nonfiction by emily baughman

IOU 10 Bucks (with interest)
Love, Dad

I realize what I want can never be. I want to visit the girls I used to be and introduce myself. There’s nothing I’d like to do more than sit with her: me at six, mud-covered hands as she creates friends, pies, and potions alone in the yard. She’ll worry about them when the summer rain comes. Stressing through the paned glass while thunder cracks. Watching the tarp Dad hung over her—my—artistic creations billow and shake in the wind between old-growth trees. Those mud friends will remain safe under there, through good night bear hugs and being tucked in so tight that waking up in the morning feels like being born again. But only this time, it’s Sunday morning and my dad’s humming in the kitchen and making damn sure Mom’s bacon is extra crispy. The rest are cooked as floppy as the pancakes, hanging limp on forks. There’s a dick joke there, and I’ll make it in another decade. He’ll be grossed out but laugh anyway.

Or I’d like to sit with her: me at sixteen. Horribly red-dyed hair weaves through the grass, orange stains still visible around her crown as she watches the sky. Clouds pass over her lids. The blue and the breeze transitioning into the pinks and reds she thinks she’s too cool to love. At least not out loud. Mom’s cooking in the kitchen. Through the open window she’s swearing, but there’s still a smile in her voice. I’ll lay there until Dad pulls in the driveway, the familiar bump between the street and home turf leading me to sit up to watch the old pick-up pull into the barn. He smells like sawdust and diesel when he hugs me, pulling me up ever so slightly into a safety that radiates love. And sweat. Gross sticky sweat, the kind where dirt sticks along his hairy forearms.

Some days I miss the girls I used to be. The soccer balls and bubbly handwriting. On days like these, I imagine them haunting my mom’s house. Creeping and giggling around corners.  Hugging her knees, stomach, and shoulders from behind. Smudging dirty hands on green walls. Loving and fighting like the sisters down the block who thought my house was haunted. But it was never haunted. Not until March and Dad never made it to another birthday. Not until the silence of his chest began to rattle in my mind at night. No one told me that death sticks to you like rot. You’re always worried someone can smell it on you, but the real kicker is that you're the only one. It's an uncomfortable truth of life. My dad is dead. One of those facts of life that once it’s true, it’ll never not be true. I can’t regrow my wisdom teeth, undo my first period, or see my dad again. I can’t hear his laugh in the kitchen. Roll my eyes with a smile at his jokes. And for the first time, the house feels haunted. 

When we first moved in, the gossip of the neighborhood was that the previous owner killed two husbands in our house. Both deaths were labeled accidents, but, hey, the rumors helped my parents afford the place. For a child afraid of everything, I never felt haunted in my house. My family filled every corner. Loud. Loving. Imperfect. It was good. People always ask if it was sudden or not. I think at the root people want to know if we knew. Had time to prepare, but I’m of the belief that nothing can truly prepare you for death. Not fully. It still feels sudden. You always think you have more time. Grief makes a mess of a life, and when you know it’s coming, it moves in early. Brings its friends. Nightmares. Sobbing in grocery stores. And, my personal favorite, a newfound dependence on greasy food. 

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or as the cool kids call it oh-yeah-that-ice-bucket-challenge-disease-from-2015 or isn't-that-what-Stephen-Hawking-had- disease is a death sentence. Plain and simple. There’s no surgery, treatment, or pills. There’s no fight to it. Watching the strongest person I know have his muscles slowly decay is the most woefully ironic thing I’ve ever witnessed. Absolute zero out of ten. I highly do not recommend it. My hatred for this damn disease runs through my blood, my bones, and my cells, which are half my father’s, so I guess he’s still shaking his fist at it now too. The part I hate the most is that it took his voice first. While it was a point of pride for him that he could walk until his last day, I would have traded anything for his voice. Or a laugh. The way it echoed through the house. Shifting the very air of a hard day with warmth and baritone, mixing with the singsong of my mother’s snorts only he could get out of her. My dad’s two most used phrases were, in order, “I love you” and “Chili always tastes better the second day, Mar”. I’d fight a bear to hear either one again because to him they were the same. My mom, while a fantastic woman, makes horrible chili. To this day, I think it’s spite at this point. It’s runny, underspiced, and lacks a balance between the meat and all the other ingredients. It’s bordering on inedible. 

