THE LAST TIME by Margaret MacInnis
1. The Last Time My Father Left My Mother
The last time my father left my mother, she asked him to. He was packing his things while I was trying on blouses at Filene’s Department Store. I was fifteen and knew that my father was sleeping in the guest room, but I didn’t know that he was leaving. My mother had said she wanted to buy me a new blouse, and I was surprised because we’d already gone school shopping. I thanked her when she handed me the bag, but she didn’t answer. She wouldn’t look at me. Perhaps to avoid a scene, she told me outside Filene’s, in the middle of the Worcester Galleria, that my father was moving out. It was Nana, she said, her great-aunt with whom we lived. Nana had told her and my father that for the sake of my younger sister Jessica and me, one of them would have to leave. Since Nana’s house was my mother’s childhood home, it made sense for my father to be the one to go. I threw the Filene’s bag at my mother. “You keep the stupid blouse.”
2. The Last Time My Father Cheated on My Mother
The last time my father cheated on my mother was with a girl more than half his age. Jan, the said girl, was eighteen. My father was thirty-nine. One might wonder how he would have had access to a girl of eighteen. It wasn’t through me: I was fifteen. My friends were illegal. My father was a married man with two children. He went to work, to church, to AA meetings, and every weekend, he visited my grandparents and uncle. Jan was actually my uncle’s girlfriend. This said uncle was my father’s baby brother, and eighteen years separated them. Colleen, a classmate who ran in different circles than I, is the one who told me that my father was messing around with Jan.
“You’re a liar,” I said, and she laughed. I am sure I could feel the heat from her stare, as I will for days to come, the burn.
“I’m not the liar,” she said.
3. The Last Time My Father So Incensed My Mother that I Thought She Might Kill Me
The last time my father so incensed my mother that I thought she might kill me – because, after all, it would be easier to kill me than him – was when he sent me home with a message for her. He wanted me to tell her that he loved her, that he had always loved her, and that he never would have divorced her. So. As soon as I got home, I burst into her bedroom to tell her what my father had said, verbatim, twice, and before I knew what was happening, she was grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me with what must have been fifteen years of frustration.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said as she shook me. “Those are only words. Ask me how I felt. If I ever felt loved. Ask me!”
I didn’t want to ask her anything. I hated her. I fixed my gaze on the wall and waited for her to let me go.
4. The Last Time I Heard Both Sides of a Conversation between My Parents
The last time I heard both sides of a conversation between my parents, my mother was speaking through the closed door of my father’s second floor apartment. This was the first apartment he moved into, and I was not yet living with him. It was late and he had taken me from Nana’s house because my mother was out when he had called earlier to speak with her.
“I want Margaret,” my mother said through the door.
“Too bad. You’ve lost her. I hope your boyfriend’s worth it.”
My father believed my mother was having an affair, that this could be the only real reason she would want to end their marriage. Had he not thought Jan was enough of a reason?
My mother pounded on the door. “Don’t turn Margaret against me. After everything I’ve done for you, this is what I get? How many women have there been?”
He told her to shut the fuck up or she was going to be sorry. I wished for her sake she would stop talking, but it seemed like she couldn’t. “Twenty, thirty, a hundred? I was never unfaithful to you. You ended this marriage.”
“Stop it,” he told her.
“Or what? What more could you possibly do?”
My father leaned his head against the door, listening to my mother. She was not giving up. Lowering her voice, she suddenly sounded like a girl, a child speaking to another child. “I’ve always been here for you. I’m still here. Don’t turn Margaret against me. You know what she means to me.”
These words hitting the air made me breathless. I had never considered that my father was trying to turn me against my mother. Part of me wanted to open the door and let her lead me away from this madness, for I experienced moments of lucidity and insight when I knew it was madness, but the part of myself I more deeply comprehended could never leave her father of her own volition. Because regardless of what my mother said, she was not “still here.” My father was breathing heavily, panting, and I saw the answer to my mother’s, “What more could you possibly do?” What more could he do? He could kill her. He could kill me. As much as he loved me, and as much as he professed to love my mother, I believed he was capable of killing us. I’d read of such men in my father’s books of true crime stories, men who snapped, killing their wives, children, parents, and pets, men who either got life in jail or the death penalty, or men who after shooting everyone who ever loved them or hurt them or both, turned the gun on themselves. On the other side of the door my mother must have been deciding she didn’t need to take me home. Quietly, calmly because maybe she too was considering true crime stories, she told my father he could keep me that night.
