Right

Daddy’s been dead and buried for two full weeks before I’m finally able to get the money together to get home to Mama, and she’s spittin’ mad about it. I know that Daddy wouldn’t have cared, though. He hated anything to do with funerals and would have really hated people crying and carrying on at his own. Funerals are for the living, Babygirl, he used to tell me. The only thing the dead care about is worms.

It’s late when I arrive, and Mama’s passed out in the blue corduroy Lazy-Boy that should have been hauled to the dump years ago. The front room is filled with the soft light from Mama’s old porcelain lamp and the glow of the muted Andy Griffith Show rerun on TV. Mama’s ashtray is full of snubbed-out Virginia Slims, and a stale smoke haze hangs heavy in the air.

Trying to move her out of here is going to turn into psychological warfare; it always does when Mama gets stubborn.

In the kitchen I’m greeted with a sink full of half-washed dishes and a nearly-empty jug of Carlo Rossi. The old, sticky table in the corner is covered with papers that I’ll have to sort out later. I don’t even have to check to know that I’m looking at a years’ worth of unopened medical bills and other probably-important documents about Daddy’s pension, and I’m instantly frustrated at Mama. She’d always let Daddy take care of things like this, but it wasn’t because she didn’t know how. Mama preferred to act stupid about money so that way she could keep pretending they had more than they actually did.

Mama didn’t want to be poor. I suppose no one ever does, but Mama would dissolve into full blown hysterics if Daddy came home with less in his paycheck than the week before, and Daddy would spend half a day shushing her and bringing her presents just to prove they weren’t going to end up destitute in an alley. But that was back when Daddy was a cop and he wasn’t telling her lies just to get some peace. I wonder if all the stress of keeping Mama happy had been the actual thing that finally killed him.

He wasn’t my real daddy. That man died before I was born, and I’m not even sure that he knew Mama was pregnant when he drank too much and wrapped his car around a tree on Scotch Lane. Daddy didn’t come along until I was four, but both me and Mama fell hard for him right away. He was Wayne Township’s police chief, and he wore a shiny brass medal on his breast pocket and called me “Ma’am.” When he married Mama that summer, we moved into this house, and we became a family.

But my focus is elsewhere right now. I head across the small, overgrown backyard and straight to Daddy’s old wood shed. The door still creaks the same way it always did, and I fill my lungs with the sweet, familiar childhood smell of wood chips and gasoline. It’s a miracle that the bulb in the singular overhead lamp still works. It’s dim, but it works. The dust-covered work table still neatly displays all of Daddy’s small tools and nuts and bolts and springs; each meticulously and carefully placed in neatly labeled coffee cans. What I want, though, is hidden underneath. I carefully run my hand over the floor under the table until I feel a tiny wood splinter pierce my finger.

It’s still here. Just where I left it.

Time and temperature have warped the wood into ugly, angry knots, but it’s still intact. I can feel my heartbeat in my temples as I lift the lid and greet my long-lost childhood treasures.

The pink rock I found in Millheim’s Creek that summer.

The wooden nickel Bentley Beckham gave me on my 10th birthday.

The tiny stuffed fox with the worn down fur from the Wayne County Fair.

The delicate little black diary with the soft, black leather and filled pages that never belonged to me.

Steffie only lived with us sometimes, because she mostly lived with her mama in Titusville. Steffie’s Mama and our Daddy were never married, and I suppose that’s because they were oil and vinegar. Steffie’s mama was a big, brassy lady that took up a whole room and had a mouth like a trucker and got on everyone’s nerves. Mama was really the only one that liked her. She used to say that JoAnn was uglier n’ homemade sin but goddamn if she ain’t a hoot! Steffie was exactly like Daddy, though; quiet and soft and full of secrets. Over the years, Steffie's become a ghost in the back of my head, but I know she was real once. Every now and again little snips of her pop into my day. A delicate white cameo on a choker around her neck. A poster of David Lee Roth that was torn up at the corners. Baby Soft perfume in pretty pink bottles. The scritch-scritch sound the purple pen made as it glided across the pages with teenage fury.

“Ew, it’s made of mole skin?”

“No, dummy. It’s Mole-SKINE. It’s just like the ones French people use”

“What do you write in there?”

“Secrets I'll never tell.”

The Steffie McDade story is this town’s favorite ghost story. I reckon it’s still told around the campfires at spook season. That’s how I first heard it; huddled around Cynthie and Bentley Beckham’s fire pit when I was sixteen.

It’s full dark and real chilly, and Bentley’s letting me wear his letter jacket. It smells like Old Spice. I had too much apple whisky and now my lips are tingly and my words are slurry, and Mama’s gonna have my hide.