These days I tell her, “Chili always tastes better the second day, Mom” with a smile that pulls at my chest more than my eyes. But it doesn’t taste better on the second day anymore. It hasn’t since my dad passed. The spice doesn’t brighten. The extra onions and beans don’t emerge from under the too-thin sauce that now fails to thicken. There’s a lack of life in the chili and we cry. The house is empty and cold in a way it’s never been. The lights illuminate the dust we’ve let sit for too long, as if the flecks of his hair, his skin, could keep him here with us. But instead, it’s the dust that haunts the corners. The hard-to-reach places of a family. So, we cry.

After a while, I tell her, “Maybe it just needed some salt?”

There’s a pause. Head and hair hanging, tears still dripping, while the slightest smile cracks. “You sound like your father.” She smiles while she says it, but we’re crying again. Our little ranch feels enormous and empty around the two of us. More like a manor full of ghosts than our home. Some place dreamed up for a gothic novel, owned by two Brontë-written women who cry into soupy meat. 

She and I slide from kitchen chairs to the floor, holding each other under the table. Hiding like children from the rain. Our backs rested against the wooden base of a table my dad built a decade ago. A table where my brother learned to do his taxes. A table where I did my homework on Rome. It wasn’t supposed to all fall in a day. Yet the table, rich wood and deep stain holds strong and steady against our shaking sobs that seem to echo between the table and the floor. Thinking back to the memory, it feels like we never get off the floor. But I know we do. I know there’s a break in there somewhere. I know there’s the pull of helping hands and we laugh at something again before the night is through. 

I still call his phone to hear his voicemail. I have it memorized and sometimes we say it together. I put his voice on speaker and it sounds so fake-professional that it makes me smile despite the glassy tears building in my eyes. It’s so unlike the man I know. There’s a robotic edge to his voice that seems so cartoonish like he’s putting on an act. Together we repeat the recording out loud. The cadence is familiar, and most days I hang up before the beep. I let the phone lay lit next to me on my new apartment’s couch. The apartment he never saw. Never helped me move into. Or watch me place my books on the shelves he built. The warm, dark wood contrasted my old bedroom walls. Walls that I begged to paint grey. The kind of grey that had just enough blue in it to match the Midwest skies during a storm. But now my walls lack a storm. My eyes follow a spider on the ceiling until it blurs into a dark point in a canvas of white. Somedays I wait for the beep. Let a silent pause hang in the air before I tell him how much I miss him. Grief is funny in how little sense it makes. My brother still calls my dad from the hardware store. I find the messages on the phone when I delete my own one-way conversations. I love the simplicity in his calls, 

“Hey, yeah, I’m at Home Depot, I know you hate the metal drywall anchors but they’re on sale. Yeah, yeah, I know you get what you pay for. You’re right. Love you”

There’s domestic comfort that follows the ending click. We all know he’s gone. You can call us crazy, but we’ve never been delusional. There’s something about pretending for small moments. It’s the small things you miss the most. It’s tarps and trucks rolling over the curb into the driveway. It’s the smell of sawdust. When I was younger, I thought “Goodnight, I love you” was the whole phrase. I didn’t know you could just say goodnight. The whole thing spilled out so smoothly. My dad's love for me was so woven into my life, I didn’t think there was any other way to be. It was the last thing I heard before closing my eyes every night and it was the last thing I ever said to him.

There isn’t a good ending here. My dad is gone. I saw the last breath leave him. He owed me years more. He owed me a dance on my wedding day. He owed me the sight of him holding my firstborn with pride. Plus, he owed me like ten dollars for an Italian beef five years ago. The IOU is framed in my bathroom. Grief is imperfect. It makes parts of your chest you never realized existed feel so impossibly empty. Physically painful. Like a vacuum sucked out all your gooey insides and continues to suck out your breath. You sob until you laugh then sob again. It's horrible and it’s funny when you don’t want it to be. I have no profound wisdom. Grief sucks. There is no right way to grieve, and everyone will have their two cents to give you but at the end of the day, you just keep going. I cry. I wake up in the morning for work. My favorite socks still have frogs on them, and they feel just the right amount of tight around my toes. I make my own coffee now, but it’s still my dad’s brand. It’s black and bitter and I love it and I cry. I leave for the day and enjoy a prairie flower growing in a crack on the sidewalk as I walk to my car. The little girls I used to be still run in my chest. The world spins. And I continue.