5. Five
Five
There’s still clay under my fingernails when I drive up my dad’s driveway with George Strait whining excitedly from the passenger seat. He knows a steak bone is in his near future the minute he sees the familiar face and overzealous wave with a glove-covered hand.
I barely have my door open when the dog bounces over my lap, sprints across the yard, and pounces on my dad with an obnoxious bark.
When I’m out of the van, walking across the yard, it’s the familiar scene of home: the house I grew up in, the shop I did homework in, the man who helped me do it all.
“Hey, Little Bird,” he says as I lean into his hug, inhaling his token scent of sawdust and soap. When I pull away, the smell of smoke from the preheating charcoal grill on the porch fills the air.
“Hi, Dad. ”
He squeezes my shoulder when I look at him with a smile. At sixty-three, my dad’s a handsome man. Distinguished. A full head of hair in various shades of grey. Soft-spoken and laidback with a welcoming sort of presence. I remember as a kid most of my friends worried about the way their parents would react when they got in trouble, but I could never relate. My dad always just handled things in stride, his voice never elevating, even when he was furious.
“Come see what I’m working on,” he says, holding open his shop door for me, easy smile on his face.
My eyes immediately go to the familiar Little Bird Furniture sign that hangs on the wall. What started as a hobby when I was a kid morphed into a full-time profession after my mom died. Now, Greg Hawkins’s tables are some of the most sought after in the southeast.
In the middle of his worktable lays a large, asymmetrical cross-section slab of wood. The edges are rough with pieces of bark clinging to it, but the rings are clear and the coloring a deep shade of brown. There are holes and indentions along the surface, making it almost look like a huge puzzle piece made of wood. Then I notice cracks—big ones. The slab is broken.
My eyebrows lift. “A busted cookie slab, Dad? I’ve seen you make something more impressive than this,” I tease.
He laughs, blowing the dust off an empty mason jar and pouring himself his after-work glass of scotch.
“I was so excited for this one. You can see why—look how big it is. And the coloring?” He whistles in admiration. “It’s walnut. Got delivered earlier this week. When I unwrapped it”—he takes a sip of his drink and lets out a sigh—“cracked into three pieces.” He shakes his head.
I drag my hand across the surface of it, the familiar roughness of the wood coarse beneath my clay-covered fingers. “What are you going to do with it now?”
“That’s the exciting part,” he says, looking down at the same broken piece of wood as me. “In Japan, they do something with pottery called kintsugi .” He pauses, his way of letting me tell him if I know what he’s talking about, but I stay silent, my way of saying I don’t.
Another sip of scotch and he continues. “Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery. The pieces are glued together in a special way, often with gold, that showcases the cracks and breaks instead of hiding them.”
“The broken becomes art,” I say.
“The broken becomes art,” he says.
There’s a comfortable silence as we look at it, imagining our own version of what that might look like.
“You putting this thing back together with gold, old man?” I ask with a grin.
He laughs. “Hardly! I’m thinking a deep turquoise epoxy with gold leaf mixed in for the cracks and a dark stain on the wood.”
“Not concrete?” I tease.
He shudders. “Don’t remind me.”
A couple years ago, my dad built a custom countertop, but instead of his usual epoxy to fill in the cracks, the man wanted concrete. He fought with sanding, rebar, and the sheer weight of it for months, vowing never again once it was done.
I look at the cracked slab. “It’ll be great, Dad.”
He grins, draping his arm around my shoulder as we leave the workshop and walk across the yard. “What’s new with you, Little Bird?”
I sigh, knowing there’s not enough scotch in the bottle for the long version, the true one. Instead, I go with, “I have a new client—a potter. She taught me to make a bowl today.”
He tucks his chin in surprise. “ You ?”
I laugh at his tone. Me doing anything creative is a shock; it’s not how my brain works.
“Yes, me . You aren’t the only one who can make things in this family. As soon as we fire it you can put it on display and tell people your seven-year-old daughter made it.”
“Tell me about it,” he says.
Then I do.
I tell him about Veda teaching me to wedge the clay. This gets the air bubbles out, she told me as I repeated a motion she compared to kneading dough. Then I formed it into a ball and pushed my thumb into the pliable, gritty center. Now pinch, she’d said. I did, placing my thumb in the center and the rest of my fingers on the outer surface. Gentle pinch, slight pull, slight rotation, repeat. Over and over until some kind of hybrid bowl-mug was sitting in my palm.
You’re a natural, she said with a smile .
It looks like a child made it! I laughed, glancing up at the woman that I couldn’t quite figure out.
Well, children make things without fear—that’s a compliment.
On my dad’s front porch in rocking chairs, country music floats through the screen door while George Strait chomps happily on a bone.
“Little Bird, your momma’s eyes are distracted tonight,” my dad says, looking at me as we rock quietly.
He always calls them that. The eyes I always think look like boring almonds too big for my face had fit hers perfectly, and it’s a compliment that I never tire of hearing.
“Hmm,” I respond, letting my head drop back in the chair.
My dad lets the silence hang gently between us until I break it.
“I’m thirty-seven,” I say. A short sentence summarizing endless suffering.
He sighs, heavy, reaching his hand over to find mine, giving it a tight squeeze. “That you are.”
His silence is my safety net. The place he’ll catch me if I fall.
“I’m scared, Dad.” A boulder lodges in my throat as my eyes burn with the confession. Scared feels like too small a word. I’m terrified. Thirty-seven sounds so old when you’re young, but now that I’m here, it doesn’t seem that old at all. It seems like nothing. A speck. Barely a beginning .