When the stairs creaked, and the downstairs screen door slapped shut, my father opened the door and ran after her. I went to the window. By the glow of the streetlights, I saw him clenching his fists. My mother, opening the car door, glanced over her shoulder. She turned to face him, which was brave considering his stance, his clenched fists, the somewhat maniacal look on his face. I held my breath, praying wildly that my mother was not about to die.
“You were the only person I ever trusted,” my father said. “How could you do this to me?”
“All I did was love you.”
Something in the tone of my mother’s voice made me think my mother might have been maniacal herself. Maybe she would be the one to kill us all. She moved dangerously close to my father, and standing face to face, she raised her hand, resting her palm on his chest. “I have just one question.”
“What?” he asked, and I noted the change in his tone too. His voice was calmer, gentler.
“Did you ever really love me?”
In a shocking display of tenderness, he covered her hand with his. “I tried. I really tried.”
5. The Last Time My Mother Spent the Night in the Same Room with My Father
The last time my mother spent the night in the same room with my father was the night after she’d asked him if he’d ever really loved her. From the kitchen doorway, I listened to her side of the conversation as she paced the kitchen, going only as far as the cord could reach.
“Yep . . . yep . . . yep,” she responded to whatever he was saying, her expression giving nothing away. I’m sure my heartbeat quickened when my mother said, “I’ll be right down.”
While she was digging through her purse for her car keys, Nana asked if he was okay, and my mother said she thought so. She wouldn’t be late, she said, but just in case, don’t wait up. I fell asleep on the couch while waiting. When the phone rang, I woke and bolted to the kitchen to answer it, but Nana, who had a phone beside her bed, beat me to it. “Hang up, Maggie,” she said. I took the stairs two at a time, making it to her room just as she was hanging up.
I asked the only logical question. Was my father coming home?
“No,” she said. “He’s going to the hospital.”
I stood waiting for more information, but she refused to offer any.
“Whose side are you on?” I shouted. I was shouting at a seventy-five-year-old woman, at a woman who would have done anything for me, who had given me a home, food, clothing, and stability. I knew she loved my father as much as she loved my mother, still I shouted at her. She was crying when she said, “There are no sides.”
She loved us all equally, she said, but my father “hadn’t always done right” and “wasn’t always quite right in the head.”
“I can’t take it,” I said, lying down beside her. I spoke into the pillow. “I don’t think I can take much more.”
Later that day, when my mother came home, she would not discuss what happened at my father’s, at least not in front of me. Not until years later would she tell me how my father held her hostage in the kitchen of his apartment, how he held a knife to her throat, begging her forgiveness. He was sorry he’d hurt her. He was sorry for everything. Of course he loved her. He would always love her.
6. The Last Time My Mother Cooked Breakfast for My Father
The last time my mother made breakfast for my father was Christmas morning, 1983. He had just moved out and was living in his cramped apartment on North Street. He arrived dressed in black from his sweater to his leather boots, to watch us open our Christmas presents. My father dressed in black from head to toe was never a good sign, but this day the color made him look paler and gaunter than he was. And he was truly pale gaunt. Since moving out he had lost a significant amount of weight. As my mother poured him a cup of fresh coffee, she asked how he wanted his eggs.
At the mention of food, he shook his head. “I can’t eat.”
“You have to eat,” my mother said, daring to speak what we all felt. “You’re skin and bones.”
He cradled his stomach and rocked. “I can’t. My ulcer’s killing me.”
My mother disappeared into the bathroom and came out with something he had left behind, his bottle of Mylanta. She placed it on the table in front of him. “Drink some now. I’ll get a spoon.”
He unscrewed the cap and swigged from the bottle.
“Over easy,” he said. My mother looked confused. “The eggs. I’ll take them over easy.”
7. The Last Time I Stole Something for My Father
The last time I stole something for my father was also the first. I didn’t want to do it. I said it was stealing; he said it wasn’t. The rings meant more to him than to her. “They’ll be safer with me.” The rings were my mother and father’s gold bands and my mother’s diamond. I must have believed him, or maybe I knew he was lying, but I didn’t care. I would have done anything for his approval, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. So. One afternoon while everyone was out, and my father was sitting in his car in the driveway with the motor running, I entered my mother’s bedroom. I knew I was doing something wrong, not in the rummaging itself, but rather the added dimension of taking something that belonged to someone else. Regardless of what my father said, this was stealing. But I would not refuse him.
