My father's fingers resemble pebbles; smooth with some knicks between the creases and dry from Chicago winter, yet when they touched the keys of his childhood Baldwin, they'd bounce like the pebbles he tried to teach me to throw on my sixth birthday out on the lake in Wauconda. “See how this side is smooth?” He said to me, taking my hand with long fingers like his to run along the gray underside of the rock with just the tips of my index finger and thumb pressing into it, his hand engulfing mine. I try not to remember the grass. “One, two, three!” His soft tone crawling on the wind into my ears as I guide my arm back like he did, I flick my wrist like he did, with a plop my pebble sinks to settle in the seaweed that wraps around my ankles and weaves between my toes.
It's Sunday. The day the television stays off until 6 p.m. so my father can have peace. My feet ache from kitten heels with muddy toes so I let them breathe on the walk from my car through the dirt on the garage floor up to the wooden door with the glass window that I broke two summers ago with the ladder my dad left out of place. I bite my tongue to stop myself from my usual greeting: “mom, dad, I'm home,” as to not upset my mother, again. The soles of my feet track dust through the kitchen and create a “U” into the dining room, my eyes land just above my knees to the top of the bench.
The bench. The wooden bench. The wooden bench with the oval of worn off polish from when my dad, his mother, his brother, my sister, and I would sit for hours combined over 50 years, plunking at the ivory keys that have grown sticky. My father spent four years teaching me to plunk, hoping that one day those plunks would turn into smooth melodies instead of disjointed “Scarborough Fair.” Silent screams emit from still keys aching to be touched, to be played. Unlike the ones at the funeral home that are played all day long, singing songs full of goodbyes and cries with silent tears splashing onto twenty year old chairs rough to the touch, but only rough when compared to the soft blanket I wrap around my back and shoulders. Wrapped around for a means of comfort while my body spends hours on the floor of my bedroom, chest rise, breath catches, body shakes, exhale slow, hours, hours.
Steam curls over scalding water, engulfing cell after cell until the water reaches bare torso, temperature rising, everything above water cold and numb from lack of blanket. Blank stare, reflection seen in the partially rusted chrome handle, eye contact with the brown eyes with the gold flecks my father gave me. “You don't want eyes like mine,” he said to me from his hospital bed. “They don't have lights behind them like yours.” He gave me my 17th birthday present that day so he'd have an excuse to spend time with me, not that he needed one. “Because I love you,” he said, laying in my hands a little gold necklace he made with his cracked hands. The first time I wore it we laughed and he complimented the gold in my eyes. The second time I wore it my eyes stayed low, watching my feet kick the yellow grass behind the mausoleum, the toes of my shoes caked in dirt.
Peripheral vision catches glow from the flickering shower light coated in sand-like dust, clinging. Not the dust, my hands cling to the sides of my bathtub, knuckles white, not from heat, from tension. Try to relax. No. Let go. No. Inhale. Yes. Exhale. Not yet. No. No. Memories race: father laughing, me laughing, I splash water in his face, he splutters, I giggle, sandcastles crumbling like broken families—one grain at a time, seaweed tangled in our toes, pebbles picked, pebble splash, no. Soap bar, splash, sink. Suds release themselves, tiny rings ripple like when my father tried to teach me to throw pebbles and they sank into the saltwater that was Bangs lake.
