Rival Off the Record

1. Dani

DANI

The envelope was on the mat when I got upstairs. I didn't need to check the return address.

This one made forty-eight.

I'd been counting since the eighth. Which sounds crazy, and probably is.

But when you grow up watching a man hit your mother in the kitchen on a Tuesday because he didn't like how she folded a dishtowel, you get specific about patterns young.

The counting kept track of him for me. As long as the envelopes came, I knew where he was and what he was doing.

Sitting in Tennessee. Thinking about me.

The day they stopped was the day I'd have to wonder why.

He hadn't stopped.

I picked it up.

My key was already in the door, which helped, because my hands were doing the small useless thing they did and I needed them holding something that wasn't my own face.

I got the door open. Dropped my bag. Set the envelope on the counter and didn't look at it.

Pulled the bourbon down from the cabinet over the fridge, the bottle I kept for emergencies and weddings. I'd had neither in a while.

Poured two fingers.

Drank one.

I felt the burn in my throat as I stood there looking at the envelope the way I looked at it every time. Wondering if this was the one I threw away.

I'd thrown some out before. Maybe nine, total.

The other thirty-nine were in a shoebox in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

Brynn had asked about that box once, two Christmases ago, and I'd told her it was tax stuff.

I'd lied to Brynn maybe three times in eight years of friendship. One of those lies was about a shoebox.

She didn't know about him. Didn't know what was in the box, didn't know I kept a count, didn't know I could pick his handwriting out of a lineup of forty envelopes with my eyes shut. Brynn knew me better than anyone alive, and she didn't know the first real thing about me.

I drank the second finger.

I picked up the envelope.

I opened it.

A clipping fell out onto the counter. From a magazine I'd had no business letting publish me, an essay I'd written on impulse and submitted on impulse and only let them run because the deadline was Friday and I was three glasses of wine into a Tuesday when they said yes.

Six hundred words about my grandmother and the kitchen on the back of her house in Knoxville.

The first thing I'd put my name on in four years. It had run two months ago.

He'd circled my byline in blue.

I turned the clipping over. More writing on the back, same blue, his hand smaller than it had been eight years ago and a little shakier, the way an old man's gets when his hands start to go.

Saw this in a magazine your aunt sent down. Beautiful piece, Ashley. About time.

Call your mother. She doesn't have much time.

I stood at the counter a long time.

Ashley.

He hadn't called me Ashley in eight years.

Last time he used it I was eighteen, standing in my dorm hallway at three in the morning, screaming into a phone that if he ever said that name again I'd change my number, my address, my last name, my whole life.

He went quiet for a second. Then he said, all right, Dani, in the voice that meant for now.

He'd used Dani in every letter since. Forty-six envelopes of Dani.

Like he was being reasonable. Like he was the kind of father who respected his daughter's wishes.

He'd called me Ashley today.

Which meant he was done being reasonable. Whatever he was building toward was already moving, and he wanted me to know it was coming.

The clipping sat on the counter. The bourbon sat next to it. Outside, a siren went up Bedford and faded. I stood there in my coat with my keys still in my hand and tried to think about what I was supposed to do next.

I couldn't. My head was already full. It had been full since 10:42 that morning, when Caroline folded her hands on the conference table on the twentieth floor and told me what I'd seen coming for six months.

I'd been laid off. Acquisition. The imprint absorbed. Three editors kept, six let go. I fought for you, Dani. I knew she had. I knew it hadn't mattered.

The conference room had a view of the East River and a box of tissues on the table, and the HR guy had a folder he slid across to me before Caroline finished her sentence.

Six weeks' severance. CObrA paperwork. A deadline to clear my desk, which was that same day, because that's how publishing worked.

I packed four years into four boxes. Hugged Caroline. Let Frank from the security desk walk me to the curb, because my badge was already deactivated and I couldn't ride those elevators down without one.

The book on top of the first box was a hardcover of the literary magazine that ran me at twenty-two.

The Gnomon Review, spring issue. An essay called The Kitchen on Iris Street.

