Page 27

Jen deftly maneuvered the paint roller on its long pole over the ceiling, working away from the corner she’d already covered. Tressa Fay was trimming the baseboards, watching with satisfaction as the shiny paint knit together all the scuffs and chips from years of wear.

“Are you going to tell me how it’s going?” Jen asked, moving the pole back down and wiping her arm over her forehead. “Or is your plan to follow Phil Robeson into the storm clouds of silence every time you have a big feeling?”

“Don’t tell me you and Dad have fought.”

Jen laughed. “Of course we have. We’re both grown adults who’ve been single, doing everything our own way, for decades. We’ve spent a good part of this month fighting.”

“Over what?” Tressa Fay sat on the floor and balanced her brush on top of the paint can.

“This.” Jen gestured around the room, which used to be Tressa Fay’s but had lately been where her dad tied flies at an old drafting desk and stored things he wasn’t sure if he should get rid of. “Making some changes. Moving in.”

“Everything you’ve been doing are things he’s thought he should do for ages. I know he’s so glad you’re here.”

“Mm.” Jen sat down on the top of a stepladder. She wore a sports bra under a pair of overalls, a bandana protecting her hair, and seemed years younger. “I wouldn’t say he’s glad I’m here. What I would say is that he wants me here but wishes he was a better Catholic and could keep me at courting distance until we got married.”

“I’m not sure how he ever could have thought that he could keep you at a distance.” Tressa Fay looked around at the room. It already seemed so much lighter and brighter than it had been, even when it was hers. “You’re a force of nature.”

Jen grinned. “I think your dad took in a little more than was necessary of the hair shirt and self-mastery portions of theology and not enough of the parts where love is the point. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be here, and I definitely wouldn’t have decided to spend the rest of my life with him, if I didn’t believe he’d surrendered to love a long time ago.”

Tressa Fay thought about that. “I was terrified to come out to him,” she said. “But I never thought he’d stop being my dad or yell at me or kick me out. I was scared because I’d fought so hard for every bit of closeness we did have, and I didn’t want to lose any of it, but also he’d made me go to so much mass that I couldn’t lie to him. I was fifteen.”

“That’s such a hard age.”

“I’m only just beginning to get that. One night I asked him to tuck me in for bed. For some reason, that’s how I decided I was going to tell him. From under the covers. I hadn’t wanted him to tuck me in and say good night to me for years and years. But he just got up from his recliner and didn’t even look at me funny. That’s how I knew it would be okay. And it was. I told him, he nodded, and then the next morning he made pancakes, which he hadn’t done since I was little.”

“He loves you.”

Tressa Fay looked up at the half-painted ceiling and sniffed, wiping away tears. “Yeah. I think I’ve only recently figured out that even if he’s never been the easiest person to talk to and is so fucking tight and prescriptivist about all kinds of things, he also never tried to make me be anything other than what I was. Which must mean that he actually loves me. For me.”

“That’s the kind of person he likes, you know. The kind who’s exactly who they are. Singular. Not hung up on rules, even the rules he feels like he has to follow.”

“Like you.” Tressa Fay smiled.

“And your mom.”

“So I’ve heard.” Tressa Fay suddenly got goose bumps. “I was this minute years old when I realized that the only stories Dad has ever told me about Mom were the ones where she was particularly outrageous.”

Jen laughed. “It makes you think about what he admires most in a person.”

“Meryl has rules. I’m not sure that’s what she’d call them. She has an old-fashioned code, you know what I mean?”

Jen leaned forward. “I do. She’s principled.”

“Yes.” Tressa Fay picked a thread from the hole in her jeans. “It means she’ll never stop talking to me if she can help it. She’ll never leave me if she can help it.”

Tressa Fay thought again of her mom. How her mom hadn’t wanted to leave, but she hadn’t been able to prevent it. How there were times, especially when Tressa Fay was a teenager and worried about coming out to her dad, feeling like the only lesbian in Wisconsin, certain she would never find love and would definitely die alone, when she’d been so angry with her mom for dying and leaving her with just Phil. She’d wished her mom had fallen in love with someone easier, someone who could have recovered from losing her with expansive, resilient optimism instead of dogged coping and grief.

It had taken loving Meryl and knowing she could lose her for Tressa Fay to understand that her mom had left her with the one person best equipped to love her. The person she’d loved the most. Because that meant her mom had never left her and never would.

