The Hands of His

Hands are meant to be kissed on dates, hands are meant to be squeezed during hard times, and hands are meant to come together to pray to God when you feel there is no one else that can understand you. I used to feel the warm touch of my mother’s embrace every day before I left the house, her red lipstick leaving a stain on my forehead for the rest of the day, and I used to touch the cold snow of winter when building a snowman when snow days meant more than a chore of shoveling your car out of the driveway. 

As I grew older my hands were needed in other ways than putting olives on my fingertips. They were expected to move mountains rather than color inside of the lines. They were expected to mend relationships that I never broke rather than clapping out three-word syllables to the teacher. I used to put my hands on my dog’s face and wonder if I could ever love someone just as much as I loved the creature in front of me. Now, I put my hands on my husband’s wet face, promising him everything was going to be okay, when I was the one who needed to hear it the most, hoping the more I said it the more I would believe it. My hands have wiped more tears than water the Nile River can hold. My pinkies have promised more promises than a Dad has broken about showing up to their son’s baseball games. My palms have held up the heads of more people than mothers have told their child ”It’s okay he will be at the next one” as she checks her phone for any messages from him. That day, I took for granted the birthdays I had icing on my fingers and the little occasions I used as an excuse to paint my nails a different color. I hadn’t had icing in months and my nails were as bare as the day I was born. Everything changed and I can tell you ten reasons as to why it will never be the same, just don’t expect me to count them on my fingers…

That day I woke up extra early, the birds were still sound asleep, the sun had yet to creep above the horizon, and my mother had not yet risen for her first out of three cups of coffee. My younger brother was passed out on the couch, still in his baseball uniform from his game the night before, a half-eaten bowl of Stouffers Mac and cheese keeping him company. He looked exhausted, worn out, in a way a 10-year-old should never look. I remember grabbing a blanket from the chair next to him and laying it across him as if that would warm any coldness he felt from never being picked up and brought to his room by our parents. I kissed his cheek and left for the shoreline.

The walk to the beach felt almost just as rewarding as seeing God’s latest finger painting in the sky above. It was a fifteen-minute walk, filled with seashells, manatee mailboxes, windchimes, and footprints on the sandy roads. The houses were small and all different shades of the rainbow, making our town resemble a painter’s palette halfway through their piece, beautifully messy. It was two minutes into the walk, I bent down to get a seashell that resembled the stitching of a baseball for my brother, my index finger and thumb expected to do the job it has done its whole life. 

My body knows of three actions engraved into my soul. 

One is, lacing up my brother’s cleats in a way that doesn’t make his feet feel like “they are being choked by Hercules,” his words not mine. 

Two being, cooking food for the house where not a single complaint bolted from their mouths. A skill I held close to my heart given that my brother is the pickiest eater I have ever met, my mother only seems to allow caffeine to enter her body, and my father whose meal has to go well with a couple bottles of beer. 

The third is, picking up seashells along the way to the only place I feel like I am living my life for me and only me. The action is simple but holds the meaning of countless peaceful memories of mine. 

Here I am, two minutes later, still struggling to get the shell from the sidewalk into the palm of my hand. Both my index fingers and thumbs seem to have forgotten the duty of what they have done for all seventeen years of my life and now I found myself trying to pick it up with my bare feet. I can feel the early risers on their rocking chairs, holding their warm cup of coffee in both hands, wondering why there is a girl on the sidewalk trying to grab a seashell in the way monkeys peel their bananas. I decided to keep walking and let the shell be someone else's embarrassment for the morning. 

It was seven minutes into the walk and since my faceoff with an inanimate object, all I could do was stare at my fingers, hoping they would grow mouths and tell me why they were so mad at me. I try to distract myself. If they can’t even pick up a shell, how can I expect them to grow a tongue and speak? I look at the towering palm trees, breathe in the sea salt air, and wave to the delightful woman with her vicious dog, wondering if I could ever be like her and see beauty in the things that seem to want to bite my head off. 

