Holes in His Heart
CASSIE AND I never sat down to eat the dinner she had made. She was so disappointed about Daddy that she dumped the meat loaf into the garbage. Then she told me to make myself something else to eat. She said she wasn’t hungry and, with her head down, charged up the stairs to her room. It reminded me of when she was very young and went into tantrums, not speaking to anyone for days sometimes. No one could shut herself up as quickly and as completely as Cassie could. Daddy used to say she cut herself off so tightly that it was amazing she could breathe.
I made myself a sandwich and ate alone in the dining room. With both Daddy and Cassie shut up in their rooms, the house was cemetery-quiet. The stillness toyed with my brain. It was as if some normally heavily locked door was thrown open, and my imagination came rushing out, gleeful that it had no restrictions, no limits. Suddenly, I saw Mother sitting at the table. She was much younger, too, and so were Daddy and Cassie. Daddy had just surprised Mother with a gift for their anniversary.
“But our anniversary isn’t until Sunday, Teddy. Today’s Friday,” she said as she turned the small gift-wrapped box, looking at it from every angle as if she wanted first to guess what was in it.
“If I gave it to you on Sunday, it would be less of a surprise,” Daddy said. “Here it comes out of the blue, so to speak. You never expected it.”
“See how clever your father is?” Mother told us. She looked especially at Cassie, but Cassie didn’t speak. She looked upset, in fact, making that small tightness in the corners of her mouth. Funny how I never thought about her reaction, I told myself now. What annoyed her? Did she think Daddy was being too corny or something?
She tried not to look as Mother opened the small box and took out a beautiful gold locket shaped like a heart with a small diamond at the center. She held it up so Cassie and I could see it.
“Oh, how beautiful, Teddy.”
“Open it,” he said with that wide smile of his that warmed me so when I was little. His eyes would sparkle. It was as if I could actually smell his love. It was that great and comforting.
Mother worked the latch and looked. Even more surprise blossomed in her face.
“Teddy, where did you get these?”
“I have my ways,” he said, winking at me. He looked at Cassie, but she didn’t change expression.
Mother turned the locket so we could see. “This is a picture of me when I was your age, Semantha, and this is a picture of your father when he was your age, Cassie.”
“You didn’t know each other then,” Cassie said sharply. It was clear she thought the pictures were silly, especially in such a locket.
“Oh, but we did,” Daddy said. “Not very well, but we had met, because your mother’s father, your grandfather Brody, was a salesman for Carter and Smith and just happened to have brought your mother on a call to our store in Kenton when I was there with my father. We spent a little time together waiting for our fathers. Remember, Arianna?”
“Not as well as you do, Teddy.”
“I think I fell in love with you that day,” he said.
“How can you fall in love with someone when you’re that young?” Cassie asked. She asked it in that hard tone of voice that made you think what you had said was very stupid. When she did it to me, it was cutting and painful, but Daddy always held his smile and never changed his tone with her.
“You can when you meet your soul mate, Cassie,” he said, and reached for Mother’s hand.
“That’s romantic nonsense,” Cassie muttered.
“When you meet yours, you’ll change your mind,” Daddy told her.
Cassie didn’t reply. She simply started to eat, her gaze far-off. I knew she had shut the door on any further discussion.
The whole scene, that memory, played itself before me as if I were watching a television rerun. When I heard Cassie’s footsteps on the stairway, the memory popped like a bubble, and that door in my brain locked tightly after it and pulled my imagination back inside.
“Are you going to have something to eat, Cassie?” I asked as soon as she stepped into the dining room.
She didn’t answer. She continued into the dining room and walked slowly around the table, pausing at Daddy’s seat. She looked at it as if he were sitting there. Slowly, she extended her hand and held it in the air as though she were caressing Daddy’s head lovingly. Then she turned to me with a strange, deep smile on her face. I had never seen her eyes so bright. They seemed to illuminate her whole face, giving her an excited glow.
“I understand,” she told me. “I sat up in my room and thought and thought and thought, and suddenly, I understood.”
“Understood what, Cassie?”
“Daddy’s pain. Think of it as two holes in his heart, Semantha.” She sat in what had always been Mother’s seat and leaned toward me. “Mother’s death is one hole, and Asa’s is another.”
“Asa’s?”
“The Asa that could have been, Daddy’s Asa. One hole is so deep it won’t close, but the other will in time.”