The Sun

Mom was on the road a lot when I was growing up. Sometimes she’d be gone for a while. A month, maybe more. I didn’t really think anything of it. When you’re a kid you don’t understand it’s not like that for everyone. You can’t really comprehend other worlds. You just assume they’re all like yours.

I have a vague memory from back then of my parents fighting. Dad was yelling and mom was just quiet. I think I only remember it because she was quiet. It was so unlike her.

I don’t remember what they were fighting about. Dad had sent me to bed early and I was mad because I knew mom was coming home and I wanted to see her. I snuck down and can still picture her sitting there, hunched down with dad towering over her. There was a cell phone on

the table, and he kept pointing to it and he was crying and yelling, and she just sat there and took it.

But it wasn’t usually like that. Usually, she came home and threw her bags on the floor and shouted and a warmth would radiate through the house.

Then she’d come into the kitchen and dad would have her favorite ready. Buttermilk roast chicken with Brussel sprouts and potatoes fried in duck fat. She’d eat the whole chicken. She was a tiny thing, but on those days, with that meal, she could eat like no one I’ve ever seen.

Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Dad would make sure him, and I ate before she got home, so we didn’t interfere. So, she could have it all if she wanted it. She’d let me eat the wings. The skin was crisp and the meat juicy and she taught me how to eat them by putting the whole wing in my mouth and clawing off the meat and skin with my teeth.

It was the only taste of that chicken I ever got. Dad wouldn’t make it if she wasn’t there. Even after she died, he wouldn’t make it. It was hers and hers alone.

One time I got into a fight about mom. It was career day, and my dad couldn’t present because he didn’t have a real job. Then at recesses I overheard some kids talking about it.

‘Why didn’t Jack have his dad talk?’ someone asked.

‘His dad doesn’t work because he doesn’t have a mom,’ someone else answered in a hushed tone. They didn’t mean it as an insult. They weren’t trying to pick a fight.

I punched him as hard as I could, and he stumbled back with surprise before launching into me. We rolled around in the woodchips under the playset throwing weak punches and pulling hair until our teacher broke it up. When she pulled me off my face was streaked with dirt and tears.

Dad wasn’t angry when he picked me up from school.
‘What happened?’ he asked after we’d driven for a few blocks in silence.
‘Kid said I didn’t have a mom,’ I answered, staring out the window trying to hide my

unrelenting tears.
That was it. He didn’t say anything else, but I thought I could feel him smile.
Mom came home that night. She took the first plane she could get after she heard what

happened. The next day she came to my school and presented. Even then I knew I should be embarrassed, but I couldn’t manage it. I loved having her there, I loved her explaining her job, I loved basking in her glow for that whole day.

She stayed home for two months straight that time. She still worked. She took calls and went out during the day, but she was always there at night and her suitcases, which stood permanently by the front door whenever she was home – always packed, always ready to go – didn’t move.

Then one day I came down and they were gone. It didn’t bother me. That’s just how it was. We didn’t do big goodbyes or notes. Just an empty space by the door.

Then things would go back to normal. Dad and I would fall back into our rhythm. Early dinners and old movies and baseball games and working together to figure out my math homework.

It’s easy with hindsight to see a lot of things that you didn’t realize in the moment. I can’t say when I was a kid, I saw my dad’s sighs or heard the desperation in his voice when he spoke to her. I can’t say I knew he was depressed or saw how much she hurt him. That was just dad. That’s how he always was.

I found out later that they’d separated for a bit right after I was born. I was still a baby and don’t remember it. Dad had woken up one morning to a cold bed and a colder note. He showed it to me once.

Phil,
Sorry. I didn’t want it to be this way. I have to go away for a bit. It’s just

something I have to do. I know you and Jack will be alright otherwise I wouldn’t go. I’ll send money and try to write.
I promise I’ll come back.

Love,
Caroline
He showed it to me years later. After she’d died and I’d learned everything.
‘I didn’t want her to come back,’ he’d said, his face covered in tears but his voice steady.

‘I wanted her to go and leave us be. Let me... but she couldn’t even give me that. She had to let me know she’d come back.’

It’s hard to picture your parents as sexual beings, but I’ve seen pictures of dad from when I was born. He’d have found someone else. He was a bit boring and clingy, but he was also kind and handsome and dependable. Someone would’ve seen him for who he was. And he’d have had a different life. A better one. But it wasn’t to be.

Instead, he had mom.

I know what she was to him. He was just some regular, quiet kid from a small town, and she wasn’t. She was special. Beautiful and smart and vibrant. She pulled the entire energy of a room towards her like a sun. And once he felt that warmth, he never could escape her orbit.

I don’t think any of us ever could.

I found out about them at the funeral. Dad had known. That’s what the argument with the phone was about.

Susan looked like mom, but without the radiance. She had brown eyes and the same build, but there was something missing, and she knew it. She was stooped and her flat brown eyes darted around anxiously. She seemed to be constantly ready for someone or something jump out and attack her. They were all that way. Afraid of something and everything.

Even her other husband, Bill, carried himself with that fear. He was tall where dad was short, but aside from that he was nothing. Just a blank. I never understood what she’d seen in him. I could understand straying. I could understand searching for something more, something else. But I never could understand what she’d found in him.

At first it bothered me that she named the boy Jack. It felt wrong. It felt like she’d stolen something from me. It didn’t help that at the funeral he’d followed me around and thought we’d become friends or bothers or whatever. He kept trying to show me his yo-yo and the tricks he could do with it.

‘Get away from me you little freak,’ I’d shouted at him after I couldn’t ignore him any longer. ‘Can’t you see no one wants you here? Can’t you see even she wanted you to stay hidden?’

He slunk away after that. Aunt June, my dad’s sister, told me to go apologize but dad stopped me.

‘That’s alright,’ he said, staring at me and trying to repress a smile. ‘He doesn’t owe him an apology. He doesn’t owe them anything.’

Then we’d walked outside and let the cold penetrate our jackets. We didn’t say anything. We just stood there in the cold sun light and watched our breath and shook before we went back inside.

It was obvious to everyone that we were the main family. We were first. We were better. We were the real one. That’s why the funeral was by us. It didn’t matter that the will was how it was. I knew we were the main family. I knew she loved us more. I wondered if she even loved them at all. I think maybe she just felt guilty about it, knew they were a mistake, and that’s why she did what she did. That’s why she gave them more.

But dad fought that and got it all in the end. It took a while and the lawyer took a lot of it, but dad didn’t care. It wasn’t about the money for him.

After the judge handed down the verdict dad stared over at them with his now weak blue eyes, but he didn’t move.

It was Bill who crossed the room. Bill who spoke.
‘Look,’ he started, his voice soft and fragile, practically breaking. ‘I know...’
He trailed off and looked out a window where the sun was falling in the distance.
‘I know we aren’t,’ he continued. ‘You know, traditional. But maybe for the kid’s sake

we could...’
I watched dad’s fist clench and felt his heart quicken. I wanted him to do it. But he didn’t.

He wasn’t that kind of man. He just turned and walked to the window, leaving Bill standing there, hand outstretched.

I followed him and together we stood, staring out at the window until we were sure they’d left.