Chapter 39
I’m Romily’s replacement roommate. She’d been sharing the apartment with a first-year grad student who fled Ohio two weeks into the semester and took her furniture with her.
The search for inexpensive, nonshitty furniture has been Romily’s winter break obsession. I half expect her to present a PowerPoint deck, comparing and contrasting various Facebook Marketplace posts.
I’ve barely begun to unpack when she asks me to accompany her to a nearby estate sale where she’s planning to purchase a pair of midcentury accent chairs at an excellent price.
That’s the last place I want to go, with all those memories of my dad’s business: sorting through other people’s junk, looking for anything especially valuable, haggling with resellers.
But she needs me to drive to the sale in my mom’s Subaru Outback because both chairs will not fit in her car.
And, as she points out, I’m also in need of furniture.
While she inspects the chairs, I browse.
I admit, I still like looking around at other people’s things.
An estate sale can be a little morbid, but it’s a portrait of one person as told by their stuff.
It scratches the same itch as researching artists—you look at all this evidence and piece together what might have been important to them, knowing that you’ll never have the complete picture.
There’s always that gap. That’s what makes certain artists so exciting: it’s up to the viewer to look at the art and fill in that complete picture. The magic.
Now, I’m not sure about the magic in ninety-three-year-old Hazel Abernathy’s estate sale. She hasn’t left hundreds of abstract paintings like Giuseppe Baggio. She definitely didn’t leave any comics for me to scoop up at rock bottom prices.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with an older lady and sort through boxes of miscellaneous things: 1960s lace seam binding; rickrack; a spool of ribbon with tiny cows on it. So many packs of playing cards.
“C-minus, not so good, Danny,” the woman says. I tilt my head to peek at what she’s reading. It’s a fragile-looking report card from Deer Valley Junior High. I bet Hazel kept all of Danny’s drawings.
The woman oohs and ahhs over a pile of doilies that someone’s grandmother worked so hard to create a hundred years ago, only to have them tossed into a box and sold for fifty cents. “These are beautifully yellowed,” she says approvingly.
I dig through a pile of notebooks, address books, diaries that were only used for a week or two.
There’s one in the pile that looks brand-new.
The embossed title reads Dad, Tell Me Our Story.
I open the cover and the spine makes a cracking sound.
There’s an inscription reading “We love you Daddy!” with a child’s attempt at signing their name.
Anna? Annie? Flipping the pages, I deduce that it’s supposed to be a journal filled with prompts for a father to fill out throughout his daughter’s life.
The last page is to be completed on her wedding day and then given to her.
The entire thing is blank, aside from the inscription.
Blank.
The neon-pink sticker on the cover is marked twenty-five cents. It’s the thrifting equivalent of “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
I beg myself to keep calm. To not think about how this book would’ve looked the same today if my own father had received it when I was barely old enough to scribble my name. To not see this as a physical manifestation of all my contradictory feelings about him.
For a few seconds, I brace myself for public crying. There’s a swell of emotion churning in my chest, making my throat tight, drawing the unstoppable grief up to the surface.
I drop the journal back onto the stack of other books. It slides off the pile and onto the floor with a loud smack.
The lady flinches at the sound and turns to me. “You okay, hon?”
“It’s blank,” I mutter.
“Oh, did you find a brand-new one?” she asks, reaching down for the book even though I suspect her knees aren’t the greatest. “I’m always drawn to the most worn-out ones myself.
I always say if they’re pristine, they haven’t been well loved.
I like some damage.” She hands the journal back to me. “It adds to the character.”
I sit with that comment for a few moments, letting it wash over me. I lower myself to the hardwood floor, put my head in my hands, and breathe.
“Oh, sweetie, what’s the matter?” And now I’m alarming this poor woman who probably stopped by for a nice morning outing. She leans down.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “I just think…I have some damage.”
“Well, then you’ve been well loved,” she says.
“I dunno about that. I’ve taken a lot of damage from men who have not loved me well.” Her smile is so kind and I don’t know how to explain abandonment, breadcrumbing, and situationships to a woman in her seventies.
“When you find the man who’s right for you,” she answers, matter of fact and all knowing, “he’ll see your well-loved side and know that it just adds to your character. Sometimes wear and tear can make something more beautiful.”
She touches me on the arm very gently and passes behind me with her basket full of rickrack.
All I can think about is Nick. Holding me, listening to me in the least-judgmental way possible. Sharing the well-loved parts of himself with me, too. I’m 100 percent certain he wouldn’t leave this journal completely blank.
I take a few more deep breaths and stand back up.
I continue sorting through various bits of ephemera, piecing together the outline of this woman’s life.
Her marriage, children, apparent divorce, remarriage, grandchildren.
It’s a giant pile of extreme specifics—Christmas letters from extended family members detailing vacations they took in 1998, a middle school yearbook, lots of crayon drawings by children with still-developing motor skills.
I picture strangers poring over my dad’s long boxes in the same way I’m looking at this lady’s stuff.
I imagine comic book collectors hurriedly flipping through the bagged issues, looking for a treasure.
I watch the boxes get emptier until there’s nothing inside.
As empty as the blank journal in my hand.
It’s the calmest I’ve felt in ages.
In the same way that my dad convinced himself that divine intervention gave him that X-Men #1, I must have been meant to find that father’s journal.
Well worth the twenty-five cents to finally let go of those goddamn balloons.
I spend the next day transporting the boxes of comics from a storage unit to my mom’s car to the apartment. My plan is to sell them online myself for maximum profit. It’s more work than sending the whole lot to a comics dealer, but the one thing I have right now is time.
After hauling the last box out of the storage unit, I stop by the office and close out the account. The amount I charge to my credit card makes me feel slightly ill. I will not be paying any more money for climate-controlled storage.
I shouldn’t even be paying this bill, I think as I open the door to my mom’s car, now weighed down with long storage boxes.
I check my mirrors, thinking of Nick. I wonder if this association will last for the rest of my life and I’ll just feel sad every time I turn on the ignition. Forever.
An unfortunate side effect of diligently checking mirrors is that you also catch a glimpse of your own appearance after hours of sweatily lugging boxes up to a second-floor apartment without an elevator. The only word for it is haggard.
I stare out the windshield at the ugly exterior of the storage facility. I feel a strange, irrational pull to call my father. To send him a bill, not only for the last few months of storage, but for the last ten years.
Panel 1: Establishing shot of a Subaru Outback, packed to the gills with boxes, flying down the interstate.
Panel 2: Close-up on Lydia Deetz, at the wheel, a wild, determined look in her eye.
Panel 3: The Outback screeches to a halt outside a condominium complex. The landscaping is dotted with palm trees.
Panel 4: With a surprising amount of strength, Lydia tosses the boxes out of the car. Comic book pages catch the breeze and fly upward into the air.
Panel 5: A gloved hand reaching over a balcony railing catches one of the pages.
Panel 6: Lydia looks up.
Panel 7: In a wider shot, we see a man on the balcony. But he’s not wearing gloves after all. There’s no cape. No helmet. He’s just an old man, in normal clothes.
Panel 8: Lydia—
My phone buzzes in my lap, snapping me into the present.
I glance down at the notification.
waterwingluna16
Sam
waterwingluna16
SAM
It’s me Kira