Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
POPPY
If Arrow had told me he wanted to meet, how different would everything have gone with Oliver?
If Oliver hadn’t left me today, I never would have sent that message to Arrow.
And now I’m alone, listening to a song Dad told me about in his first letter from prison.
It was the only song I played until the very next letter, when he gave me a new song to listen to, and a new one in the letter after that. How many hundreds of songs did he tell me about over the years? I listened to every one.
The music is louder at the door, and louder still when I open it. Unsurprising. What is surprising, though, is that there are more people here now. At least a dozen, maybe more. Where it was somber when I left, the mood is almost lively.
My great aunt is monitoring the memorial table, bless her heart, and my uncle and aunt are talking to three men I’ve never met. Uncle Bill waves me over.
“This is Poppy, Kevin’s daughter. Poppy, these gentlemen are—”
“Not gentlemen,” one of the men says, roaring with laughter and elbowing his friend. The sound is so big it rattles the folding chairs stacked against the wall. Between the three men, I count at least a dozen tattoos.
They’re returning citizens.
They were incarcerated with my dad.
I hold a hand out to the most jovial of the three. I’d guess all three of them are in their 40s—younger than my dad, but then most people don’t serve fifteen years. A quick survey of the room tells me only a few of the men here are around my dad’s age at all.
Each of them shake my hand, and they introduce themselves as Mike, Miguel, and Mikhail.
I give a soft laugh, feeling too raw and tender for much more. “Are those your real names?”
“Real as Mikey’s smile,” Miguel tells me, elbowing the jovial man, who’s missing a tooth.
“We were in Collins with your dad,” Mike says. “He was as good a cellmate as I ever had.”
“I’m glad. Thank you all for coming,” I say, hoping they’ll get the hint and let me go mope in a corner by myself.
They don’t.
“He was a good guy,” Miguel says.
“Moody as he—” Mikhail clears his throat and he looks heavenward and crosses himself, even though this isn’t a Catholic church. “Sorry. He was moody, is my point. Nice otherwise, though.”
“And funny. That guy could find something to laugh at in anything.” Mike elbows Miguel. “Remember the time with the cards?”
Miguel snorts and calls another man over, this one older. “We were cellmates same time as Mike and your dad.”
“That’s nice,” I say. I try to catch my uncle’s eye so I can silently plead with him to excuse me, but he’s smiling, waiting for a story I know I don’t want to hear if it involves cards.
But Mike is already laughing, shoulders bouncing under his flannel shirt.
“One night after lights out, your dad said we should play cards with our neighbors in the next cell.
So we passed notes through the vent and played Go Fish around the wall.
Miguel laughed a little too loud, and a guard showed up, yelling to get in bed.
“Your dad said, ‘Come on, boss, what are you gonna do—throw us in prison?’”
All the men laugh, loud and unrestrained, like they’re back in that cell.
“The guard wasn’t even mad. He laughed, told us to hit the hay, and walked off.” Mike grins. “He was always good for a laugh.”
“And good for playing cards,” I say, wishing I could keep things as light as these men can.
“Oh, yeah, him and the cards.” Mike shrugs. “We all got demons, kid.”
“His last year, he figured things out, though,” Miguel says. “Got back on the wagon.”
My ears perk up. “How so?”
“Went back to his Thursday meetings—Gamblers Anonymous, in the chapel. Didn’t want to come back home an addict.”
The lump I’ve been trying to swallow all day swells to grapefruit size. “He didn’t?”
“Nah,” Mike says, as if that says it all. “Like I said. He figured things out.”
Miguel is nodding. “We worked out every day together. Do you know how many pushups that guy could do?”
Pushups?
The word snags my attention, pulling it back to Miguel. “My dad did pushups?”
Mike cocks his head, clearly confused. “What do you mean? You guys had that challenge for years: pushups, wall-sits, planks. Man, those stupid planks. He’d do them on the floor in our cell. It was so annoying.”
“He always talked about how he had to keep up with his Gracie Lou,” Miguel says with a chuckle. Then he looks me over. “No way you can do a five minute plank.”
