Animal Dreams

15 Mistakes

He has to look at her for a long time before he trusts himself to speak. Who is this girl? His daughter Codi, but which Codi? He thinks.

“You look surprised.”

“You startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He was doing Mr. Garrison’s lab work, waiting for the centrifuge to spin down Mr. Garrison’s blood cells, and when he looked up she was standing in the doorway. He detests surprises.

“Pop, I called five minutes ago, to see if you were here. I told you I was coming. I came straight here. I spent the day up at the graveyard.”

She is leaning against the doorsill holding a bouquet of rabbitbrush and roadside weeds, showering the air with pollen like an old feather duster. She has on purple cowboy boots, which even now are damaging her arches.

“And now you are here,” he says carefully.

“I found a surprise in the graveyard, a headstone with a name on it you might recognize. Yours. Almost yours.”

“Perhaps I am dead.”

She stares. “Do we have relatives from here?”

Uda Dell gave those to her, to both girls, for Christmas: the boots and straw cowboy hats and holsters with cap guns, so that they could run like banshees around the house pretending to fill each other with imaginary bullet holes. He took the guns away, for the preservation of their souls, and the boots on account of their arches. He let them keep the hats.

The minute hand on the wall clock jumps and the centrifuge slows to a stop, clicking suggestively, like the wheel of fortune. Without its mechanical whine the lab is very quiet. He looks up again and she is still there in her stocking feet and red straw cowboy hat, its dark cord knotted under her chin. She understands about the guns, but she wants the boots back. She has come on behalf of herself and her sister, she says. Her left foot in its white sock curls under. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves? Tears stream from her eyes.

He can’t relinquish either the guns or the boots. He wishes he could do all these things differently, but he can’t. He says, “I don’t think we need to discuss this any further.”

“Oh, come on, just tell me. Would it kill you to tell me?”

Startled, he looks again: she isn’t in stockinged feet, she has boots on. She is much too tall. He is confused and becomes angry. He has a glass vial of blood in his hands. This is his office. She didn’t need to sneak down here and startle him in his own doorway.

“I’m doing Mr. Garrison’s hematocrit,” he says. “I have a good bit more work to do.”

She sighs loudly. She must be fourteen. In a year she will be sullen and furtively pregnant. Or has that passed too? He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.