by Brett Ann Stanciu
The morning her wisdom teeth are extracted my teenage daughter says, “I might die today.”
“You won’t,” I assure her.
“You don’t know that.” She flosses her teeth meticulously.
As I drive to the appointment, she clenches the plastic prescription bottle with its single tab. “What is this stuff anyway?”
“To make you relax a little. Take the edge off.”
“You don’t know that.” At precisely nine a.m. she swallows the pill with the tiniest mouthful of water, a sip so small she might have been lost in a desert, conserving her scant resources on her search for home.
*
An hour and four extracted teeth later, her face streaked with tears the nurse assures me are a female reaction — “we cry at nothing” — my daughter marvels that there are two mamas. “Cars are flying everywhere. It would be so fun to drive.”
She FaceTimes her friend. “I didn’t die! I’m a senior. I’ll graduate from high school.”
At home she drops on the couch and asks why I’m not at work. Her cheeks have already swelled.
I set a glass of water on the table beside her. “I’m staying here with you today.” I pat the couch cushion to encourage her cat Acer to snuggle up and comfort her.
She wipes fresh tears with Kleenex. “When I woke up, I thought he had come back. He stood in the doorway, winking at me like he used to.”
Oh, my heart.
Oh, my fatherless daughter.
Those winter nights he rubbed your cold bedsheets with a heated cast iron skillet to keep you warm, how he taught you to ski through the woods by pulling you with his poles, the banana splits you shared with him, are with you always. Those years and that love nestle in your beating heart, in my limping heart. Who understands the mercurial ways of this world? Not I. How a father might morph back into a boy and light out for new territory?
For two days we eat vanilla ice cream. We hang out on the back porch, cool in the shade of the elder trees. Sparrows nesting in the budding milkweed serenade us.
Brett Ann Stanciu is the author of Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal (Steerforth Press, 2021). A recipient of a 2020 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, her essays and fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Memoir Monday, Vermont Almanac, Taproot, Vermont Literary Review, The Long Story, Parent Co., and Green Mountains Review, among other publications. Her novel Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2015) portrays the challenges of a hardscrabble family farm. She lives in Hardwick, Vermont, with her daughter and is a great believer in the power of clotheslines.
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