Chapter 16: Both My Girls

Mindy didn't let Gabe follow us.

She walked across the lot and knocked on his window with one knuckle.

I couldn't hear what she said.

He listened and nodded, and then he started the truck and drove away.

"What did you tell him?" I asked in the car.

"That if he wants to be useful, he can watch the motel. Glen will go back to it."

"He won't like being sent off."

"He sits outside a clinic all day with a thermos. He'll survive."

The cemetery is on a hill north of the river.

In July the grass goes pale and loud with grasshoppers.

I had been there on every one of my father's birthdays, and I knew the way to the row.

Mindy did not.

She walked two steps behind me with her hands pushed into her jacket.

The stone was small and gray.

It said WALTER SUNDBERG, and under that, in the plain letters I had chosen: Father.

She stood in front of it for a long time.

"I thought he'd be bigger," she said.

"The stone?"

"All of it."

She crouched and laid her palm gently against the stone.

"I haven't said his name aloud in twenty years," she said. "I tried once in a mirror, when I was twenty-three. I couldn't."

"Was he that bad to you?"

"He wasn't bad at all. That's the thing."

She kept her hand where it was.

"He left, and he called every Sunday for a year, and my mother took the phone off the hook. Then he stopped calling."

"Mindy."

"I decided that meant he didn't want me. I never asked. By the time I wanted to ask, I was too proud."

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