Singer Distance by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Tin House Books

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My dad didn’t haunt the farmhouse after his death, but he did before it. When Mom and I, along with most of the nation, were in the grip of Holladay fever, he turned poltergeist, seen only from the edge of your vision. Cabinets clanked, doors slammed. Faucets went on and off. His hammer pounded against the siding or the shingles. His boots thunked down the hall, but turn and you’d catch only the space where he’d been. It’s an exaggeration to say we never saw him—he sat with us for dinner, chewing his roast with a purposeful joylessness before clearing his plate and heading back out to work, even if it was dark. Mom would have the radio in the other room turned up loud enough to hear from the table, and whenever Holladay made a fundraising plea, he’d scoff audibly.

The pressure of Holladay’s approaching attempt changed a key thing: how he was with my mother. I was used to my father’s dismissive cut-downs and disinterest toward me—“You were more skeptical at seven than you are at fourteen. Tell me how that happened.” Skeptical was his great compliment, his measure of a man. Not of a woman. He’d always loved that my mother was mostly practical but could get a little dreamy. He would have called that femininity, not something he wanted in a son. When he couldn’t look at her either, I knew the rot between him and me had soaked into their marriage. She no longer snickered at his grumblings.

He was insufferable when Holladay’s message failed. He walked around the farm beaming. He couldn’t help smirking whenever he saw either of us. My mother started sleeping on the couch that week. Dad found that funny for the first few days too—then he became as bitter as ever, and even more angry with me.

He told me, when he knew she was out on an errand, that I had ruined my mother. I was shocked. I had never heard him say a negative word about her, in public or private. He was as stubborn in his devotion to her as in everything else. I told him he’d broken his own relationship with her, after practicing the art on me, but his comment sat with me like a punch. I got angrier and angrier at having to hold it in. I wanted to wound him back, so I passed it on. I told her what he’d said, running my sword through him even though she stood between us.

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