeup bag at the bottom of my backpack.

“I have to take a shower,” I said. “I’ve got a pound of grease on me.”

Henry had been on a bender for over a week. It started when Caleb arrived unannounced at our door with a knapsack and a bottle of whiskey. A few days ago they cut out work altogether. They blamed it on the heat, as if I hadn’t seen them do it before. Three years ago, Caleb got a fat check after he’d been in a fender bender and they partied for two weeks straight. The following spring, we had heavy rains for a month and they said they couldn’t work outside. Then there was the time Henry fell off a ladder and broke his foot. Caleb stayed with us for the entire six-week recovery.

Henry painted houses for a living, which meant it was up to him to actually go out and find jobs. If he didn’t have one already lined up there was nothing to motivate him, except poverty, which is relative when you’re drunk. Caleb had been traveling around doing odd jobs as long as I’d known him. When he stayed with us he usually worked with Henry, except for times like now. Rainstorms. Mudslides. Fall winds. Ice storms. Every season had weather that kept them at home and liquored up. This summer it was the heat.

I prayed I’d make it to my seventeenth birthday without setting fire to anything.

˜

By the time I got out of the shower, Henry and Caleb had eight crushed beer cans piled on the table and the pizza box was half empty.

I circled past Henry to the fridge and stood for a moment in the cool air before reaching for the iced tea pitcher. He’d made a peace offering. The fruit and vegetable bins contained a handful of apples, two plump tomatoes, a bag of carrots, and a head of iceberg lettuce, instead of the brown pools of water that were there yesterday; milk, juice, eggs, and packages of sandwich meat filled the shelves.

I cracked ice cubes into a glass. “Did I get any calls?”

“From who?” Henry rolled out the who like the answer to a riddle.

“You know who. Did he or didn’t he?”

He cupped his hands around a match and lit his cigarette.

“I don’t remember.”

“Fine,” I said.

David and I had a standing date for Friday nights. If he hadn’t called it was because he was still at work. And if he had called, chances were he hung up at the sound of Henry’s voice. I’d ranted to him over the phone after Henry’s tantrum, until I’d run out of words and just sighed at intervals. David said to go ahead and fall asleep on the phone with him, which I did, and woke to the sound of the dial tone.

I walked back through the living room and kicked open the screen door, with my pizza and iced tea in hand. The worn wood creaked beneath my bare feet as I crossed it to the porch swing. Above me, the sun dipped into a bank of clouds, the pinkish glow of sunset leaking out from behind them in wisps. Then it cracked like a giant egg yolk and spilled over the sky. I folded my legs and inhaled the smell of freshly cut grass.

These moments were mine. I waited for them all day, through corned beef hash, burgers, sundaes, and sore feet, knowing at the end of it all there was a small corner of the world that didn’t ask for anything from me. As the sun went down, another world woke up, with crickets and fireflies. The details of the daytime world faded into half-seen, darker shapes.

In the darkness, I was most myself. My senses were sharp and focused. Nothing in the nighttime could be taken for granted. Swing sets, cars, gardens, houses—all just shapes and shadows. My backyard wasn’t a square of lawn. It had no edges. The land reformed in the dark and continued on forever, town after town, forest into field into mountain. It could lead anywhere if you knew how to follow.

When I was dreamy, Henry said I was acting like my mom. Only he called it flightiness and said it didn’t do anyone any good. That’s what got her into trouble, he said. That’s what made her marry a fool like him in the first place.

He kept a shoebox full of photographs under his bed. There were maybe half a dozen snapshots from their wedding, and in all of them Henry looked so young it was like seeing a picture of an imaginary little brother. In one photo, he wore a tuxedo and held my mom in his arms, her long white dress trailing like a parachute on the ground behind them. Henry’s eyes were fixed on her and in the frozen moment, he looked stunned. Mom’s hand blocked her face. If you looked closely you could see she was laughing; everyone around them was laughing, too.

That’s what most of the photos in the box were like: Mom laughing with me in her lap, laughing in a bikini at the beach, laughing in front of a birthday cake. There were a few of Henry too, and he was cutting a face in every one of them. He wasn’t such a clown these days.

Henry’s mom, Mamie, took me aside before Mom died and said, “Moira, your dad’s had his heart broken. Give him time.”

Mamie didn’t talk much. Our conversations usually involved food. What I liked or didn’t like. How the butcher gave her the best cuts of meat because she was polite to him. How she’d taught my mom to cook.

Henry and Mom married young, in their teens, and didn’t know how to do anything. Mamie told me Mom cried her way through runny pancakes and leathery steaks, until Mamie sent a note saying she was coming to stay for a week.

She and Mom started small. Scrambled eggs. Meatloaf. Baked chicken. She taught Mom how to stock a pantry. Before Mamie drove off in her brown Buick, as big as a boat, Mom could cook a handful of meals and read a recipe.

Mom never got past teaching me how to cook scrambled eggs. She died when I was nine. After Mom’s funeral, Mamie took a leave from work and unpacked her bags in our house once again. She took me by the hand. Her skin felt like rose petals. “Now I’m going to teach you the way I taught your Momma,” she said. We sifted flour. She showed me how to crack eggs so the shell didn’t fall in the bowl. How to use a whisk. My small fingers could barely hold the bowl and the whisk at the same time, but I was determined. She’d nod to me when the flour was milky and never mention the quarter-sized lumps I’d left behind.

Henry shuffled through the house like a ghost for the six months Mamie stayed with us. He drifted in and out of rooms, his slippers scratching the floor. He spoke in words, not sentences. It scared me. Henry didn’t eat our dinners. He pushed his food around his plate, piled his peas against his mashed potatoes. If he caught me watching him, he’d force himself to eat a few forkfuls.

Maybe I’d made things worse. All I know is I’d made a game out of calling him Henry, teased him into eating or shaving the stubble off his chin, as if it were easier for him to listen to me if I didn’t remind him of our role reversal. Somewhere along the way, it stuck.

I started following Mamie everywhere. If she disappeared from my sight for more than a few minutes, I called out for her. I heard her and Henry whispering at night. In the mornings, I’d wake to find Henry still asleep and Mamie doing strange things. Like pouring hot coffee into the teapot or putting the milk in the freezer. She forgot my name. I didn’t mind when she called me Claire, my mom’s name.

Henry and I pretended not to notice. He began playing tricks on her. He’d move her place in her book back two chapters so she would just read and read and read and never get anywhere. She’d come into a room and say, “Lord, this book is a doozy. It’s taking me a year and a day to read it.” We’d fall out of our chairs laughing like two little kids.

That fall, she moved into a home. We visited every weekend, and then every other weekend and then we buried her, too. The doctor said it was a heart attack. Henry nearly stopped speaking altogether. Mamie was the only family he had left, except me.

˜

I stretched my legs and when the sun slipped behind the trees, I decided call or no call, I’d stop by David’s house. I put on my Girl Wonder t-shirt and the necklace he’d given me for Valentine’s Day—a silver chain twisted like rope, with a solid silver heart dangling from it, engraved with my name.

A wall of cigarette smoke divided the living room from the kitchen.

“Going out,” I yelled in Henry’s direction.

“Take your keys.”

Which translates loosely into, I’m going out tonight and may not come back. Take care of yourself, Moira—as if I wasn’t doing that already.

“Yeah, right,” I said.