I started with the bottom drawer as I had learned to do while rummaging. I preferred to work my way up. While it is true that the best stuff was usually in the top drawer, this was not always the rule. You could never tell where the best stuff would be hidden. I felt under sweaters, jeans, and pajamas. The fact that my father was waiting made me move a little faster. In a black velvet box at the back of her top drawer, I found two gold bands and a diamond. I snapped the box shut and ran outside to my father. My mother would not notice the rings were missing until after my father died, and I was hysterically, feverishly searching everywhere in our apartment, in every drawer, in every corner, even under the sink, for the rings, for the rings I now knew my mother had bought herself as a young bride. The rings were unrecoverable.
8. The Last Time I Rocked My Father in My Arms
The last time I rocked my father in my arms as if he were my child was another first. One Saturday morning, while I was home alone watching back-to-back reruns of The Waltons, my father rapped on the door. I hadn’t been expecting him. When he joined me on the couch, the sensation of being close to him so enthralled me that at first I didn’t notice it was a black day. It took me several minutes to note the black jeans, black sweater, black boots, and black leather jacket. There was something in his eyes too that frightened me. I cannot say what was there, or what was missing, so I reached for his hand, and before I knew what was happening, he was leaning into me, wrapping his arms around me, and resting his head on my shoulder. He cried quietly at first, then louder and louder until he was sobbing in my fifteen-year-old arms, and as I rocked him, rocked my father like a baby, my baby, I was daughter, wife, and mother. I rocked my father, my husband, and my son until he stopped crying, until his breathing steadied, until, as quickly as he had fallen into me, he pulled away.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said as he stood, but he wasn’t talking to me.
The daughter in me told him not to go, told him to wait for Mummy, told him to hang on, she’d be home soon. But. He was already halfway out the door.
9. The Last Time I Played Yahtzee
The last time I played Yahtzee – a game I had always enjoyed playing with Nana, my grandmother, and Jessica – was with Jan, my uncle’s former girlfriend and my father’s current one. I don’t remember why she and I were alone, but we were, and we were playing Yahtzee. She told me she didn’t want to take my father away from me. I knew that, didn’t I? Sure, I told her, but it was a lie. She most certainly wanted to take my father away. To replace her father. I wasn’t stupid. When she said she and my father might get married someday, I looked up from the dice. I had just rolled two sixes. I was going for sixes. After she said she wanted to have two children, a boy and a girl, she paused, waiting for me to say something, but my words were spinning around in my head so fast I couldn’t catch them, but she kept going, her words spilling over me. I moved my sixes aside and shoved the remaining dice back into the cup. Covering the cup with one hand, I shook violently. The dice tumbled to the table as Jan said, “Sean for a boy and Beth for a girl.” Beth? Beth without Elizabeth was stupid. I knew she meant Beth without Elizabeth. I shook my head and swept my third six to the side with the others. I lined them up in a neat row. What the fuck was she thinking? I was on my last shake. She covered the remaining dice with one of her hands. I looked at her long fingers, her nails painted pale pink. I had to say something, but I didn’t want to make her cry. Even though she irritated the hell out of me, even though she wanted to claim my father as her own, there were moments when I almost liked her. Even though she’d done what she did to Michael and my mother, I almost liked her. She was easy to understand, even then, when I was a child myself. She was a sensitive, troubled girl, the daughter of an alcoholic man, who lived at home with his wife and daughters, but had a girlfriend and made no secret of it. How could she not be drawn to my father’s charisma and good looks? The drama. She would’ve given him anything he wanted. She would’ve done anything. Of course she would’ve believed him when he said he loved her. I’m sure part of him did love her. I’m sure part of him meant every word he said to her. But I had to say something because there was no way my father was having more children.
“You might marry my father, but he doesn’t want more children.”
“He told me he did.”
“He told me he didn’t.” I shot her my best dirty look. She moved her hand, and I took my last turn. No more sixes. After I put the dice in the cup, I handed it to her. I filled in three of a kind on my score sheet. She didn’t say another word about having a baby.
