Weeks into the new year I took myself to a diner outside the city. Folgers coffee served in thick ceramic mugs. Eggs and buttered toast for dinner. Mine was the table in back where teenaged servers pecked indiscreetly at their phones, and, in the booth to my right, a mother began to tell her daughter a story.
“It was the middle of winter,” she was saying. “And pouring rain. Nana had just died. I took you to Dr. Bornstein because all three of you were really sick.”
She might have been in her late forties, the mother. Dyed-brown hair too plum for her complexion. It looked to me like she colored it from the box. I imagined her standing in front of an oval-shaped mirror with those see-through gloves, spouting a tube of dye at the roots, the way my own mother used to.
After the doctor’s, the woman explained, they stopped at the supermarket to fill the prescriptions and get the ginger ale, the popsicles, some food for the fridge.
“We were back at the house maybe an hour later, arms full of shopping bags, taking off jackets and boots. Then I realized I never got the medicine. I couldn’t put you back in the car—you were all so young, the three of you still in car seats. Coughing, sore throats. Your father was stuck at the office so I had to call Papa, who never wanted to help or babysit. Never lifted a finger for anyone his whole life. I said, ‘Dad, I need your help. The kids are all really sick. I took them to Dr. Bornstein but forgot to fill the scripts. Can you come up and sit with them?’ There was this big sigh on the other end, then he said, ‘Hokay, I’ll come up,’ which was shocking, honestly. You were in the bedroom with the bottom drawer open, pulling out the pajamas, helping Anthony because he was only a year old and had just started walking. We were in there for maybe five minutes when the doorbell rang. I thought it had to be church people on my steps but when I peeked through the glass it was Papa standing there in his fuchsia windbreaker, hands in his pockets. I opened the door and said, ‘How are you here? I just hung up with you.” He said, “You called and I’m here, Maria.’ I said, ‘Did you fly?’ That’s how fast he got to my house. He came in, started talking to the dog. I put a movie on and told him just to sit with you on the couch. Then: I’m driving down Bayrd Street, pulling onto Route 99, going past the bowling alley and the blind and curtain place—I stop at the light and look out the window and there’s my father walking soaking wet in the rain on his way to my house. I was stunned.”
“Mom. What are you talking about.” The girl looked to be around fifteen. Swallowed up in a stone-colored sweatshirt.
“It was him. His clothes, his walk, everything. He had on the windbreaker—you know the one. Hands in his pockets.”
“It was your mind playing tricks.”
“Nosir. I knew it right then. It wasn’t my father back at my house. It was something supernatural. Don’t laugh. I’m serious. He never helped anyone unless it was on his terms. Never offered a favor unless my mother was with him, and I think my mother in heaven knew I was desperate that day. I think it was my mother who came up to my house so I could go to the pharmacy. Then the real Papa came after.”
The woman napkinned her plate, I think, to keep from picking at hashbrown crumbs. I felt sad for her, though her demeanor did not signal sadness. I tried to make eyes, scraped an inch closer in my metal chair.
“So, you left us home alone with a ghost.”
“He didn’t like to drive in the rain or the snow, and it was a bad day—not just rain, but hard, icy rain.”
“And this is more believable to you. Ghost Papa. Angel Nana.”
She bothered me, this girl. I didn’t like her tone. Or the way she went at the drawstring of her sweatshirt, leaving it wet and puckered with her cowy chews. Too obvious, I suppose, to say I recognized a former self in her, a version of me I was keen to forget.
“When I was in my early twenties, working at the bank in Boston? A blizzard was starting and Papa wouldn’t come get me. I had to take the bus and by accident got on the wrong one because you couldn’t see a foot in front of you it was such white-out conditions. Phones were down. Buses stopped running. Two feet of snow on the ground. I didn’t get home until nine o’clock at night. They thought I was dead or kidnapped. I really don’t know why you’re laughing. It all just goes to prove—it wasn’t my father that day.”
“This story doesn’t even make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”
The girl plucked a pink packet from the ceramic holder, tore it open, and sugared the tabletop. She proceeded to draw shapes with her fingers—stars and swirls, little sugar people. “Wasn’t Papa a grave digger?” she asked, without looking up.
“At one point, yeah. He had a bunch of jobs. There was the paper cutting job, the paint factory, then he was out of work for a long time until Uncle Louie got him a job at the Parks Department doing cemetery maintenance. My mother got him jobs in between that he just wouldn’t show up for. One was at a fish company but he didn’t like the smell of the fish. We were on welfare and did stamps, my mother waitressing at The Club. I was going out with Dad. I think it was Dad actually who got Papa the job with the city.”
“So, who was on the phone with you?”
“When?”
“When you called for help.”
“It was the real Papa at first but then the ghost stepped in because he was like, ‘I’m comin’ now,’ all in a good mood. And when I got back to the house—that was the real Papa for sure. He said you were all sick because Dad didn’t put the heat high enough. He had you all rolled up in blankets, little burritos. Even the dog. It was funny. He was loving in other ways.”
The mother stretched her fingers as if searching for something to touch. She pulled a napkin from beneath a coffee mug, pleated its paper corners, then opened them back up. She had those hands. Mother-hands. Leathered from too much washing. I thought of my own mother’s hands, how she used to tweak each of her rings just before a photo was taken, making sure her costume jewels faced the right direction.
“Ask your father, if you don’t believe me. I told him as soon as he walked through the door. He said, ‘I believe it. Your father never would have come up with no complaints, no griping.’”
“Poor Papa.”
Poor Papa?
“I don’t remember him being as bad as you say.”
I wanted to swipe her shitty art right off the table. I wanted to say to this girl: why won’t you listen to your mother? She’s right here.
“A month earlier—now I’m laughing—a month earlier, Dad and I were both sick with a bad bug, throwing up. Couldn’t even function. We asked Papa if he would bring you guys Happy Meals. He said, ‘Naw, try and reach your brother.’ When I saw him walking in the rain that day, after the shock wore off, I said to myself, ‘Yup, I knew it was too good to be true. A ghost is at my house.’”
A long pause. A dimple, worming on the mother’s cheek. “I still have the jacket, you know. In my closet.”
The girl livened in her seat. “Can I have it?”
“No, you can’t have it. It’s mine.”
“Come on!”
“It’s the only thing I have of his. That’s how I know it was Nana who came to help that day. After he died, nothing. But he did make a point just before it happened to complain about the plot. His was in the sun and the grass was a little burnt. He didn’t think it was fair Nana was getting all the shade.”
At this, the girl looked horrified, drawstring spilling from her open mouth. Her reaction seemed to satisfy the mother, who was leaning back in her chair. The mother’s gaze swooped to catch mine, then a small smile.