Raleigh Review 5.1 (Spring 2015)

“I used to think that if my mother would have gone to the movies with us she would have stayed with him.”

Andrew leaned his arms on the table and looked at her straight on as though she might bolt and run.

“You’re not your mother, and I’m not your father,” he said.

Laura reached behind her and turned off the light.

“And then what happened?” he asked.

“And then he died. Just like that. One minute he was walking down the street talking with a friend, and the next minute he was dead. A heart attack. My mother was the one who called to tell me.

“I didn’t know what to say to her. I was still angry she’d left him. I felt so empty and strange, like he’d never even been in my life.”

“Was he handsome?”

“Like a god.”

Slowly, Laura began to talk in the dark. She told him about her parents fighting during the night and how she couldn’t go to sleep until it was over and she heard her father walk to the living room to sit in his chair and her mother slam the bedroom door. She told him about the time she told Jimmy Davis her father was a bank robber.

And about Mrs. Moore and that stupid third-grade Weekly Reader and how she ran home and cried on the front porch wishing her father would be the one to find her and take her back to school so she could show Mrs. Moore he wasn’t handicapped. But, instead, it was her mother who came home and found her, washed her face, and took her back to school.

When Andrew reached across the table and took her hand, Laura was surprised at how cool his fingers felt against her skin. All at once, she remembered how it was to sit next to her father in the movies and to tell him about the things he couldn’t see. Then, she told Andrew the truth about her father.

“Sometimes he could see. Not for long, and not very well, but he could see. He called it pinhole vision.

Whenever it happened, he would take the lampshade off 26 | Raleigh Review