“Are you mad at Meryl?”

Tressa Fay sighed. “Well, sometimes my feelings and what I can’t control have a party, and I get so dug in and stubborn.”

“I have no idea where you got that from.” Jen put her elbow on her crossed legs and her chin in her hands. “But you didn’t stay stuck?”

Tressa Fay cleared her throat. “No. And also, I’m giving her a little time and space this afternoon because I perceived she might have felt the tiniest bit smothered. She has a lot on her mind.”

“Oh, Tressa Fay. How is it that you’re supposed to navigate this? You’re both doing the best you can. But I know that neither your dad or I want you to be left with any regrets.”

“You think she’s going to be gone,” she said softly.

“I don’t know.” Jen shook her head. “It’s out of my depth in every way.”

“Meryl said that you weren’t even living with Dad when he told me in October that you were getting married.”

“Yes. But I was always going to, so it feels like the same thing.”

It reminded her of the words her father heard at mass once a week, right before he walked out the door. As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.

Tressa Fay stood up. “I’m going to go find my dad and give him a hug, and then I want to spend as much time as I can with Meryl.”

“Come here.” Jen opened her arms.

Tressa Fay sank into a long hug with Jen, her first really proper Jen hug. Her arms were strong, and her skin was soft. Her hair smelled good, a gentle scent that didn’t close up Tressa Fay’s throat.

She stepped back.

“Your dad’s in the garage, repairing a bookshelf of mine I was going to toss. I don’t think I’ve ever offended him more than when I told him that I was going to throw away something because it was broken.”

“Yeah.” Tressa Fay laughed. “You’ve noticed that this place is a time capsule from the nineties, right? The pristine condition of the creamy-white appliances and hunter-green carpeting?”

“He’s shampooing it on a schedule, isn’t he?”

“Every August. ‘Before the cold weather sets in and it won’t dry.’?” Tressa Fay imitated Phil’s voice.

“Good to know. How receptive do you think he’d be to ‘I bet there are perfectly serviceable hardwoods under all this carpet’?”

“Maybe first see if you can get Father to mention they need a bunch of secondhand carpet in good condition to cover part of the floor in the church basement.”

Jen laughed. “I’m so glad I have you as a walking Phil Robeson guidebook.”

Tressa Fay kissed her cheek and left.

In the garage, her dad knelt down beside the bookshelf, which lay on its side. She smelled sawdust. He had a clamp in one hand and a bottle of glue in the other.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Almost done. Did you finish up that trim painting?”

“I left Jen to it. She’s obviously an expert, and I wanted to hang out with you for a while. Guess what I did today.”

“What did you do?”

“I wore Mom’s dress to cut Meryl’s hair. Look.” She fished out her phone and pulled up the photos she wanted him to see. “I found a picture of Mom wearing it to a party. You look about fourteen years old, but the date says you were a legal adult.”

Her dad pulled his readers out of the pocket of his shirt and studied the picture on her phone. “I remember that party. It was at Lucy Donmire’s. She was getting ready to move to Seattle.”

“Lucy Donmire?” Tressa Fay looked at the photo again. “The artist who makes the giant billboard installations? She’s famous!”

Her dad pulled a rolling stool over and sat down. “Last I heard.”

“You’ve never told me that you know her. I didn’t even know she was from Wisconsin.”

“I went to school with her. Kindergarten through graduation. My mom always gave her mom perms.”

“You didn’t think I would find this information interesting?”

“I never know what you’re going to find interesting, Tressa Fay.” He laughed. “More than half the time you accuse me of never letting anything change at all, and then you’ll make a big fuss because you find a can of Old Bay seasoning in the cupboard and ask me why I have it, because I’ve never bought it before.”

“That was weird,” she said. “There has never been anything but salt, pepper, and cinnamon sugar in that cabinet. What was I supposed to think?”

“Sometimes a man wants his Friday fish fry to be jazzed up a little.” He raised his eyebrows at her.

Tressa Fay grinned, delighted with him. Lately, she’d been saving screenshots on her phone of haircuts she thought might look good on him, because it had started to feel possible that she might be able to talk him into one.

