Terrible Daughter

Terrible Daughter Danielle Wick

I’m sorry. I never got around to thanking you for teaching me how to make rice in our scratched aluminum pressure cooker, or that I need a little milk and cinnamon for really good french toast.

I’m also sorry for not making a scene about those potato pancakes at Perkins, sitting across from each other in a booth for the first and the last time because you were finally skinny enough to fit.

Now, remembering the sharp downward twitch of your beard and the dip of your brown eyes when you saw half-raw hash brown bits hanging out of Bisquick’s excuse for pancakes, I wish I had.

I wish I had stood up in the booth, started yelling, “This man is two months from losing a year long battle with cancer and the best you can do is fucking hash brown bits? You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

But, goddamn it, I would only have been yelling at myself –

Ashamed for myself, for all the times I said I’d spend the weekend videotaping you telling those hundred stories you always told only to turn tail and run, eight hours in, catching any ride that wouldn’t ask questions back to my apartment the same night.

Now, two years later,

I’m left wondering whether or not you would have wanted me to stand shaken, awed and weeping in front of your empty corpse, subconsciously formulating nightmares out of the undividing flesh.

I think not. I think you would rather I remember you grunting as you tugged weeds from your obnoxious garden of green beans, sweetcorn and ox heart tomatoes or tugging your beard with your other hand on your hip, glaring at a computer as it blew subsonic raspberries in the back of your computer store: GOM. Grumpy Old Men. My grumpy old man.

But mostly I remember you laughing to tears when you said, “I’m so full of shit…” and I replied, “Not anymore…” This conversation in that old wood-paneled van, just after you’d lost control of your bowels in the elevator at Mayo.

I loved you and forgave you for everything then, you know, and I glared at anyone who wrinkled their noses at the dark stain creeping down your leg –

“That’s my dad, goddamn you. Whether he smells bad or not, he worked as a cowboy once and has a degree in making hybrid plants and owns his own computer shop. He has five kids and doesn’t love the step-ones any less than the rest of them and has a temper to shame the devil and owns a little auburn poodle whom he loves even though he swore he wouldn’t.

The mighty fall mightily and you should be humbled to see him like this.”

I remember in the van, while wiping tears of laughter off your face, you smiled at me and said, “That joke… You’re a terrible daughter, just terrible.”