You Are My Sunshine

“Are we going to see my dad again this year?”

“Yes. It’s Father’s Day, honey. That’s where we are going. We will see him every year. I promised you that. Remember?”

She smiled holding her doll. She combed its hair apprehensively. Thinking of the cemetery made her nervous. “He was a good dad wasn’t he?”

“Yes, darling. He was a good dad.”

She hesitated. “You are a good dad, too.”

He turned to smile at her. “Thank you, pretty. You are a good daughter.”

He started the car and turned on the air conditioning. A wasp pinged off the window glass. She panicked but he quickly scooped the wasp out the window. “You needn’t worry, dear. I will not let anything as silly as a wasp hurt you. We bought the wasp jar, remember? It catches all bad things.”

She smiled but her gratitude faded with her thoughts. “What happened to my dad?”

“There was an accident.”

“Someone at school said he was — murdered.”

He was quiet. He looked at her in the rearview and put the car into reverse. “Do you know what murdered means, darling?”

She shook her head no. He caught a glimpse of his wife in the upstairs window as they pulled away. He smiled reassuringly and waved. She smiled weakly and waved back. A drink in her hand. Ice cubes melted slowly. She had decided not to go this year. It would be better if he took her alone. Maybe they could stop for ice cream. It would be better for everyone. 

It was a twenty minute drive. They got ice cream on the way. She watched the trees float outside the window. Shadows of birds between the sun and the earth. Cottonwood spores floated across the fields above the heads of a wave of green corn. Her stomach was in knots. An ice cream stain on her sundress. Her head was full of memories of her dad but they were leaving her slowly. This year there were a few less than last and surely next year there would be even less until he was an empty locust skin. She loved her dad because he was her dad but there was very little to hold on to other than a name and a few pictures. She closed her eyes and the silhouette of the wasp from earlier was on the back of her eyelids. She opened them and it was gone.

He pulled into the gravel lane that led to the cemetery. A row of sad-looking crabapple trees crowded their route, bent and twisted along the lane. Thorns pushed back by a black-wire fence. They pulled through a black-iron metal entry and the road became paved in gold-soaked asphalt. Of course, his parents overdid it and he had a black marble headstone that could be seen from the road and was prominent among the other headstones. Sunlight glared off it as it streamed in banners through the spread of ancient sycamores. It was an old cemetery. It was a hot day and the locusts chattered loudly, hiding somewhere in the trees. Birds sang songs for the dead. They walked past rows of modest gravestones, hundreds of years old, that people had forgotten entirely. He was on a fresh hill. There was a car parked nearby visiting someone else’s bones. He took her hand as they got close. She held tight to him and looked up comforted by his presence.

She never said anything at the headstone. She could still taste the strawberry ice cream on her lip. She stood in front of the marker and looked down at the etching. At the shapes of his name, the same as hers. At the dates of his birth and death. At the plastic flowers his mother and father left for him. The dad next to her stood silent, a step back away from her. If he had a thought, an emotion, he didn’t show it. It had all been bulldozed and leveled and reconstructed for the better good, for the girl and her mom.  

“I forgot!” she cried.

“What did you forget?”

“Wait!” She ran off towards the car. He stood there and waited for her. His hands folded in front of him.

“Be careful,” he called. “We are in no hurry.”

“Okay,” she called back running for the car. Her eyes fixed to it. She tried not to look to the sides. The gravestones frightened her. She felt that if she looked a hand might come up through the ground and grab her ankles and pull her under to a place she could imagine only in nightmares. She ran through a spider web and stumbled, frightened it was a ghost, swiping at her face. She tripped and skinned her knee and cried. He ran for her and scooped her up in his arms. She wailed, seeming to forget what she had forgotten.

“Oh, you poor clumsy girl! I am sorry. Let me take you home.”

“But I drew dad a picture.”

They got to the car and he opened the door. The picture was on the backseat next to her doll. A likeness of her, a bright yellow sun and what appeared to be her dad with a halo and wings. One of those memories she would lose in another year or so. A day they had once upon a time.

He picked up the picture without letting her go and he carried the girl and the picture back to the grave. The sun no longer shined on the black marble and it seemed desolate without it. He bent down and let her put the picture on the grave without letting her go. 

“You’re a good dad,” she said as he stood back up. Tears stained her cheeks. Strawberry ice cream on her chin. “Was my dad a good dad, too?”

“Yes. And you were his sunshine.”

She felt better in the car on the ride home. The air conditioning and the music softly lulled her to sleep. Her favorite songs toiling in her ears. A carousel in her mind of beautiful memories, painted and glossy, exploited from reality and molded into wonderful contortions like the fantastic zebras on gold poles that went round and round. The faces of her parents reappearing again and again until her dad was gone. A memory of him was replaced with a new memory. Of being scooped up into her new dad's arms and carried to the black marble marker. Black marble doesn’t stay with you. Neither does dirt. Neither do the twirls of letters in fancy etching. They are cold and sterile. They are adorned in plastic flowers.

When she woke up her knee stung. He carried her into the house singing "You Are My Sunshine" and her mom held her hand as he cleaned her knee with peroxide and bandaged the wound. Fat tears in her eyes stalled and he wiped them away. They were gone and she wouldn’t remember them. She fell asleep early that night and he carried her to bed. He and his wife had wine on the porch.

“How did she do?” her mother asked. New insects made new noises.

“She was fine. She is beginning to forget him.”

“Do you think she will ever know?”

“No one knows, dear.”

“She asked me if he was murdered.”

“She asked me, too, today,” he replied.

“What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t. She is a little girl. Murder, suicide, what does it matter now? They’re just words.”

She took a long drink and smoked another cigarette. The fire from which lit her beautiful face aglow. He lit a candle and a moth fell immediately for it.

“Those things are going to kill you, dear.”

“They calm my nerves.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” She put out her cigarette and melted into him on the dark porch. She felt reassured. She whimpered softly as he held her, “It’s been two years. I can’t forget. I only worry she will find out.”

“We did what we had to do. I couldn’t be with you or her so long as he was alive.”

“What will she remember of him?”

“Black marble.”

There was a ping on the glass of the wasp jar as another wasp reluctantly began the ceremony of dying, holding on to life.