“Trenton Jenson’d taken a real shine to Steffie, an’ one night he took her out Route 7 to Sullivan Pointe. Trenton tried real hard to get Steffie to go all the way with him, but Steffie kept sayin’ no. But, y’know, Trenton’s a Jenson boy, an’ ain’t no one alive ever said no to a Jenson boy. Not with all that money. So Trenton went plumb crazy an’ put his hands ‘round Steffie’s neck an’ squeezed ‘til he couldn’t squeeze no more. Then he threw her outta the car an’ drove down to the A & P an’ called his daddy to come git him.”

But no one ever tells the rest of the story. Maybe no one remembers that Daddy was the first one that responded to the call. Maybe they’re too polite to repeat the part where Daddy drove straight to the Jenson’s dairy farm on Rancord Road and punched Trenton Jenson so hard that one of his front teeth flew clean out his mouth. That’s why there wasn’t a trial. Trenton’s daddy’s fancy lawyers figured out a deal with the county, and instead of rotting away in a jail cell for murder, Trenton had to spend his senior year cleaning bedpans at the Lutheran Home all because a cop attacked him.

Mama had too much rhubarb that year, so she’d made JoAnn a pie because JoAnn couldn’t bake worth a damn.

There’s slimy, globby red smears across the flagstone where Steffie’s mama dropped the pie, and I cry a little because it looks like blood. Steffie’s mama is screaming like a banshee right there on the porch. Daddy’s cryin’. I feel Mama’s long pink fingernails dig into the tops of my shoulders. I’m real scared, but I don’t know what’s scaring me.

“You shouldn’t a’let her go, Bill! This is your goddamn fault!”

“I didn’t know, Jo. I didn’t know.”

Daddy lets out a wail like a dyin’ dog, and I bury my face in Mama’s blue apron.

“You’s a goddamn cop, you sonofabitch! You coulda protected her! You let that goddamn hillbilly bastard kill our baby, an’ now he ain’t even goin’ to jail!”

Mama smooths my hair. I try to be sad about Steffie, but all I wonder is where she hid her soft little diary made of mole skin.

I found it behind an old jewelry case in Steffie’s closet a week later, on the same day they found Trenton Jenson’s body. He went to the woods and put a bullet in his brain and as the town mourned, I read their love story in those pages. Trenton loved Steffie, and Steffie loved Trenton right back. She wrote pages upon pages about how Trenton wanted to marry her and how excited she was to tell him about the baby growing inside her.

After Trenton died, the Jenson family fell apart. Trenton’s daddy drank himself stupid until his liver completely gave out, and his mama ran the farm right into the ground and then disappeared somewhere. Daddy quit the police force the day after Steffie’s funeral and although she never said it out loud, Mama always resented him for it. He never was able to hold a job for very long after that, because some days he wasn’t able to do much besides sit in the woodshed and stare at nothing. Most folks took pity on him and hired him to do odd jobs here and there, but some weeks we barely had enough to get by. It didn’t matter. I grew up happy, because there was no other option. I knew Daddy loved me even during the dark days, and I knew Mama protected me from the worst of it. I came out of childhood with minimal scarring, and I understand how lucky that is.

I flip through the aging pages and trace my finger over the familiar, flowery script like I’d done so often so many years ago, but suddenly I stop. There’s a brand new entry; one that I’ve never seen. The ink is brighter, and the handwriting is familiarly slanted and shaky.

Babygirl-

You protected my girl for all these years. I love you even more for it, an’ my heart’s already bursting.

I need you to know one thing, an’ then I want you to burn it all cause it’s time.

I shot him, Annie. He took my girl away, an’ I shot him.

And it ruined his mama.

I lost my Steffie, but I still had you and your mama. Trenton’s mama had nothin’.

Now I know why he done it. I know I can’t never make it right. Maybe you can.

Red Folgers bottom shelf.

12111 Pole Bridge.

I love you to bits and bits,

Daddy

There are nearly 10 Folgers cans that are now more rusted than red, but they’re all neatly lined up along the bottom shelf with the mostly-empty cans of WD-40. I brace myself for an onslaught of spiders and open the first can. Inside is a yellowed handkerchief wrapped around several large wads of money. Same with the second. And the third.

It takes me nearly a half hour to count those wads under the dim light at the work table. When I’m finally through, $20,000 in mostly $100 bills are neatly piled there. Benjamin Franklin grins stupidly up at me, but I’m numb.

This is enough to cover most of the medical bills.

This is enough for a full-time caregiver for Mama.

This is enough to cover my rent for years.

This is not my money.

Pole Bridge Road is so overgrown and dusty that I worry if my beat-up Camry can make it all the way down, but by the grace of God and all the angels it putters all the way to the dilapidated single-wide at the end. An old lady sits on the porch stoop smoking a long cigarette and glaring daggers at me. I don’t blame her. She was beautiful once. She had a loving husband and a lovely young boy and they made her happy and wealthy and full.

I clutch the large envelope in my hand and step slowly towards her.

“Mrs. Jensen? My name is Annie McDade.”