Sunday Dinners

Spoons clanking porcelain bowls make up the only sound at the dinner table, as they are passed counterclockwise and from the left. It is Sunday, the day we grown children gather to break bread with our mother. It is also June 26. The same day my Daddy went to jail, 12 years ago. We all know it, our sighs saying more than we want to admit. But we are not permitted to utter it aloud; Mama forbids it, as though by not speaking of it, it simply fails to be true. Oh, Mama. Poor, Mama. Don’t much know if she’s holding out hope for when Daddy returns. What future would he have anyway in this world? Twelve years is a long time under normal circumstances to hold a candle for love, or worse yet, obligation. Let alone for a convict. And that’s only a third of the way into his sentence!

We were all children when he left and now, here we are, some of us with our own little families in tow. I fear for my children. There I said it! What it might mean for them when they are old enough to know their grandpappy is an incarcerated man. My Daddy also scares the shit out of me, even still! Or let’s say, the memory of him does, some of it tethered to reality, but most of it a fabrication, patched together like a quilt of assorted second-hand clothing. Let’s not forget, he did kill a man, that’s what he went in for. I just can’t shake the idea that, if he did it once, he could do it again, even to one of us this time.

Had I really thought it all through, I probably would have held off having children of my own. But somehow, within the swirling vortex of those first few years, my heart opened, like the delicate wrapping on a tiny gift box, with Jeremy filling it up with sweet affirmations, love, and apple-pie goodness. Why should I be punished for Daddy’s mistakes? That’d be too high a price for anyone to pay. Sure, it’s too high for Mama too, but I am not sure she sees it that way. She’s more apparition these days anyway, a hollow shell of whom she might ever have been. Which might give context to the silence that descends our repast, thick like the Texas heat. We live in as much fear of our mother morphing from Doctor Jekyll to an unpredictable Mr. Hyde, so we sit in silence, knowing it’s too much of a gamble to take.

After a while, Amber slices through with her small talk.

“Did you know the Knowltons are putting their house up for sale?” she says to no one. “Yeah, they’re looking to buy a bigger house, can you believe it? In Waco, of all places.”

Inside, I feel like smacking Amber on the head. “I don’t give a shit about the Knowltons,” I refrain from saying aloud. They are neighbors of hers I met only a single time when Amber hosted a holiday party years ago. “And what’s so wrong with Waco? What a snob!” But I laugh at her use of “know” and “Knowlton in the same sentence, the only reprieve from her banality and naïve peacemaking. But then again, at least she tries.

As soon as my plate is cleared, I get up wordlessly from the table, open the sliding door to sit on the back veranda. I take in a deep breath, as though I had been held underwater and gasping for air. I gaze out across the pond, draped in a canopy of sagging, ancient willow trees. A Mallard duck family swims in a diamond shape, mother leading the front, daddy flanking the back. In the middle, five fuzzy ochre ducklings.

“Shit!” I say aloud. Out here, in nature, I can’t escape the thought of fathers. Even waterfowl know how to be fathers! More than my own. Sure, he would send me letters, in his unsteady cursive hand, and my married last name misspelled on the envelope. There’d be professions of love. Promises of being a better man. “I can’t wait to see you” was a frequent empty line that accompanied the guilt trips: “You don’t come visit me anymore.”

Though the letters kept coming, albeit more sporadically, I stopped reading them on my 18^th birthday, as a coming-of-age pact with myself. I am sure the subject matter didn’t change all that much over the years, and I needed to separate my current life from the crazy of my past, him included. Especially him!

What kind of man would he be after all these years? Twelve done, 18 more to go. Prison, I know, is no summer camp. It’s not college, or a rehabilitation facility. He isn’t going to bake brownies or take up macrame. Prison is a place where bad people go to get hardened even more. To learn how to steal, cheat, rape, murder, intimidate, all over again. Sure, there are innocent guys in there. Weren’t they all innocent? Ha! Eager to get a ticket out so they could go right back to doing whatever got them locked up in the first place? No, Daddy is right where he needs to be. Where I need him to be.  

The sliding door opens, and Jeremy comes out carrying Oliver on his hip. Suzie, dragging her doll by the hair, runs toward me, “Mommy, mommy! I’m so glad we found you!”

I open my arms to let her snuggle in. She smells of earth and sunshine and I gently tuck her messy curls behind her ears as she recounts her story in all its animated, rambunctious innocence. She is perfect! My heart wells up with gladness that I hadn’t waited to have her, in the end. Jeremy smiles and our eyes lock for a second. It feels longer. He is the keel of my boat. Oliver fusses and reaches down for me. I make room in my lap for both children, my most prized achievements.

I let out a long exhale. With my courage renewed, I go back inside. I might need to sit here silently, once a week, shoulder to shoulder with these specters of my past. If it’s one day a week, I suppose I can do that. The other 313 days belong to me and my kiddos. I vow to plant them like seeds and cherish every single one.