Daddy's Gone a Hunting

54

Peggy Hotchkiss was in her Staten Island home, settled down in front of the television and watching the same newscast as her son and daughter-in-law. A gasp, followed by a sound that was both moan and sigh, escaped her as she clenched the arms of the club chair where she was sitting.

Her eyes flew to the picture on the mantel over the fireplace of her and Clyde and Skip. It had been taken only a few weeks before she had returned from the pre-Christmas visit to her parents in Florida and found the note and money from Clyde, surrounded by his Vietnam service medals, on the dining room table. She had replaced the picture of them that Clyde took with him with a copy of the one she had given to her mother and father.

Shocked though she had been then, she had also been sure that he would be found quickly and would get help. But he had vanished. For months she had gone to the morgue each time a man of his general height and weight and appearance was found dead without identification. And each time she had stared down as an attendant had lifted the sheet covering the face of the body, then had shaken her head and turned away.

Clyde had vanished without leaving a hint of where he might have gone. After twelve years and no new information, her father had finally persuaded her to have him declared legally dead in court so that she could collect his life insurance. She had been twenty-seven years old when he disappeared. She had worked as a secretary when Clyde was in the service but then, with a baby, she had decided that it made more sense to get a job at the delicatessen only two blocks away rather than commute into Manhattan again.

Now, forty-one years later, Peggy, still pretty at age sixty-eight, a size twelve where once she had been a size eight, was content with her life. Skip had always been the child any parent would dream of raising. Now the income from the annuity he had purchased to supplement her Social Security allowed her to live comfortably. The home that she had never left had been renovated with every convenience from a steam shower in the upstairs bathroom to a new kitchen and thermal windows. “And heaven knows what else he’ll want me to have,” she would joke to her friends.

Peggy, whose faith was her rock and her strength, was an ecumenical minister in her parish and a regular volunteer at the neighborhood homeless shelter. Years working at the deli had turned her into a superb cook and baker, and the regulars at the shelter always knew when Peggy Hotchkiss had been in the kitchen.

Donald Scanlon and his wife, Joan, had been lifelong neighbors and fast friends of Peggy’s since the day they moved into the neighborhood all those years ago. Joan had been dead for five years and, to his friends, Donald made no secret of the fact that he would love to marry Peggy, but he knew better than to ask. Incredibly to him, Peggy was sure that Clyde was still alive and one day would come back.

In her heart, Peggy knew that even if the door suddenly opened and Clyde came in, they would be strangers. But he had needed her all those years ago and somehow she had failed him. She was so wrapped up in little Skip that she had made excuses for Clyde’s heavy drinking. She had found the hidden wine bottles and decided not to upset him, that it was just a phase. When she had left for the pre-Christmas visit to her parents in Florida, something had warned her not to go.

“If you recognize any of the people in this photo…,” news anchor Dana Tyler was saying as she pointed it out to the viewing audience.

“Recognize… recognize…” Peggy heard herself sobbing. Desperately she repeated the phone number to call but knew it was jumbled in her mind.

The phone was ringing. She grabbed it. “Hello.”

“Mom, it’s Skip.”

“I have it on, too. I saw it. Skip, what is that number? I didn’t get it straight.”

“Mom, why don’t you let me make the call?”

“They said the picture was found in a van where a homeless man was staying, that he may have been there at the time of that explosion in Long Island City.”

“Mom, I know. And the homeless guy who had it may have found it somewhere years ago.”

Peggy Hotchkiss suddenly became calm. “No, Skip,” she said. “I don’t believe that. I have always suspected that if we ever found your dad, it would be because he was in that kind of condition. Oh, Skip, maybe we have found him or will find him. I knew God would answer my prayers. The waiting has been so long.”