When I was fourteen years old, when my father still brought life into the family he chose to make, he brought back flowers from the rundown garden store next to the construction site he was working at. I imagined the journey the flowers must have taken with five six-foot-tall men crammed into the back of an old Ford truck. I wondered if the flowers saw my dad laugh more than he did at the dinner table, if the flowers felt the gentle touch he used to have with me when trying to do my hair for school, or if they loved the scent of wood and pine he brought home after a long day of work just as much as I still do. I’ll never forget the smile he had on his face when bringing me home what I assumed was a bouquet of pink lilies before the truck wind blew most of the pedals away. They looked even better now than what I imagine they looked when he bought them. Now, they smelled like sawdust mixed with the sweet scent of flowers. If I could make that into a candle, I would let it burn forever. 

It was now ten minutes into the walk and the sweet scent of my favorite home already filled my nose, making my bare feet do a little skip. The morning sky was beginning to have a tint of orange, a message my heart had memorized indicating the sun should be up within the next ten minutes. The weather was cool, just enough to feel comfortable in a bikini and one of my Dad’s old construction shirts, it still smelled like him, the old him. I rounded the corner onto Ocean Ave and was immediately greeted by Miss Violet. Her curly orange hair gave her three more inches, and her big pink framed glasses made her eyes look like a pair of peaches.

“Oh, good morning, honey!” She called from her bright purple porch, “A blessed morning on this big rock of ours isn’t it?”

I had to step to the left, squat a little, and tilt my head to the right to see the elderly woman in her wooden chair sitting in the only spot that was not filled with wildflowers and butterflies. This easily grew to be my second favorite view, after the ocean.

“Absolutely gorgeous,” I yelled back from across the fence, “Did you see the full moon last night?”

I could hear her chair creek from across the garden, the most telling sign of excitement from a 70-year-old woman. 

“Oh boy, did I see it?! Sweetheart, I fell asleep outside my balcony and woke up with binocular imprints on my eyes! It was one of the loveliest views I have had in a while. I feel like I could see my Henry in the cradles of that oversized stone.”

I loved how she always referred to her husband as my Henry. Even though he exhaled his last breath on Earth and inhaled his first into Heaven, they still seemed to have left enough love in the air for them to be breathing together, and that in itself was a beautiful thing. 

“I baked your family a little something last night, I’ll be right back!” Miss Violet said as she made her way through the stained glass front door. 

Miss Violet remembers our family in the cookie-cutter form. Her visions of us go as deep as the picture-perfect Christmas cards we had to retake at least seven times, school photos of my brother and I minutes after crying to our parents about how we didn’t want to wear the clothes they chose for us, and family walks to the beach after a huge blow-up, knowing that if we stayed in that house any longer one of us would never had come. I didn’t mind her perfect picture of us, in some ways it was comforting, for both me as well as her. Everything seemed to shine a little brighter in this world to her than the rest of us, and in no way was I going to be the one to ruin it.

Her house sat right across from the sea, her porch, and two balconies in perfect position for dolphin seeking, sunset chasing, and thunderstorm watching. It was a bigger home for one person but she filled it with enough life to make the whole world seem small. I have only been inside once, when I was seven years old, and scraped my knee running towards the ocean trying to catch the sun before it went down. She took me in, placed me on top of the counter, and wrapped my knee with one of her colorful scarves. She told me the scarf held magic and that if I wished hard enough, all the pain would go away. She was right about my knee, but I think I needed a few more scarves in order to heal the rest of my scars. 

The outside of her house can only be explained as the ones you see in the fairytales. A beautiful green garden filled up her front yard, allowing vines to crawl up the side of her house. Granting Rapunzel to be saved any second of any hour. I could never name a color that wasn’t visible in her plants, no matter how hard I tried. Butterflies flew inside the white picket fence attaching themselves to you like bears to honey. If Miss Violet ever left, her spirit animal would undoubtedly be a butterfly. 

Miss Violet came out of the door gleaming, her hands in two mismatched kitchen gloves, displaying a tin can of freshly baked blueberry muffins, 

“I reheated them for you, come up and try one!”

I made my way through the lilies, past the hibiscuses, and around the daisies, finally landing my bare feet onto her sandy porch. 

“I picked the blueberries yesterday afternoon, they were just ripe enough for this batch and I had just gone to the market that morning for my baking supplies. It was as if The Universe told me you needed some freshly baked goods in your life, and who am I to turn down such a request?” 

