After I made some coffee and ate breakfast, I resurrected my Florida wear of short shorts and a tank top. Then, with a glaze of sweat on my skin, I started going through a box that I’d brought into the living room.
The heater didn’t stop pushing out hot air, but I shrugged it off and tried to make some headway delving into an old box of my father’s books.
Unfortunately, I was slow-going because I had the annoying problem of opening each book and reading a small passage out of many of the books. #Hashtag English major problems. He had some good old classics. An autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The story of Hemingway’s wives. A 1960s reprint of Mary Wollencraft’s memoir that destroyed her reputation for over a century.
I put the books that I needed to keep into one box that I would send home and put on my college bookshelf, and then put the rest (which wasn’t many) into a big box labeled ‘donate.’
Around noon, I stumbled onto something that took me by surprise.
There was a brown bag of books labeled ‘for Natalie, after she graduates college,’ written with a black marker in my father’s handwriting.
My pulse raced as I opened up the bag, and pulled out the books onto the dining room table.
There was a smattering of at least a dozen books. I opened a random book, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and read an inscription from my father:
Hi Natalie!
Congratulations on graduating college. I never had any doubts about how smart you were. The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton’s first big hit of a book. She was the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. It wasn’t for this book though. It was for a book she wrote years later.
This, though, was a book she wrote when she was young and just getting started. I always think it’s interesting to read about people’s ‘breakout’ moments.
I can’t wait for you to have your ‘breakout’ moment. Or maybe you already had it, in sixth grade when you were the best wicked witch of the west the Wizard of Oz has ever seen. Do you remember that? I do. You were wonderful. You’ve always been wonderful.
I can’t wait to discuss all of these (and more) with you.
Love,
Dad
I ran my eyes over the words again, and suddenly felt dizzy.
Tears welled in my eyes and a shiver rolled across me in spite of the heat wave that was occurring in my house right now. My whole body slackened, and I staggered over to the couch in the living room, book in hand. Collapsing on the couch, I held the book tight against my chest.
Anger racked through me.
I’d never get the chance to discuss this book with him. Or any book, for that matter. Clearly he thought about me all the time. Despite the divorce, he was a good dad and I would never get to experience that bond with him again.
Why did it have to be like this?
At first I tried to fight the sobs, but I knew it would be futile.
Collapsing in a fit of rage, I cried for several minutes, needing the release of the pent up emotions I had been feeling.
An hour or so later, I woke up to the sound of my cell phone ringing.
“Hello?” I answered groggily.
“Hi, honey! How are you?” It was my mom.
“Not good,” I said before I cleared my throat.
“Oh, sorry. That was a dumb question. What I mean is, how was your first night sleeping at the place alone?”
I sighed. “It was okay. Lonely, though. And hot.”
“Hot? It’s freezing, dear. Isn’t it?”
“Not in this house. It’s like an oven. I think the heater’s broken. It’s been running nonstop since last night.” I wiped off beads of sweat from my forehead.
“You can call a heating professional to come out there, you know.”
“I’m sure it will start working soon. Plus once I leave, I’ll just turn it off.”
A silence fell between us for a moment, and I heard my mother blow out a slow, deep breath. She and my father had had their differences when he was alive. After his death, she hadn’t said too much about him, which made me wonder what was going through her head.
“So, you remember the North’s, right?” I said, trying to break the tension. But I realized then that this would be an equally depressing topic.
“Of course! Louisa and her nice older brother, Shane. How are they?”
“Not so good. Louisa passed away.”
Every time I thought about her it made my stomach coil.
“Oh. Oh my gosh. That’s so sad. Send them my condolences.”
“I will.”
I heard a deep breath on the other end of the phone.
“I really should have stayed in Black Mountain with you. It’s not fair to put all of the responsibility in your hands to get your father’s things together.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s therapeutic for me.”
After another pause, she said, “Would you give me Louisa’s house number? I’m going to give a personal call over there to see how Mrs. North is doing.”
I recited it to her, right off the top of my head.
My mother and I said a few more niceties and then we hung up.
After reading some of The House of Mirth for a couple hours, I made myself a sandwich, and by then the sky was getting dark again. I’d forgotten how incredibly short the days were in the Upper Peninsula around the winter solstice.
I was making exactly zero headway when it came to going through my father’s things. Since today was my first full day to finish going through everything, I excused myself for getting badly sidetracked. I had no idea about that box of books that caught me completely by surprise, and a little self-reflection in the middle of this tragedy probably was a good thing.
I needed to figure out what the heck I was going to be doing with my life, in any case.
By springtime I would be finished with my major in Theatre and English, but I still had no idea what I wanted to do with it, or where in the world I would end up.
Florida was home for me but as far as getting ahead in the acting or writing scene, I needed to think about a big move. I’d considered New York—which had a thriving theatre scene—but cliché as it was, Los Angeles was where you found the real acting jobs according to all of the research I’d done.
Another part of me thought I could move to Chicago and do improv there like my idols, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and maybe write a little bit. But the prospect of moving to a new city, making new friends, and being completely on my own was daunting to me.
I’d always been too scared to put my thoughts down on paper and get them in front of people, though. Well, except for my journals which absolutely no one but me was allowed to read. And I had no idea how you ‘broke in’ to a job in writing. College was safe and cozy; the world ‘out there’ was this nebulous cloud of auditions and failures that I would have to endure in order to find success. I still didn’t even know what success meant to me. It was hard to imagine going through such stressful means without a clear end of what I wanted to achieve.
To be sure, my future after college was still foggy. I was intending on coming to visit my father after Christmas this year to think it over talk about it with him. He always seemed to have good advice for me. Instead, I’d pushed my trip back to arrive here after the New Year.