My Father’s Gift
Long winters and loneliness aren’t good for any man, espe­cially a seventy-five-year-old who has lost his wife. That’s why several times a week I call my father in Montana and pepper him with questions: How’s the weather? What’s for dinner? When are you coming to Tucson? The answers seldom vary: cold, beef, soon.
Weeks go by until one day in February he calls to say that he has booked a flight. “No need to pick me up,” he says. “I’ll take a cab.”
I don’t argue. He likes being in charge. Whether I am suffering from a broken heart or a broken leg, I know that I can count on him for a strong cup of coffee and a strong piece of advice. I don’t always want either one of them, but I swallow them anyway.
The day of his arrival, I head for the airport. By the time I arrive, the other passengers are walking into waiting arms. At any moment I expect to see Dad charging out of the gate just as I remember him charging his horse straight up Bull Mountain, hat pulled down low, reins held tight. The crowd thins to a trickle and then stops. I worry that he missed his connection, changed his mind, when I see him wander out of the tunnel.
“Dad,” I call, waving above the crowd. He blinks in the sun­light. “Dad,” I call again, making my way toward him. I stand in front of him, touch his arm and say, Dad, it’s me.
He puts his arms around me as if I’m a life preserver on a rough sea. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy you came.”
“Of course I came,” I answer, hugging him back, my arm registering the change in his appearance before my eyes have a chance to.
He’s leaner than he was last summer. His red rag-wool sweater, too heavy for the desert heat, pads his narrow frame. Instead of a cowboy hat and boots, he’s wearing an Irish tweed cap and black running shoes.
We drive north toward the foothills, straight for the Catalinas. The desert is foreign to him, but when we get close to the mountains, he relaxes as if he knows we’re almost home. As we turn into my driveway, where bougainvillea cascades over a stucco wall, he shakes his head. “Your mother would have loved this place,” he says.
When my husband comes home, he grills steaks. Afterward we sit outside and Dad smokes a cigar. The talk is general this time — no one mentions my mother. Dad insists on doing the dishes, stacking them helter-skelter in the dishwasher. I resist the urge to rearrange them.
The next morning, when I’m making coffee, I hear him whistling in the bathroom.
“Any horse races today?” he asks, coming down the stairs. “Let’s go look at horses.
After checking the paper, we drive through South Tucson toward the fairgrounds. When he sees a sign for a pawnshop, he orders me to pull over. There are steel bars over the doors and windows, like a small-town jail. He pushes open the door and we walk inside. The back wall is lined with rifles, more rifles than I’ve ever seen. Simply being inside this secondhand arsenal makes me nervous.
“Dad,” I whisper. “Let’s go.
“Slow down,” he says, draping his arm around my shoulder.
A man wearing a vest, possibly bulletproof, walks over to us. The scent of cigarettes and gunpowder hang in the cold air. “Let me see your diamond rings,” Dad says.
I stop short and echo, “Diamond rings?” Does Dad have a girlfriend? I ask myself. I can’t remember him mentioning any names.
“For my daughter,” he adds, gesturing me.
“For me?”
“Come on,” he urges. “I want to buy you a diamond ring.” He casually leans one elbow on the counter as if he is used to shopping for jewels.
In an instant a black velvet tray of rings rests on the counter in front of me. “I don’t want a ring, “ I tell him.
Ignoring my response, he points to one. “That’s pretty,” he says.
I look at the glittering rows of rings, symbols of weddings gone sour, marriages gone bad, promises broken. Some are the size of bullets, some the shape of tears. I finally sup a ring on my finger and hold up my hand. It’s a gesture I learned from my mother. Every now and then she held up her hand to admire her diamond solitaire in its Tiffany setting. “Let me try it on, “ I would say, knowing what the answer would be. I never saw her take it off.
When she was dying, she asked each of her five children to make a list, tell her which of her belongings we wanted. I usually did what she asked, but this time I didn’t follow through. I didn’t want her Limoges china or string of pearls. I wanted my mother.
“Pick whatever one you want,” my father offers.
The ring winks on my finger; another woman’s ring. “You don’t need to buy me a diamond ring,” I tell him.
“I want to, he says.
“Let’s go eat and think about it,” I whisper. “We’ll be back, I call over my shoulder to the man in the vest.
Later, as we spoon tortilla soup and listen to Mexican love songs on the jukebox, Dad clears his throat. Then he confesses, “I gave your mother’s ring to Sheila.”
Suddenly the shopping trip makes sense. Sheila is my younger sister, my only sister. Before our mother died, Sheila told me that she wanted Mom’s ring, that to her it represented ma­ternal love. She cried when she said that.
Just as he never lost hope, my mother never got around to dividing up their things. While my lawyer brothers worried how to disperse her estate, my Aunt Bern suggested that I should inherit her ring. “You’re the oldest daughter,” she reminded me. “You should insist.
That planted a seed, made me greedy for a while. But over time, I saw the irony. Bern, my mother’s youngest sister, com­plained often and loudly that her mother favored the older girls. Each time I imagined Mom’s ring on my finger, I couldn’t get the picture of my little sister out of my mind: the middle of five children, growing up wearing my hand-me-downs, inheriting my old teachers who called her by my name.
“I hope you’re not upset,” Dad says.
“It’s okay,” I answer. I just wish that Sheila herself had told me.
Two daughters. One ring. Two possibilities. Or neither one of us could have it. The ring could be sold and the money divided. Remembering the rings at the pawnshop, sparkling beneath the guns, I close my eyes tightly so no tears leak out. Specks of sun­light filter in, sparkle like tiny diamonds. I say good-bye to my mother, happy that her ring is on my sister’s finger and not in a black velvet tray.
I think about the gifts passed down from mother to daughter, gifts that don’t have to be divided. The way she pinched the crust on an apple pie. Where to look for wild asparagus. The way to hold a watercolor brush. Firstborn, I made her a mother. She fine-tuned her mothering on me. Sheila her middle child, she held right in the middle of her heart. I suddenly realize that she didn’t want to choose. That she loved each of us, all of us. Dad did the choosing, gave my sister what she wanted, her symbol of a mother’s love. Now he wants to give me a ring so that I know I. too, am loved.
As we walk to the car, kicking up dust in the unpaved parking lot, I keep my eyes on the ground. “You’re not wearing your boots,” I point out. Back home in Montana, my father rides horses almost every day. “They hurt my feet,” he admits.
Suddenly I have an idea. I drive a few blocks south to Stewart Boots, a tiny shop in an adobe house with cowboy boots as soft as caramel. After looking around at the leather uppers stacked like loaves of bread in bins around the room, Dad peels off his shoe like a boy and wriggles into a tall cowboy boot with a pointed toe. “It’s too tight,” he says.
Victor, the owner, caresses Dad’s instep and recommends a wider size. Within minutes my father is standing tall in a pair of boots the color of walnut bark, made by the wise hands of old men, men who learned their trade from their fathers.
“Why don’t you get a pair?” Dad suggests. I already have an old pair of Stewarts on the floor of my closet, but this time I don’t refuse his offer. Now we stand together in front of the mirror, one of us old and the other no longer young. I think of the ties that bind us: our sense of family, our sense of place, our sense of fairness. The old man next to me stands tall, walks softly and says nothing, even when his heart is full of feeling.
I want you to have them,” he says with a grin. I smile back at him, thinking of the gifts that he’s given me that I can’t hold in my hand, can’t wear on my finger, but hold in my heart. When he is gone, as I know he one day will be, I will have my boots, a symbol of a father’s love, and the memory of a day he set out to make things right.