“I can do an eight minute plank. But I stop at five, because planks are evil,” I say. This gets a laugh from all of them.
“You sound like Kevin,” Mike says. His eyes pause on my face and his smile softens. “Man, that guy never shut up about you. Made me want to be a better dad to my kid when I got home.”
“It got annoying how much he talked about you,” Mikhail says. “No offense.”
I laugh, but tears threaten to spill out again. “None taken.”
Uncle Bill puts his arm around me, and I lean into it. It feels like scaffolding around a building about to collapse—holding me up when I didn’t think I could stand anymore.
Aunt Amy joins us with my cousins and a few of the other prisoners. Great Aunt Marla comes around to my other side and puts a hand on my back.
“Tell us your favorite memory with him,” Aunt Marla says.
“You already tell ‘em about the karaoke?” the oldest of the men here says in a thick Brooklyn accent. He reaches a hand out to mine. “I’m Joey. I was your dad’s cellmate ‘bout eight years ago.”
“Not yet we haven’t,” Mike says. “Tell ‘em, Joe.”
“Your dad got a job cleaning offices and saved up for an MP3 player from commissary.” Joey smiles. “He was crazy about music. He said it was a thing you two had, right?”
I nod, though my chest is starting to shake from emotion.
“He said he was running out of songs to send his Gracie Lou and he started getting recommendations from the rest of us. But he had to pay for them.”
Mike laughs. “He had to sing them during count time if he wanted us to share. Off key, too.”
All the guys laugh.
“Like he hadn’t already sent you ‘Don’t Stop Believing,’” Joey says, looking at me with a grizzled smile. “Your dad just wanted to show off. He had a good voice.”
“He had a terrible voice,” Miguel argues. “You’re tone deaf.”
“Like I said,” Joey says, and we all laugh.
They start piling stories over one another, voices tumbling, laughter mixing with tears, and for the first time in years, it doesn’t feel like I’m on the outside of my dad’s life, looking in.
It feels like I’m part of it again. And I realize I was part of his, too. A bigger part than I ever realized.
As I laugh with them, I let my tears break free, but they don’t sting the way they did in the truck.
They don’t burn my throat or carve another hole in my chest. They feel clean, like stepping under a waterfall.
Because I know now that I’m not holding my dad’s story all by myself, clinging to the good memories of him as if to excuse the bad ones.
Other people knew him—flawed, moody, funny, trying—and they loved him anyway. Like I did.
My uncle’s arm is still around me. My aunt’s hand still rests on my back. My cousins are gathered close, and Dad’s friends are swapping stories like he might walk in at any second.
After so many years giving my heart away to other families, trying to fill their cracks while mine split wider and wider, I finally feel a piece of what I’ve been aching for.
Not fixed, but held.
Not whole, but healing.
An hour later, the party is winding down, and my aunt invites anyone interested to come out to the adjoining graveyard to pay respects to my dad.
Everyone comes.
Uncle Bill walks with me. “How’s your work. You still doing sentencing advocacy?” he asks.
Mike, Joey, and a few of the other guys are close enough to chime in.
“That’s God’s work, right there. Being an advocate,” Joey says, holding the cross that hangs around his neck.
And that makes me feel worse. “Uh, no. I left my job. Earlier this week, actually.”
“Why’d you leave?” Mike asks.
That’s the question, but can he handle the real answer? I quit because it was hard, and I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t stuff my own issues aside when it mattered, and I hurt another family. I couldn’t save Marcus. He’s the most recent, but my failures haunt me like ghosts in a Dickens tale.
“I …” I don’t know what to say.
“Can’t be easy seeing so many families like yours,” Joey says. “My parole office said he got ‘burnt out’ from all the ‘trauma dumping’. Sounds rough.”
“Yeah, and you were his first case,” Miguel says.
A few of the guys laugh. But what Joey said makes me sniff back tears.
That’s exactly how I feel: burnt out. My clients and their families didn’t “trauma dump,” they simply lived a trauma I couldn’t help sharing.
And when I finished a case, it’s not like I gave the burden back.
They still carried it, but I did, too. Case after case, family after family, the weight kept stacking up on top of me.
