I made my yearly phone call to my father last night. We spoke for about an hour.
It’s not that I don’t love him. Of course I do.
It’s not even that we don’t get along. We do, in our way.
I just never know what to say to him anymore.
He lives in Chicago now, and I live in L.A.
I haven’t seen him in almost five years.
The last time we saw each other, I decided to stop worrying that we don’t have much in common.
Our relationship is what it is.
He loves me, I’m sure.
But I’m also sure if we weren’t family, we would have stopped talking to each other a long time ago.
Sometimes it just hurts too much.
I don’t know why, but a part of me feels guilty whenever I think of him. A big part of me.
For what, I don’t know.
It wasn’t me that treated him like shit.
♥ ♥ ♥
Father married my mother when she was very young. She was already carrying me.
It was a marriage that was never meant to last.
But they gave it a go. I admire them for that.
They lasted together for eleven years. When he moved out, I stayed with mom in the big house.
He moved into a room in my grandparents' house.
It was my summer between fifth and sixth grade. My mom was only twenty-eight.
I didn’t understand why my dad left, and I hid a terrible sadness with me all the time.
My stomach hurt with sadness.
I remember trying to be happy, because it made my mom angry to see me sad.
But when I was alone, I let myself cry.
Finally I gave up on actually being happy and tried just to look happy, for my mom.
I started going into the garage, where my dad had built a workshop. It was a good place to be alone.
There was a big wooden bench and one wall was covered with wide wooden shelves.
To this day, the smell of pine and sawdust reminds me of him.
I remember the day he built the shelves. I wanted to help him.
He let me help a little bit, but he only let me watch when he cut those huge pieces of plywood with a noisy saw.
My father saw how much the saw scared me. He took me in his arms and held me.
He told me, “Shhh, baby, it wont hurt you. See I turned it off.”
He didn’t understand.
I was afraid for him, not me.
♥ ♥ ♥
After he moved out, I would stay in the garage for hours, exploring the shelves.
They seemed a mystery to me.
I wondered about all the tools. What they were called. What he would use them for.
Why did my dad feel the need to keep all those little nuts and bolts in those glass jars?
Why so many little rubber washer disks, and so many nails and screws?
Men and their toys.
I studied the things he left behind. Maybe I thought that if I understood him better, I might be able to get him and mom back together.
Or maybe It was the only way to stay close to him.
♥ ♥ ♥
One afternoon I discovered the crawlspace above the garage.
I was climbing on the wooden shelves and when I got to the top, I noticed that there was a space above the ceiling of the garage.
It was like an attic, except you couldn’t stand up in it. Not like the attic in my aunt’s place back in Illinois.
Dad used it to store boxes. Christmas decorations, scraps of wood, old books, mostly junk.
It became my secret space that summer.
Mom was so busy selling houses, she left me alone much of the time.
I took some books up there, and a reading lamp. I had to connect a bunch of extension cords to get it to work.
Pushing the boxes around, I made a little room for myself. My little sanctuary.
Even back then I loved to read.
I absolutely devoured The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Bridge to Terabithia.
Those two books seemed to have been written especially for me, I thought.
Later I invited my friend Pilar to my little room. We'd read books and whisper about the boys at school.
Pilar knew to keep our room a secret from my mom.
But my mom found out anyway when she discovered the extension cords.
I thought she’d get mad, but I guess she was glad that I had found some way to occupy myself.
She even helped me move a tv and some beanbag chairs up there so me and Pilar could play Nintendo.
One day I figured out how to crawl over one of the wall boards in the storage space and into the rafters of our house.
It was dusty in there, and dark. I didn’t crawl very far. The insulation scared me because I thought it might be poisonous if I breathed it in.
A week or so later, I found a white dust mask in the garage and decided I could use it to protect me from the insulation.
I had long wavy hair back then, down to the middle of my back. I tied it into a ponytail and pulled a cap over my head tightly.
Then I got a flashlight and went exploring again.
There wasn’t much to see up there. I tried to figure out where the walls of the house were by the wooden beams that stuck up between the powdery insulation.
There were thick, dirty vents where the air conditioning went.
I followed those vents too. I had to be careful to stay on the wood.
Somehow I knew that if I stepped in the insulation I might crash through the ceiling.
It seems strange to me now, I don’t know how I would have known that back then.
I don’t know why I wanted to sneak around either. But for some reason, it occurred to me that I needed to eavesdrop on my mom.
When I knew she was in the kitchen. I found my way over to that side of the house and found a vent that wasn’t wrapped in insulation.
I couldn’t see into the vent, but I could hear her talking on the phone.
I remember she laughed a lot back then. Still does, actually.
But hearing her laugh while she was on the phone that afternoon made me mad at her.
It was hard to stay in one spot for a long time, because i had to balance uncomfortably on the edge of a two by four.
I crawled back into my little attic room right away. I probably sulked in there through dinner that night.
♥ ♥ ♥
Later on that summer I managed to pull some flat pieces of scrap wood into the rafters so I could crawl around easier.
I laid one over each room in the house where there was a phone. I guess this was in the days before cordless phones were popular.
Now I could lie up there and eavesdrop to my heart’s content. I managed to loosen the ceiling fan in the kitchen so i could peek down into the dining area where the phone was.
I also loosened some of the screws that connected the vents to my father’s study and the bedroom.
I could spy on my mom a lot better after that, but she never said anything interesting on the phone. It was all boring real estate stuff.
My best view was into the study, but she rarely went in there.
The next best view was into her bedroom, but she only used that phone at night, when it was too quiet for me to be crawling around in the rafters.
So mostly I just eavesdropped on her when she was in the kitchen, hoping to catch her saying something incriminating.
Something that would explain why she and dad weren’t together anymore.
And maybe, desperately hoping that I’d overhear her making up with dad.
But I never got my wish. And she never said anything interesting either.
♥ ♥ ♥
By mid summer, it was too hot to be up in the rafters anyway, and I stopped snooping altogether.
I began to spend more time over at Pilar’s. Things were happier there. Her parents were still together.
When Pilar’s family went on vacation, there was nothing for me to do but go swimming and lie out by the pool all day.
Mom was gone most of the time, and some days she wouldn’t come home until late at night.
I couldn’t wait for Pilar to come back.
My mom noticed that I was lonely and she tried to make it up to me by buying me presents.
I scored a lot of Nintendo cartridges that summer, that’s for sure.
I didn’t bother going up into the rafters again until the day Pilar’s family came back home.
I wish i hadn't gone back up there.
I could have kept my innocence a little longer.
But maybe God figured it was time for me to grow up a little.