10. The Last Time My Father Dated Someone His Own Age
The last time my father dated someone his own age he was dating Em Shea, the mother of Colleen (the same girl who first told me about Jan) and Colette, my uncle’s new girlfriend. Believe it or not, their father’s name was Colin, and he and Em had a tumultuous union at best. Suddenly Jan was out and Em, short for Emmajeanne, was in. Em, who was a year older than my father, and had been a classmate of my father’s late sister, decided quickly that she was in love with my father, and before I or her own family knew what was happening, she moved out of the trailer she shared with Colin and into an apartment with her children. Em was petite, but lean and hardened. A cigarette hung from her lip most of the time. She was the antithesis of Jan, the antithesis of my mother. Unlike Jan, Em was not someone I’d tell to sit in the back seat.
One night at my father’s apartment on North Street, I was in bed, half-reading and half-listening to his phone conversation when I heard him tell Em that he loved her. At the sound of his words, I shot up. My book tumbled to the floor. I was not going through this again.
“Daddy!” I shouted, kicking off the covers. “Daddy!”
I heard the phone hit the table and the sound of his leather slippers on linoleum. He appeared in the doorway. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What are you doing?” I mouthed, not wanting Em to hear. Truthfully, I was more than a little afraid of Em.
“Hold on,” he said and returned to the phone. He told Em he had to go. Before he could finish saying, “Margaret needs me,” I was up and out of bed and in the kitchen.
He sat at the kitchen table, cradling his head in his hands. “I’m in deep shit.”
“I know you are. You told her you loved her. Do you?”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Do you love her?” I repeated.
He didn’t. I knew it. Earlier he had told me that Em and her former high school clique had given my aunt Margaret a hard time in school. She was such a sensitive girl, my father explained. They used to make her cry. I knew my father couldn’t love anyone who’d hurt Margaret, but I asked him again regardless. I wanted to hear him say, “I don’t love her.”
“The only person I love is your mother,” he said, looking up at me with the eyes of someone who hadn’t slept peacefully in a very long time. “None of this would be happening if she hadn’t left me.”
I believed him, maybe not about “the only person I love is your mother,” but certainly about the “none of this would be happening if she hadn’t left me.” But that was no excuse to keep making things worse by telling every woman he fucked that he loved her. “You told Jan you loved her too, and now she’s all messed up,” I said. “You have to stop doing that.”
Half-teasingly, half-seriously, he asked if I needed to be reminded that I was neither his mother nor his wife. I definitely needed to be reminded.
11. The Last Time My Father Raised His Hand As If to Strike Me
The last time my father raised his hand as if to strike me was because Em, Colleen, and Colette had repeated to him something I’d told them in confidence. Surprisingly, I had been defending Jan because she needed defending. Em, Colleen, and Colette called Jan “a clueless, fucking idiot,” and I bristled. She was only eighteen, I reminded them, and my father had told her he loved her. He’d even talked about marriage and children with her. And. They were all staring at me. Thank goodness I stopped before revealing that my father was still in regular contact with her.
“Sometimes,” I said, “my father makes bad choices,” but I should have known better than to say such a thing. I should have stopped before I said, “Sometimes my father is unstable.”
Later, when my father and I were alone at his apartment, he asked if I’d called him unstable, I held my breath. Because my father’s behavior seemed so erratic these days, I wasn’t sure what to expect. When he raised his hand above his head, I cowered.
“I’m your father,” he said. “You must respect me.” His voice seemed that of a stranger, and it grew louder and angrier at each syllable of each word. “Never say anything like that again. Never. Or you’ll regret it. Do you understand me?”
I couldn’t answer. I knew if I tried to speak, I’d start to cry. He was shaking as he shouted, his spittle flying. “Do you understand?”
I still couldn’t speak.
“Answer me!” he screamed.
I managed to squeak, “yes,” before I crumpled to the kitchen floor, a heap of sobs and frustration. “Good,” said the stranger who stood in my father’s place. “Cry. That’s what you get.”
12. The Last Time I Trusted Someone So Completely that Her Betrayal Blind-Sided Me
The last time I trusted someone so completely that her betrayal blind-sided me I should have known better. Colette and my father were now romantically involved, and by romantically I mean sexually, and had been since the spring of Colette’s senior year of high school. Though Colleen, Jan, Jessica, and I knew about the relationship, we were keeping it a secret. As far as we knew Em didn’t suspect anything. My father had ended things with her at Christmastime, saying he just wasn’t ready for the kind of relationship she wanted, but he still wanted to be friends. But what he’d told me one day was “Em hurt Margaret, so I’m going to hurt her.”