Although, if he didn’t want to change his hair, that was okay. She didn’t need him to be anyone but who he was, who he always had been. What felt so good now was knowing that he’d wanted to figure this out, just as much as she had. That was what the monthly haircut appointments and weekly diner meals had been about. They were his way of trying to tell her, I want to be close to you .

“I’m glad Jen’s moving in. I just wanted to say that, because I happen to know it was a very real possibility that I’d never learn of her existence until you told me you were getting married.”

Her dad put down the bottle of glue and settled back on his heels. “Isn’t it something?” He looked away, gazing out the open garage door to the street. “I’ll be honest, it was hard to hear. But it’s been a wake-up call.”

“Tonight is the night.” She walked over to where her dad had laid a big piece of cardboard out beneath the bookshelf to protect the wood and keep the garage floor clean. She sat down across from him on the cardboard, pulling her knees up to wrap her arms around them.

All at once, feelings rushed over her, and Tressa Fay knew she’d been here before, sitting by her dad on the garage floor.

Sitting by her dad on a boat on a quiet lake.

Standing next to him while he lit a candle in the back of the church for her mom.

Standing behind him, checking that she’d gotten his neckline straight and sharp.

“What is it?” He raised his eyebrows. “What do you need?”

It was the first time he’d asked her that when it didn’t feel like an accusation.

“I need to know that how I feel about Meryl is…enough.” She couldn’t say, not to her dad, that she was afraid she wasn’t enough.

He rubbed his hands together, slow, squeezing his fingers. “It’s not,” he said, finally. “I had that, plus the candles I lit at the church and all the time I spent on my knees. I can tell you that if the way I felt about your mom wasn’t enough to keep her here, nobody’s feelings are. I know that’s prideful, but I think it’s true. Not possible there’s ever been a love greater than what I gave to Shelly.”

Tressa Fay couldn’t speak.

Her dad blew out a breath. “You know, you’re a lot like me, Tressa Fay. I don’t doubt that you’re plenty for Meryl.”

She laughed reflexively, almost breathless. “What should I do, Dad?”

He looked out of the open garage door again, then back at her with a smile. “Fishing works for me, but you’ve never taken to it.”

Fishing. She almost made a joke, one of what her dad called her smart comments , but the words stopped up in her throat because she’d thought about the water, and being at the top of the Ferris wheel at Bay Beach, and the short walk across the street from Canyon Tacos to the river, and what Meryl had told her about water remembering everything.

Water was something that Meryl was sure of. Like Tressa Fay was sure of what to do with a razor in her hand and a person in her chair who wanted to be made over into the truest version of themself.

Meryl could look at the water moving through a place like Green Bay, where every piece of shoreline along the lake and bounding in the Fox and East Rivers had been engineered—where levees and culverts and drains and underground pipes directed every speck of rainwater—and have complete faith that if all of it was deconstructed, the water would know where to go.

If water was the only thing Meryl could be sure of, then Tressa Fay could damn well get Meryl into the water. Maybe there, she could find the faith she so badly needed.

“It’s a nice day,” Tressa Fay said. “Probably the last nice day in Wisconsin. I don’t fish, but I’m thinking I’ll go swimming.”

“Wear sunscreen and shower after. Don’t want a burn or diarrhea.”

“Oh my God,” Tressa Fay said. “I’m not ten.”

“No, but that night when you were ten after that girl’s party at her people’s farm pond was a bad one.”

Tressa Fay stood up. “You’re a good dad. Have I ever told you?”

“I don’t need praise for the work God puts in front of me, Tressa Fay.” But he smiled. “Come to breakfast in the morning if you want to.”

“You bet.” Tressa Fay brushed her butt off, even though a person could probably eat ice cream off her dad’s garage floor and not have to pick so much as a speck of dust out of their teeth. “You need help getting that back in the house?”

“Nope. Glue has to dry. You can go on. Watch the mailbox on your way out.”

She laughed. “Stand up and hug me, though, first.” It was only a little bit vulnerable to say such a thing out loud. She wasn’t sure when she’d asked her dad for a hug. Probably that was why she’d decided to come out to him from beneath her covers in her bedroom—because part of his routine, when he said good night, had always been to give her a hug.

But he just rose stiffly to his feet as though they’d always done this. He set his clamp on the workbench against the wall and opened his arms.

Tressa Fay hugged her dad, thinking about Meryl and love and what a gift it was to live every day not knowing what would happen tomorrow.