All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Read Free Book Online Page A

blood, remains in the corner where you spilled it over
thirty years before. The checkbook is there, in the top right-hand drawer, just
as your father specified. You toss it on the carefully made single bed. The
closet is almost too small to get the chair into, but you manage. On the shelf
are boxes with letters inside. None are from you, because you never wrote.
There are sweaters, shoes, a curled-up belt, a hat your father must have held
onto from the Fifties, the last time anyone wore such a thing. There is also a
framed photograph of you. You’re not smiling. The background color is too
brightly blue, and you remember it as your class picture from the fifth or
sixth grade. Unlike everything else on that shelf, it’s been dusted, kept
clean.
    Was he
getting it down, or putting it back? Or just taking a moment to look at it,
wipe it off, then return it to the dark? There are no other photographs visible
in the tiny apartment, or in any of the drawers you go through, even those in
the kitchen, only yours.
    You take
the glass you just rinsed and fill it with a little scotch from the bottle by
the toaster. On the small sofa you drink some, and then drink some more. The
lake can’t be seen from where you sit, but it’s there for sure, long and deep,
only a few miles away. On its shore there’s a park where you went in summers
before your parents split up. You fill a blue plastic bucket with pebbly sand
and take it to where they lie on wide, striped towels. What a pretty bucket, you father says, rising up to see better. Then, I have a secret to tell you! The secret is I love you! Now off you go, find me some more sand for
your bucket.
    Years
after the bucket is lost you eat a TV dinner in your father’s dark apartment.
There’s a game on the black and white set, the antenna off kilter, the picture
in and out.
    Who
scored? he calls.
    Pittsburgh , you’re happy to say,
knowing the teams at last.
    He stands
in the low kitchen doorway, a can of beer in his hand. He says he’s getting
married again soon. You nod. Mom told me , you say.
    The final
quarter is underway, Pittsburgh reaches Miami’s 10-yard line, and still in the
doorway your father says, I want you to know that I won’t have any more
children. You’re the only child I have, the only one I want to have.
    Years
later you call up to say you just got married. A silence falls on the line. In
the background there’s a game playing, and you have to wonder if it’s football. I wish you’d told me, Dar. I would have liked to give you away.
    You finish
your drink. Something within you shifts, then drops like a single flake of
snow. You put the glass down, and sit a little longer in the quiet of your
father’s empty house.
    You find
the checkbook in the bedroom. Inside bears your father’s neat, square hand. You
take it along to look at later, and realize how very glad you are you made the
trip.

 
     

    For the
Taking
     
     
    Angie needed a drink and
had already waited ten minutes for Fran to offer her one. Finally she went into
the kitchen, found a glass, and returned to the living room. She joined Fran on
the soft leather couch and helped herself to the whiskey from the crystal
bottle on the coffee table.
    The
funeral had been long. A lot of people Angie didn’t know gave voice to her
father’s good deeds, I remember when he taught Bess to play her first scale ,
and He guided Collin through his first recital . Fran was the last to
speak. She cried as she described their seven lovely years together— a second
marriage for us both but even better than the first —then closed with your
music is silent now, my love, though for you my ear remains keen .
    To Angie,
it was a big bore. She’d given up on her father years before and was only there
to get something for her trouble, something she could take away and hang onto.
    “Find out
about insurance,” Kevin had said as Angie boarded the bus to Ann Arbor. “An old
guy like that, he’d have insurance.” He