She put the tin on the glass table in front of her, took one of her gloves off, and motioned me to sit down in the porch chair next to her. 

She used to have two chairs, one for her and one for her Henry. However, one day, after a sunset swim, there were three chairs. That evening she invited me up to her porch and told me the story of how they met. 

“Try it. It has to be one of my best!” 

She handed me the muffin and it was as though my hand was nothing more than a hologram as it went tumbling down onto the wooden paneled porch. Freshly picked blueberries falling through the cracks. 

“Oh dear! It’s been a while since I fed the squirrels so they’ll thank you later! It looked a little burnt anyway.” She smiled and grabbed another, this one perfectly golden brown. 

Moments later another muffin went tumbling down, this time making its way past the porch steps onto the newly molded dirt. I looked at my hands wondering if they belonged to me.

I clapped my hands, nothing. I twiddled my thumbs, nothing. I made the executive decision to pretend my fingers were the last food on Earth and bit down, hard. I didn’t feel the need to stop until I tasted blood on the tip of my tongue.  

“Darling, are you okay?!” 

She grabbed a hold of my bleeding hands and put them against hers. Her touch felt warm and loving, like she held the hands of her loved ones many times before, as if her heart depended on helping others to keep beating. I grew accustomed to my father’s callused hands and yet somehow both felt just as nice. Her blue eyes were filled with worry and I could tell if I stared any longer a tear would find its way onto my freckled, sun-kissed cheeks. 

“They were just hot, that’s all,” 

I tried my best to prevent my knees from buckling after lying to one of my favorite people. 

“I should get to the beach before the sun comes up! Thank you again for the muffins, I know my family is going to love them.” 

I found myself halfway through the enchanted garden before I heard her calling after me. 

“But Honey! You forgot the muffins!”

I look down at my palms, empty of feeling and baked goods. Never a good combination. 

“I will stop by after the beach. I’ll bring you some seashells I find!” 

I swear my heart stopped for a second knowing very well I couldn’t pick up a seashell fifteen minutes ago, and the thought of putting myself through that again made me shiver. 

“Okay, be careful down there and watch where you step, it’s sea turtle hatching season!”

With that, I gave her what I could assume looked like a two-year-old trying to give a thumbs up, and headed straight for the shore.

It couldn’t be more than two seconds after closing her fence that I found my bare feet racing across the street, toward the water. I sprinted past the couple hand in hand, the other holding their freshly brewed cup of coffees. I blew past Ray who was doing his daily morning meditations, giving me a nod and mouthing the words, namaste. I would usually sit my bum right next to him and worship the rising sun as he does but this morning felt different, even though the word feel was a sensitive topic. I weaved my way through the minimum beach chairs that sat in the sand holding nothing more than a person and their book until finally I reached the water and fell to my knees. 

My mind has never known steady but it has known balance. It knew when it was time to keep it together for the sake of my tired brother, my spiritless mother, and my father who knew nothing but love until the world drained him of all he had. These hands have thrown baseballs with my brother as my parents were arguing through the window. These pinkies have made promises that I would die rather than break them. I danced my first dance with my father's rough hands in mine, the night my mother didn’t come back. We were in the kitchen and he showed me his favorite country song. We danced until the ding in the oven went off telling us our cookies were ready. I missed who my father was and wondered if he would ever be back to the man I wanted to always remember him as. 

I looked past the horizon, towards the sun that now peeked above the glistening water. My mind became the waves, unsteady and crashing down over and over again. I breathed in the salt air and breathed out hoping my lungs wouldn’t collapse in on itself. 

My eyes opened at the feeling of my Dad’s old construction T-shirt meeting the hand of someone behind me. I turned my head to reveal the unknown shadow, my father’s green eyes filled with tears. I've seen those tears on him long ago, they were different from the ones I’ve been greeted with the past few years… these were joyful. I looked at him and then looked at my lifeless hands. He exhaled a breath that seemed like he was holding forever, put my hands into his, and dropped to the sand. 

“I love you and I am so sorry.” 

My father spoke as if those were the only words he knew. He kissed my hands and for the first time that day, the first time in years, I felt his calloused, warm hands hold the palms of his daughters’ and we laid there watching the sun come up, smelling the scent of wood and pine and feeling the hands of the father I always knew would come back to me.