Early one morning, when school had ended for the summer, and after my father had left for work, Em knocked on our back door. I invited her inside, and she asked what I was doing for the day. Spending the day at the farm, I told her.
“You’ll be gone all day?” she asked, and I told her I’d be back after supper. She asked if my father had left a key for her; he wanted her to clean the apartment. He hadn’t left a key. Nor had he mentioned anything about her coming today. She seemed upset that he’d forgotten. They’d agreed on today, and she’d taken the afternoon off. I believed her. I believed that she’d offered to clean our place. I believed my father knew she was coming. I believed he’d forgotten to leave the key. I’d been lying to her for months, but I didn’t think she’d lie to me. I offered her my key.
“Good idea,” she said. She’d leave it under the mat when she left. I ran upstairs to get my key. When I came back down, I found her in my father’s bedroom, which wasn’t a room at all, but the half of the living room he’d partitioned off for his bed. Jessica and I should have the upstairs rooms, he’d said when I moved in. Em was looking on top of his dresser, where the only thing he’d ever kept was Margaret’s senior portrait.
Em took my key. “I’m trying to decide where to start,” she said.
My mother came to get me, and I didn’t think about Em or the key for the rest of the day. Later that evening, when my mother brought me back to the apartment, Colette’s car was parked in the drive, music blared, and every light in the house was on.
“I wonder what’s up,” I said, reaching for the door handle. My mother asked if I wanted her to wait, and I told her I’d be fine.
I found my father and Colette at the kitchen table chain smoking. The ashtray overflowed with their cigarette butts. “You guys are gross,” I said, reaching for the ashtray to empty it.
My father touched my arm. “She knows.”
“Mummy?” As soon as I said the word, I blushed. Colette teased me whenever I called my mother “Mummy.”
“Not your mummy, stupid,” She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “My mummy.”
I looked at my father. He shook his head. “The key, you gave her the key. She went through my drawers. She was waiting for us when we got home.”
“Weren’t you at work?” Colette had started working at a factory in a neighboring town the day after she graduated. My father had left the house dressed in his Sweet Life clothes. Weren’t you at work?
“We played hooky,” he said. “We went to the beach.”
“Maggie,” Colette said. “What the hell were you thinking when you gave her that key?”
I felt sick to my stomach. “I’m sorry.” I covered my eyes. “She said she was going to clean the apartment for you.”
“She tricked you,” my father said. “She tricked you, and you fell for it.”
“You fucking little idiot,” Colette said, pulling me onto her lap. “Don’t you know you can’t trust anyone, except me?” As soon as she wrapped her arms around me, squeezing gently, I started to cry, crying not so much about what had happened, but about what I suspected was going to happen now that Em knew. My stomach ached and burned and seemed to have a pulse of its own.
As I had suspected and dreaded, Em came back later that night. From my bed, I heard the rapping on the door. The apartment was small. I could hear everything that went on downstairs. I heard Em in the kitchen, her voice hoarse from smoking and shouting and crying.
“Anyone,” she croaked, “anyone but my daughter, anyone but Colette. You know what she means to me.”
I imagined her turning from my father to face Colette. “And you, my daughter, my own daughter, lying to me for this fucking asshole, this pervert; he’s old enough to be your father.” Then I heard a slap and Em’s voice again. “How could you?”
13. The Last Time My Sister Knocked on My Father’s Door
The last time my sister knocked on my father’s door, he didn’t answer. The last time my sister knocked on my father’s door, I was in the hospital with a stomach ailment, and my father was scribbling goodbye notes at the kitchen table. Margaret, he wrote, there was never a moment when I wasn’t terrible proud of you. In his right mind my father would not have misspelled terribly. As far as I’m concerned his terrible is proof that he was not in his right mind when he did what he did. In his right mind my father would not have pulled the shades down in the kitchen over the sink and at the door. He would not have ignored my sister’s knocking, the confusion in her voice as her knocking gave way to pounding, “Daddy? Are you in there? Daddy! Open the door!” In his right mind he would have remembered that this was the afternoon she walked to our apartment rather than take the bus to the farm, where she lived with my mother. He would have been watching through the window as she approached the house. He would have smiled and waved. He’d have swung open the door, pulled her into an embrace, and after brushing the bangs out of her eyes, he’d have kissed her on the forehead. That’s what my real father would have done. Not being in his right mind however, he did not answer her. Reluctantly, she gave up, and headed up Main Street, crossing right at Jackman’s Funeral Home on her way to my grandparents’ house, where she would be when the police later knocked on their door.
