When the phone rings at 9:12, I know it’s him.
“Hey, baby, you on your way?” he asks. His voice is bright, honey smoke. He is a morning person. I am still curled up in the sheets.
“Mmm-hmm, I’m getting ready,” I croak, shuffling for my glasses. They’re sitting atop a small book of poetry labeled Love Poems, which he found on sale for me at Barnes and Noble. This looked like you, he told me. It’s been read cover to cover, turning its white jacket a muted cream, and the bottom is stained plum from where I spilled a glass of cabernet on my bed-stand one night.
“Okay, ten o’ clock,” he says, knowing I’m a goddamn liar. “See you then, sweetie.”
I show up to his house at 10:32.
“Hey, Pop,” I say, coming through the door. He says nothing about the time, kisses my cheek, and starts gathering pans from the kitchen cabinets because for three-and-a-half hours today, he’s teaching his daughter, who can barely bring water to a boil, how to make baklava.
Two days ago, I had been at work, checking in on him because my mother was out of town at a sorority convention. A retired history teacher, he has a propensity towards cooking and library books; without my mother around, neither would satisfy him for the weekend. I called him from my desk, laying out the obituary page with one hand and clutching the phone with the other.
“Anyone interesting die today?” he asked me. I could hear him sipping a rum and coke in the background.
“Hmm, a tugboat captain who had a boat called Shag Nasty,” I said.
“Your mama’s coming home Sunday,” he told me.
“I know,” I said. “What time?”
“I don’t know.” He paused.
“So I was thinking about making baklava,” I said.
“Really?” His voice sounds both eager and astonished, like I told him I was finally going to stop fucking around and marry a doctor already, preferably one who had a timeshare in Venice.
“Yeah. Maybe you could give me the recipe?”
My father is a champion baklava-maker. A Greek pastry made with up to thirty layers of phylo dough, honey, and toasted nuts, it’s a five-hour process that my father has shaved down to three, including baking.
“I tell you what,” my father, said, giddy. “You could come over Sunday and we can make it together. I have all the spices, so you won’t have to buy those. Just get the dough and the nuts. We can get up early in the morning and get it finished.” His voice was so genuine that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Sunday was the only day I had to sleep in.
Dad gathers his tools: a stainless steel bowl my parents got from a coworker after they eloped, a little red food processor, and a tiny spatula he bought specifically for scooping honey from the measuring cup. He is a man who arranges his spice rack in alphabetical order. He, as he always has been, is prepared for anything. I am not as organized as my father, and gather packages of nuts from a crinkled plastic grocery bag in the bottom of my purse, and the thin dough, which I bought frozen before I came over. He tells me it needs to thaw before we touch it, or we risk tearing it to pieces.
We set to work. He turns on country music from the 40s, and wailing cowboys moan about losing their heart to another woman while I’m cutting squares of butter, and he’s toasting nuts in the oven. He arranges them on baking tray, smoothing them out with his thick, tanned fingers. “Ruddy,” he often called himself, an outdated term that was used to describe people of mixed ancestry at the turn of the century, but for him, it seems oddly appropriate. He’s wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and when I look at his legs I remember that he had a life before standing in this red kitchen making baklava for his daughter under the guise that she was doing it herself, because in my father’s legs are indentions from bullet wounds.
It wasn’t a secret that my father was a Marine Corps sergeant in Vietnam, but what was interesting about my father’s service was that it was, for him, a moot point. He rarely brought it up, unless he was discussing seeing the fjords of Norway or the Vatican on leave, and then it was simply contextual. He framed one Purple Heart with five of his other medals to hang by his father’s and his grandfather’s Marine Corps discharge certificates, and kept the rest in the dark bureau drawer of his antique butler desk. His time in war made him neither tightly conservative nor overly liberal. He wasn’t angry. He was just personally unimpressed with it all.
I found out about most of my father’s experiences in Vietnam through newspaper clippings my grandmother saved about him, including one incident where his bunker was blown to pieces while he was on duty, and his pursuit and execution of a guerilla fighter in the mess hall of the camp. At eleven-years-old, I eagerly flipped through his scrapbook, and was met with his steely gaze in muted Polaroids of him in forest green, manning a machine gun. There were letters he wrote home, one of which had a hole from a piece of shrapnel, and telegrams from when he was transferred to a hospital in Hawaii. I read these with fascination, and then walked into the loft of the house to find him stretched out on the sofa watching Designing Women. It was hard to put the two people together, especially when they were both supposed to equal out to be my father. At nineteen, he was sleeping in the irrepressible heat of the jungle, having his flesh torn with bullets; at nineteen, I failed a German test because I was hungover from a fraternity bash the night before. While he pulled grenade pins I picked out pink high heels to wear to formals.
I feel a sickening tinge of guilt when he starts to butter the layers of dough in the glass pan, which he has let me borrow but has made me swear I will bring back, that my life has been irrefutably easier than his, and yet he is still sharing, still giving, and all I can offer him is the opportunity to do so, an ingrate in my own way. As he paints the dough with bright yellow, I stand watching him stupidly, there to offer a hand but knowing that not only does he not have to take it, but that he doesn’t need it. Love flows downhill, I heard somewhere, and repeat it to myself while he gently presses the dough down into the pan, and think, Thank God you have to love me because I’m not sure you would if you had a choice.
“You just have to go slowly,” Dad says. “It just takes time. You want to try?”
I move next to him, and start laying the dough, thin and fragile as parchment, on top of a layer of nuts and cinnamon. I butter it while he watches and reach for another layer.
“Slow down,” he says gently. “You have nowhere to be yet.” I look up at him while he sips his rum and coke. His directions and his advice have always been indistinguishable. I take pains to slow myself, and when it seems as though I’m steadied, my father wanders towards the door and opens it. He lights a cigarette, and stands with the door cracked open. The faint smell of a Marlboro hits me, something that will always remind me of my father. A friend of mine had him as a teacher once, and said students used to see him smoking cigarettes between classes all the time. It amused me, thinking of my father as a delinquent, having to sneak cigarettes in the school parking lot with the rest of the eighth-grade vagrants.
“There’s my cardinal,” Dad says suddenly. “Come see him.” I put down the butter and walk outside with him. He’s been talking about a cardinal and a blue jay that he feeds in the morning, and here they are, awaiting the offerings. He keeps a jar of peanuts on the porch for the occasion, and throws one in the air, which the cardinal dives for. A squirrel rushes forward too, and my father tosses him a few nuts.
“You’re like Snow White,” I tell him, and he laughs. My father has an odd clout with animals, cats especially, but I’m still amazed how well this rule applies to undomesticated animals when he makes a faint whistle and the cardinal chirps back. Two blue jays appear and we watch them for a while.
“Sometimes one of the blue jays will give his peanut to the other one,” he says. They sit on the branch and watch us. He tosses them a nut but neither one of them moves, probably because my father is not alone.
“It’s just Laura,” he calls to them, and I’m a little embarrassed to be viewed as so unworthy of trust, even it is from two blue jays. They continue to sit on the branch of the dogwood my father planted when my brother was born.
“Sure am glad you came over,” he says suddenly, and I want so badly to make the moment count, to open up, to tell him that I caught the man I love with someone else and how bad it fucking hurts and to hear him tell me not to worry about it and how it all correlates to giving it time, just like baklava, just like everything, but this moment is about me and Dad and no one else, so I put my chin on his shoulder and he calls again to a blue jay, who swoops down to the ground and picks up a peanut from the earth while we watch in a clear, hot morning that is nothing short of faultless.