Six hundred words about my grandmother. My thesis advisor had made me send it, printed the envelope, addressed it, stood over me until I licked the stamp.

They took it. For exactly one summer, I'd been a writer. On paper. In a small, careful way.

That fall a graduate writing program offered me a fully funded spot, the kind I couldn’t have afforded any other way.

Another piece got picked up somewhere else.

My advisor took me to dinner to talk about the next ten years of my life.

And on the train back to Brooklyn I sat with my forehead on the cold window and understood, all at once, that every byline I ever published was a thing my father could see.

Calvert was a small town. The local paper picked things up.

Aunts mailed things. Magazines ended up on the rack at the same Family Dollar he bought his pens from.

A byline was a flag with my name on it, and he'd see every single one I planted.

I turned the offer down the next morning.

I took an editorial assistant job at twenty-two instead.

It had health insurance, and editing other people's words kept my own name off the page where he could find it.

I told myself I'd come back to my own writing eventually.

When it was safe. When I figured out a version of being a writer he couldn't follow me into.

I never figured one out.

Four years went by.

Two months ago I broke the seal, on impulse, the way you break the seal on a bottle of something you've sworn off, and let a little magazine run a short essay about the small kitchen where my grandmother had been the only person in my childhood who ever shielded me from anything.

Six hundred words. My byline. Dani Hartley. At the time it felt like a win.

It wasn't a win. It was a flare.

I'd put the boxes in a cab. Come home.

The boxes were still in the cab.

I'd left them there, told the driver to keep the meter running, and gone up to breathe before I hauled four boxes up four flights, because the freight elevator had been broken since June and I'd been working around it for five months.

Four years of books were down there. One Comic Sans coffee mug Brynn sent me last Christmas.

A framed cover of the first novel I ever acquired.

All of it in a yellow cab on Lafayette with the meter running, and I didn't care about any of it.

The driver could come find me. Or he could keep my books and resell them on a sidewalk in Williamsburg. Either way.

I'd been fired ninety minutes ago.

I'd come home to a Tennessee envelope and the name my father swore he'd never use again.

I drank what was left of the bourbon and went down the hall and opened the bottom drawer.

Old shoebox. Adidas. White and green, gone soft at the corners from too many openings.

I lifted the lid.

Forty-seven envelopes, oldest at the bottom.

I'd put them in order once, when I was twenty-four and a year sober, not the bourbon kind, the I'm going to be a healthy person about this kind, the kind that lasted six months and got me into the first therapist I ever actually trusted.

She asked me once why I kept them. I gave her an answer I'd been polishing for a week, about how throwing them out would be its own kind of denial, how naming the pattern was the first step to disarming it, a bunch of language I'd cribbed off the pamphlets in her own waiting room.

She let me finish. Then she said, real quiet, Dani, you keep them because counting them makes you feel like you can see him coming.

I cried in her office for forty minutes.

I kept the shoebox.

I added forty-eight to the top. Lined the corner up with forty-seven, which had come in August.

He'd never come for me. That was the part nobody got, the couple of times I tried to explain it on bad dates. Never showed up at my school, my college, my office, my apartment. Never called the building. Never tried to be in a room with me in eight years.

He just mailed.

Every two or three months. Birthdays. Christmas.

A random Wednesday in March. Sometimes a holy card from a funeral he figured nobody told me about.

Sometimes a clipping. Sometimes nothing at all, a blank sheet of stationery with my name on the front, like he wanted me to see his handwriting and nothing else.

The patience was the worst part. A man who shows up at your door is a man you can call the cops on.

A man who mails you a clipping every couple months for eight years is just your father, staying in touch.

He had nothing in his life but the church and the Family Dollar and the Bic pens and the PO box he'd kept since 1991, and a daughter he hadn't laid eyes on since she was eighteen.

He was happy to spend whatever years he had left reminding her, one envelope at a time, that he was alive and she wasn't free of him.

I closed the box.

Put it back.

Shut the drawer.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my coat for a long time.

My phone buzzed against my hip. I pulled it out.

hey are you free tonight i feel weird about you for some reason call me