14. The Last Time I Waited Up for My Father
The last time I waited up for my father was the first time I knew, on a somewhat-conscious level, that he wasn’t coming back. He couldn’t come back, not this time, even if he wanted to, but I had been waiting for so long and was so used to waiting, I didn’t know how to stop. I sat in the waiting room at the end of the corridor, curled on the sofa cushions, wearing my pajamas. The sedative they had given me earlier in the form of a shot to my butt cheek was wearing off, leaving me wide-awake and anxiously anticipating something. I hoped my father would appear to me like Jacob Marley appears to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. He would tell me something I needed to hear to put the past year-and-a-half behind me and get on with my life. Maybe my mother would appear instead to say it had been a mistake. My father was fine. He was back at the farm, reading Charles Dickens or Sherlock Holmes in their bedroom. The past eighteen months had been nothing but a bad dream. My mother would be the one to shake me awake.
15. The Last Time I Touched My Father
The last time I touched my father I’d been waiting hours for time alone with him. Leaning into his casket, I reached first for his hands. They lay folded between his chest and his stomach. Laced between his fingers were rosary beads, and in reverence I touched them too. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I was still alone, and then I leaned into him, running my finger along the puckered mound of skin on his right temple. I ran my finger along the bridge of his nose and then traced his mouth. I leaned in closer, as close as I could get, and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I stayed there pressed against him. I don’t remember doing what they say I did. But I do remember hearing my grandmother say, “Sweet Jesus,” and I do remember the warm strong touch of fingers tightening around my upper arms, lifting me from my father’s casket.
16. The Last Time I Saw My Father Alive
The last time I saw my father alive he was standing in the open doorway of my hospital room. In the pulse and the hum of the dimly glowing corridor light, my father seemed to glow himself as he looked at me. Car troubles had kept him away the previous day, but he’d promised to come that day, even if he had to walk. As other patients succumbed to sleep, I was fighting to keep my eyes open. Visiting hours had ended, but my father had promised he’d be here, and something in his voice when he made the promise told me this was one to believe.
At last he appeared with Colette and a nurse beside him. Their visit would have to be short, he said, nodding to the nurse and then winking at me. Did I want a ginger ale? When he left to find one, I told Colette that he looked terrible, exhausted.
She sank beside me on the bed. “Your father had a bad dream last night. He dreamt that someone shot him. He woke up shouting and could not fall back to sleep.”
When my father returned with the ginger ale, he asked Colette to please move her skinny ass. He wanted to sit next to me. He dragged over a chair for her, and then sat in the imprint she had left on the bed. He touched my forehead, my cheek, and my chin. Was I feeling better?
“Tell me, please,” he said, his hand resting on my stomach, “tell me that this is not my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
I don’t remember what else my father said as he sat beside me. Maybe he didn’t say anything in those moments because I remember vividly what he did and what he said when he stood to go. He hugged me hard, almost too hard, and I gasped. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“For love,” he said, “for love. Your old man loves you.” When his eyes suddenly filled, so did mine, an instant reflex. I thought he was sad because I was sick. I wanted to comfort him. My exact words were: Don’t worry about me, Daddy. I’ll be fine.
Oh, dear God. Did he think I meant that? Did he think I’d be fine without him?
I wouldn’t.
I didn’t mean it.
I was just trying to make him feel better.
He paused in the doorway, turning back to look at me again, to say one last goodbye, for he knew it was the last goodbye – he actually said the words: “Goodbye, Margaret.” And in the glow of that muted light, I glimpsed my real father, the man I believe he wanted to be, and I felt loved. He said those words too; they came easily. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, and his eyes didn’t brighten the way they usually did when he smiled. He seemed close to tears, so I told him again that I’d be fine. He nodded and blew me a kiss, but before I could catch it, he turned his back and was gone.
Margaret MacInnis’ essays have appeared in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and River Teeth.