So many families. So many hurts and disappointments. Even the “successes” felt heavy.
Joey’s throwaway line about burnout and trauma has lodged in my mind.
Is that what happened to me?
Is there a chance I’m not a complete failure, but simply someone who burned out?
“What are you gonna do next?” Miguel asks, pulling me from my thoughts. “Is all that working out gonna make you a prison guard?”
Mike laughs. “Lay off, Mig.” Our feet sink into the snow, but the main paths through the cemetery have been cleared recently, so it doesn’t reach the top of my boots.
“You oughta look into the Bridge Initiative. It’s a re-entry program for guys like us.
I’m a recovery coach. It’s a good organization. ”
I smile and nod. I’ve never considered working anywhere except in sentencing advocacy. Re-entry programs are important, but I can’t get that enmeshed in people’s lives again.
“Nah,” Joey says. “She should fix the program. She’d probably have all sorts of contacts, ways to make things better.”
“Good point. Smart thing like you—you’d make a good program director.”
Huh. That isn’t the worst idea. A way to stay involved with a work I’m passionate about without feeling like a 24-hour all you can eat buffet. But … “You don’t know if I’m smart,” I say, giving him a doubtful smile.
The guys look at each other, and Mike rolls his eyes. “Your dad showed us your report cards, kid.”
“What?” I laugh. “I never sent my dad my report cards.”
“Your mom did,” Mike says, no idea the effect his words are having on me. “After she divorced him, she only sent letters when it was something about you.”
“Which was a lot,” Joey says from a few feet back. “Made me feel like my kids were complete idiots.”
“Well, they take after you, don’t they?” Mike says, and they all start laughing, and Joey punches Mike in the arm. I laugh with them, but the feeling in my heart is sweet and tender.
Mom sent Dad letters about me?
We’ve reached Dad’s gravesite, and as I look at the cold stone, love warms me from my feet up. My mom cared enough to make sure my dad knew how I was doing. My dad cared enough to brag about me … constantly, from the sound of it.
And these men cared enough about my dad—my flawed, complicated, moody, big-hearted, loving dad—to come honor and celebrate him. And because they cared about him, they care about me, too.
Looking at all of these people around my dad’s grave, I break into a smile.
This isn’t the release party I wanted for my dad.
No Pinterest-worthy reunion pictures, no storybook closure, and no true love by my side.
Oliver was probably right about my parents: Dad wasn’t the saint and Mom definitely wasn’t the villain.
But I was right, too. I had a good dad growing up. A flawed, human dad who made a mistake that he paid for. A mistake my whole family paid for.
It’s not what I wanted—life has never given me what I wanted—but it’s time for me to be brave and hold on to what I have.
It would be so easy to let anger and bitterness turn me inward.
To curl into a ball and give up. I don’t want to live small anymore, though.
I want to laugh loud and love big. I want to put myself out there, even if it means risking heartache.
I want every step forward to be like a new track on the playlist my Dad started for me years ago—a concept album where each song adds to an overall story of beauty, pain, redemption, and a lifetime of second chances.
I can’t live for everyone else anymore. But I won’t survive if I close myself off.
There has to be a middle ground—a path forward that lets me accept the mess beside the beauty and to build something lasting from it.
So I’ll keep moving. Without my dad. Without the man I built so many dreams around.
I didn’t choose this road, but I will find joy in the journey.
It’s who I am.
I love that about myself.
The cold has seeped through my coat by the time we head back inside. My fingers are numb, and my cheeks sting from the wind and tears. But my heart—my heart feels lighter than it has in years.
Uncle Bill holds the door for everyone, and the warmth of the fellowship hall wraps around me like a hug. The ‘80s music is still playing—Depeche Mode now, “Enjoy the Silence,” one of Dad’s favorites.
Aunt Marla is cutting the cake she brought, and Mike is telling another story about Dad that has Joey doubled over laughing.
I grab a cup of hot cider and lean against the wall, just watching. Just being.
For the first time in so long, I’m not running. Not hiding. Not trying to be enough for everyone else.
I’m just ... here.
And that’s enough.