I was not his daughter. I was his housekeeper. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.
He called it his house. But I’d learned later that he never owned a single nail in it.
My mother’s name was Diane. She had brown hair that curled at the ends without trying and a laugh that made you feel like you were in on some wonderful secret. I know this because I was 8 years old when she died, and those two details are the ones I’ve held on to the tightest.
Breast cancer. Stage three by the time they caught it. Stage four by Christmas. She was gone before the tulips came up in the yard she’d planted the spring before.
After the funeral, my father changed. Or maybe he didn’t change. Maybe the grief just burned away whatever thin layer of softness had been keeping the rest of him hidden.
He moved through the house like a man sealing off rooms. First the photos came down. Every picture of my mother—off the walls, off the fridge, off the mantle—packed into a cardboard box and shoved into the garage behind the snowblower. I snuck one out. A small snapshot of her holding me at the county fair, cotton candy stuck to my chin, both of us laughing. I kept it pressed inside my biology textbook like a secret.
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