My Heart Belongs to You--How Sad

“You remember him throwing the ketchup bottle against the wall but don’t remember what their argument was about? You expect us to believe that?”

“That did stand out in my mind. Yes, sir.”

Some lawyer he’s turning out to be. Where did they find this guy?

Cindy pictured the bottle whizzing past, not far above her head, then blood and glass going everywhere—like it was happening now.

OK, it wasn’t real blood, but what splattered on her mama, the floor, and the ceiling sure looked like it. And it could have been, with a different twist of Daddy’s wrist.

Cindy punctuated her memory with thoughts of how the real thing would have run: the beautiful dark hair matted with blood and the hazel eyes shut forever. She shuddered. The lawyer guy noticed.

And misunderstood.

“You don’t have anything to be afraid of sweetie, as long as you tell the truth.”

She stared straight into his eyes and said nothing. Afraid? Of him?

Cindy wondered for a long time if she had said the wrong things or if there was something else she should have said. There were no classes at Pine Town Junior High on how to handle these things.

 Still, it was supposed to be a shoe-in, a slam dunk, an open-and-shut case: whatever Mama’s lawyer guy said. They would have the formal hearing, and then the judge would give Mama the divorce because Daddy wasn’t acting right. Cindy’s testimony and her brother’s had been added for insurance.

But it didn’t work out that way.

She stared up at the little plastic daisies she had figured out were holding up the ceiling in their little trailer. It wasn’t even theirs. Her older half-brother was letting them live there.

Cindy had wondered at first who in the world would decorate a ceiling with evenly spaced white plastic daisies. Took her a while, but she found the little screws with square heads they had tucked inside each daisy. Had she moved into a giant doll house or something?

Tonight, she was giving up picturing her little pink bedroom with French provincial furniture. At least that was what her mama had called the set when they remodeled and redecorated. Cindy had loved her sunny corner bedroom, with windows on two walls. She would have to give up thinking about it sooner or later. Time to suck it up and think about something else.

But she had written her first stories there. Wonder where they are now? She could only remember one of them. No telling where all those sheets of wide-ruled notebook paper were. The garbage most likely.

They had gotten out of there in a hurry the day they left. Had it only been four months? Not that they were actually running or anything. Maybe it’s just that leaving the only home you ever knew feels like it happens fast no matter how long you take to throw your things into a suitcase.

 It wasn’t like anyone was after them, but Mama said they had to go right then. Cindy still pictured Mama in the pretty bright room, sitting on the pink puffy bedspread, and explaining why it had to be this way. Mama’s face didn't look worried like it did when Cindy was sick. She wished she had.

Cindy had decided to be brave. The one thought she would always remember was what she kept repeating to herself, “I’m not going to cry.” If Mama said it would be OK, it would be OK. She pictured another room waiting for her with sunny windows and things she liked sitting on the window sills.

That was her first crash, as she landed under the little daisy stars.

Not only was it a trailer, but it was in town. It seemed the backyard was no bigger than their back porch had been at home. Home. What did that word even mean now? Was this home? How could someplace with nowhere to go when you wanted to think and soak up the smell of the trees and the sound of the birds be home?

She longed to be back where she was free, but going back there would be leaving Mama and that wasn’t going to happen.

She started down the path in her mind to the fort she had back in the woods at h——, whatever she was supposed to call it now, where Daddy lived by himself. She was halfway over the log bridge across the little branch when her eyes got wet, and she decided it wouldn’t be worth the trip. She rolled over and turned on the radio with the album rock station she’d found blaring as loud as she dared.

Turning over brought her face to face with the little strips of wood that held the paneling together. She couldn’t help flashing back to the sturdy house she had left—the one Daddy had built with his own hands, like so many others he had built all over the place. And here she was.

But it was necessary. Mama had said so.

Still, her mind would not behave. She kept it off the log bridge, but it drifted back to the shop where Daddy built his boxes for the bees to live in.

One summer she had gotten to work for him, using the hammer he had trusted her with again after she had left it outside once a long time ago. She would never do that again, even if she had the chance. Which she wouldn’t. Anyway, that summer her job was to nail together the small frames and have them ready for when he needed more in his beehives.

The summer before that, he let her paste labels on the honey jars and paid her a penny a label. She tried to remember how much he paid her for nailing the frames together, but no matter how hard she squeezed her brain it wouldn’t come back to her. What else was she going to forget in this little room?

Not the scene on the front porch when they were leaving, and Mama and Daddy were playing tug of war over something they both wanted to keep—that was for sure. Kind of like the ketchup bottle thing, she couldn’t remember what the item was, but she remembered her parents yelling and yanking on something. Daddy won that round.

It seemed all the family had to line up on one side or the other, and Daddy wasn’t happy with the ones who weren’t on his side. Loaning them the trailer took a lot of courage, she was sure. She would try to appreciate it more.

Daddy was old. Like he turned 59 the month before she was born. And now he was 73. Too old to be acting like this. She was sure it was different having a dad closer to your mother’s age.

She saw other families. Kids at school talked about their dads doing stuff with them. Guess that was more of a new thing, and back when Daddy grew up fathers didn’t take their children out to throw a ball or do stuff together.

Maybe that’s why every little memory was growing and glowing and pulsing in her heart tonight and none of them would obey. Not that there were that many.

Without warning she was in the truck with Daddy helping him sell the honey that not enough people had stopped to buy from the little shop. She was always proud when someone stopped by and she was sent out to the shop to get what that person needed, but you never knew when someone was going to need honey.

That day, Daddy loaded up most of what was left because it was almost time to bottle up some more. He said you had to take it off when the bees had extra or it would overflow and cause the bees big problems. Cindy liked it best when they were happy inside their hives, not flying all over the place and sticking in her long hair.

It was just her and Daddy that day. He would stop at a house and send her to the door with a jar of honey. Thinking back, she realized it might have been harder to say, “No” to a little girl. Plus, sending her kept him from having to get out of the truck so often.

But she had felt special at the time, even if she was the only one who thought it was a good day just because she and her daddy were doing something together. Like she meant something and could do something that mattered. Something Daddy would notice, but not like the day he found the hammer outside.

All he noticed now was that she wanted to be with her mama. And she would be, but he wouldn’t care that it was because Mama was right. He only knew she had chosen the other side, and because of that she was losing all she treasured.

She would try again to forget: the log bridge, the fort, the shop, the work, the trip peddling honey, and all of it. The sunny little bedroom. The stories. And wanting to show Daddy he had her heart—once.

And she wasn’t going to cry.