My last stop of the afternoon is a new customer. Mrs. Foley. Glen met her at a yard sale last week and signed her up. He goes to yard sales on the weekends, hoping to find things that he can sell for a profit on eBay. Old toys. Electronics. Baseball cards. Part of his “investment strategy,” he says. “Like mining for gold,” he said. “It’s out there. You just got to find it.”
Mrs. Foley lives in the big, yellow house with the blue door on the corner of Elm and Summer Streets. It’s way too big for an old lady. I can’t imagine how she manages to keep the grass cut and the gutters clear of sticks and leaves. She probably has a son or daughter who helps out. In my experience, the bigger the house, the more annoyed the people are about paying me, and the more places they have to lose their checkbooks.
Big-house people suck.
Mrs. Foley, I’m sure, is going to suck.
I ring the bell. The door opens so fast that it scares me. It was like she was standing on the other side, just waiting for me to press the button. I jump back a couple steps.
“Hello,” she says. “You must be Michael.”
“I am,” I say. “Are you Mrs. Foley?”
I ask because this woman isn’t as old as I thought she’d be. Maybe this is Mrs. Foley’s daughter. Or a housekeeper. She doesn’t look much older than my mother.
Or the other mother, a voice in my head says. I recognize the voice. It’s mine, but it’s also a part of my voice that sometimes speaks on its own. Says things I don’t want to hear. I push it away. Shove it into the back of my brain.
“Yes,” Mrs. Foley says. “That’s me. But you can call me Louise.”
Mrs. Foley (there’s no freakin’ way I’m calling her Louise) is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Her black hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She’s smiling. This doesn’t look like a woman who can’t use the internet.
“I’m here to collect the money for the Globe,” I say. “For my stepfather.”
She sighs. Puts her hands on her hips. “You look just like your father.”
The words hit me like a punch in the gut. I’ve heard them before, but not for a long time. Not since he died. I actually take another step back until I’m standing at the edge of the stoop.
“Oh God,” Mrs. Foley says. “I’m so sorry. That was stupid.”
“No, it’s fine,” I say. But it’s not. I still can’t catch my breath.
“Look at you,” she says. “I’m so sorry. That was so inconsiderate of me. It just came out because you do. You look just like him when he was your age.”
“What?” I’m still trying to catch my breath.
“You and your dad … you look just like him when he was a boy.”
“You knew my dad?” I can barely get the words out.
“I did. I thought your stepfather would’ve told you. We talked about it last week.”
Now this makes sense. “He didn’t say anything to me about it,” I say. I want to tell her that he doesn’t tell me much about anything. I want to tell her that she was dealing with an idiot at that yard sale. An asshole and an idiot. But I don’t.
“I went to school with your father,” Mrs. Foley says. She smiles. Laughs a little. “I wasn’t a Foley back then. I was a Perkins. Louise Perkins. My husband’s name was Foley. He passed away a few years ago.”
Louise Perkins. The name rings a bell. Not a big one, but I’ve heard it before, which is saying a lot. Dad wasn’t exactly a fountain of information.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Michael. I know it’s terribly late in coming. I didn’t hear about his heart attack until well after it happened. But still, I’m so sorry. Your father was such a good man.”
“Thank you,” I say. This is what I say when people offer me condolences. When it first happened, I didn’t know what to say—and people said things like “I’m sorry for your loss” all the time—so Mrs. Newfang helped me find a strategy. “Just say thank you,” she said. “Then you can stop talking.”
I know that thanking a person and saying nothing more is kind of like setting a word trap. I say thank you and then I wait. That forces the other person to talk, and the silence before they figure out what to say can be super awkward. But at least the person can talk about anything they want—usually a story about my dad—and all I need to do is pretend to be interested and nod a lot. It’s not like I’m asking them a hard question.
It’s actually a good strategy. One of Mrs. Newfang’s best.
Mrs. Foley is stuck in one of those awkward silences now. She doesn’t know what to say, so she just stares at me for a second. Blinks. Then she says, “Sorry. You have places to be, I’m sure. Let me get my checkbook.”
As Mrs. Foley disappears into her house, she leaves the door open. I can see down a hallway into a kitchen. Most people either invite me inside, which I hate, or close the door as they go for their money, which I hate even more. It makes me feel like a criminal. Like I can’t be trusted to stand on their front stoop with the front door wide open.
Mrs. Foley has left her front door wide open. There aren’t too many people like her. I like her for that.
She also knew my dad. I’ve never met anyone who knew my dad when he was young. Mom met Dad in the hospital after he fell out of a tree and broke his arm and nose, but he was in his twenties when that happened.
This lady knew my dad when he was my age.
Suddenly I’m mad at myself for putting Mrs. Foley into that word trap. I wish I had asked her a question.
There are a billion terrible things about your dad dying, and every day you find a new one. It’s like an endless list that just keeps getting more and more endless, which I know doesn’t make mathematical sense but makes real-life sense. I remember the minister telling me that things would get easier with time. “Time heals all wounds,” he said.
I knew it was a lie on the day the minister first said it to me, and I know it even more now. He was either a liar or a fucking idiot. Time doesn’t heal any wounds. It infects them. Poisons them. I feel worse today and will feel even worse tomorrow.
When Dad died, he took all his memories with him. Everything that I didn’t know about him—every question never asked and every story never told—can never be known now that he’s dead. It’s like losing your only copy of a book before you finish reading the story, except it’s the only copy of the book ever. There’s no way to get those pages back.
When I was a little boy, I watched Dad fall into some water. I can’t remember where we were, but I remember that there was a Mello Yello can floating in the water. I don’t even know what exactly Mello Yello is, but I remember that aluminum can as clear as day, reflecting the sun off its shiny top. Dad fell off a dock, maybe, or out of a canoe. Maybe off a rock. I’m not sure. I’m not even sure why we were near the water. I don’t know if it was a river or a pond or the ocean. Probably not the ocean. But I’m really not sure.
Maybe he even dove into the water on purpose.
But I remember he was wearing a hat that day. A straw hat, I think, which makes no sense, but that’s how I remember it. A big-ass straw hat. And when Dad fell in, he disappeared beneath the water, but his hat remained floating on the surface. It just sat there, bobbing in the water, waiting for him to come back up and claim it.