“If you would have known how it was all going to end with Mom, would you have done it differently?”
“God no, Birdie!” he says it so quickly—so adamantly—it startles my heart to a stop.
He smiles. “Everything in this whole world ends—we forget about that during a tragedy. Maybe it’s our way of making our misery feel special to us, but it’s another lie we tell ourselves. It’s all ending. Me, you, the trees growing all around us.” His pause prepares me for something profound. “My time with your mom was too short, but I suspect any amount of time with her would have been. I got some of it though, and I got you. Some is better than none, Birdie. Don’t you forget that.”
He looks at me until he’s sure I hear what he’s saying and pats my knee. When “I Just Want to Dance with You” starts to play, my body is so conditioned to our Thursday night routine I don’t even have to think about what comes next. I stand and so does he. Hand in hand, one arm draped over his shoulder and his palm in the middle of my back, my dad and I dance to one song just like him and my mom used to do, smiles on both of our faces as we shuffle around the porch to the voice of George Strait.
When I load the dog in the van, my dad gives me a tight hug. “You know more than your mom and grandma did, doctors know more. And you’ve had the surgery. This year will be different for you.”
When he pulls away, his smile looks almost forced, like even he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Like he’s saying it to comfort himself as much as me. I just nod. “Love you, Dad, thanks for dinner.”
“Love you too, Little Bird.”
After a too-long bath and a nightly skincare routine that involves a jade stone, jojoba oil, and red-light therapy, I drop my towel to the floor and stare into the mirror. My chest, besides the fact it looks nothing like it’s supposed to, is an unexpected work of art. Every shade of the rainbow lives on my skin.
I had known when I scheduled my mastectomy that I’d get tattoos to cover the scars. It wasn’t until a summer day driving by a field of wildflowers that I decided what I wanted. It had been a bad day, but the flowers still bloomed. Beauty when life felt anything but.
I took a dozen packets of wildflower seeds to the tattoo artist, Seth, for design ideas. I asked him to draw something that would cover everything from armpit to armpit with every color under the sun. It took multiple visits and hours with the needle poking in and out of my flesh, but once it was finished I felt a completeness that I didn’t know was missing. Closure almost. Acceptance.
I trace the colorful petals with my finger. The bumpy unevenness and scars left in the wreckage of my surgery now hidden by petals, leaves, stems, and tendrils that dance across my skin. Other than Seth, my doctor, and George Strait, not another living being has seen my chest in its entirety .
Even the men I’ve been with—despite the recent lack of traditional sex—haven’t seen me completely bare. Always in a tank top or lacy bralette. None of them ever argued or pushed for anything different. Like they didn’t want to see what I looked like as much as I didn’t want to see their faces if they did.
Tonight, I’m at peace with it. Some nights, it’s not so easy. Some nights I look at my reflection and cry and scream, but not tonight. Tonight I’m okay. Like it could be so much worse than this.
I wrap the towel back around me at the same time my phone dings.
Bo: Gran put me in my place today because I made you mad. She already likes you more than me.
I read it—twice—but don’t respond.
Bo: I’m going to call you.
I drop the phone like it’s a bomb about to detonate when it immediately starts ringing, Bo’s name flashing on the screen.
When the ringing stops:
Bo: I’m going to call again.
Again, it rings, and I stare at it on the counter, biting my lip, trying to imagine what he has to say to me. Again, I don’t answer.
Then:
Bo: Pam Beesly, last time. Please answer.
Then the ring. Once, twice, and on the third time, I push accept without speaking.
“Birdie?” His deep voice echoes through my tile-covered bathroom and I stare at the phone like he might pop through the screen .
He clears his throat. “Okay, this is nice and weird of you, but I guess it’s progress.” I can hear the smile in his voice through the speaker before his tone turns serious. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a toothpick dancing on his lips.
“I didn’t tell you I was married because it’s not a real marriage. Not really. Not anymore. Mandy and I were together a long time and got married because it’s a small town and that’s what people expected. Hell, maybe at some point it’s what we both wanted. Seven years ago it started crumbling, six years ago she took off to Nashville to chase her dream of being a singer and we— I haven’t talked to her since. I’ve filed for divorce, tried to figure out how to get her to sign, but I’m stuck. So technically, I’m married, but that’s it. I don’t wear a ring, I don’t talk to her, I don’t see her, and I don’t love her, at least not in the way a man should love his wife.”
He pauses. I’m silent, holding my breath.
“You there?” he asks.
I exhale. “Yes.”
“If I thought I was ever going to see you again, I wouldn’t have done what I did.”
“Gee, thanks,” I say, not bothering to hide my offense.
He puffs out a small laugh. “I don’t mean it like that. I mean, whatever reasons you had for wanting one night, I had my own. And I guess you being you and—I got carried away or caught up in the moment and…”
His voice trails off, letting all the unspoken words hang between us.
“Okay,” I finally say.
“Okay,” he echoes.
In the quiet, my heart tries to pound out of my chest.
“Gran showed me the mug you made. It’s very cute.” I can hear the amusement in his voice.
I snort. “It’s a bowl, asshole.”
“Well, it’s a cute bowl.”
I shake my head, but smile.
“Good night, Bo.”
“‘Night, Birdie.”
Then I hang up, get into bed, and dream about broken things being glued back together with gold.