Cover Me

On Saturday, a tomato at Shop Rite made me lean on my cart for support.

This is the problem with grief. It surrounds you like fog and you can’t see your way out of the haze.

My dad passed away almost 20 years ago, and losing him again, this way, that he was never my father, has pushed me into mourning again.

Mourning Round Two for what wasn’t true the first time.

Since I only saw my dad every two weeks or so growing up, we had a pretty sanitized arrangement. My sister and I went with him to the movies, or bowling, or to get banana splits. We didn’t talk about how the day was, or even when there was a hard day. We just ate popcorn or Neapolitan ice cream with chocolate and pineapple sauce with a literal and figurative cherry on top, and enjoyed the few hours we had together. As a child, I knew my dad had demons but I didn’t see them. I knew because I heard adults talking when they thought a wall was thick enough to keep words from sliding through. I didn’t understand how alcohol could impact my dad, who arrived wearing a suit in a series of shiny Cadillacs through the years, whisking us away for a few magical hours of what seemed like make-believe.

It was only when I was a teenager and my mom picked me up from school to tell me that my dad was in the hospital in critical condition that I finally got an inkling of what the whispering was about. The doctors surmised in the other 325 hours we didn’t see him, he spend a huge part of the time drinking. He was disciplined enough to go to work but his down time was spent in bars on North Point Road. He suffered a small stroke and heart attack with a side helping of alcohol poisoning. When we were finally able to see him I remember being surprised at this stranger with a 4 day beard wearing a hospital gown, too weak to sit up or keep his eyes open.

My mom was with us of course. She asked if he knew who we were, and he answered in a hoarse voice that never-the-less tattooed itself on my memory.

“It’s my two little babies and the one who got away.”

While he was recovering, my mom took us to his house to get it ready for his return. I never questioned why we never went there before. It just wasn’t part of the plans of our excursions. It was like entering a secret clubhouse. He had photos of me and my sister, and some of my mom, that we didn’t have in our house. He had a stack of Old Spice gift sets in his closet that we gave him for Christmas, and Father’s Day. He collected unusual whiskey decanters that were sealed and full, yet mixed with empty Canadian Club bottles. Bags of empty amber bottles. We sorted and scrubbed and brought in groceries. Magpie that I was, I was so intrigued with a shiny gold decanter of an Egyptian Pharaoh on top of the refrigerator and wanted to ask my mom if I could have it, but suspected it would make her angry if I put it in words. I didn’t always understand secrets, but knew they weren’t given the wings of the spoken word.

My dad changed a bit after his recovery. He stopped wearing suits and started wearing dress pants and short-sleeved shirts without a tie. I used to think he saved the same tattersall shirt to wear when he visited us and only realized when he passed that he hated shopping so much that when he found something he liked, he bought 6 or 7 of the same thing. The only variation of this was he used to bring my kids a new Dalmatian stuffy when he visited and I used to wonder how he did that without getting a duplicate from the 101 available.

His new medication and health regiment prevented him from drinking so he began his quest for the perfect tomato.

His pursuit, looking for the perfect tasting tomato, warm from the sun on the vine took him along many roadside vendors that lined Bel Air and Harford Roads, My mom and step-father had moved us to a farm in southern Pennsylvania by then. My mother planted an acre garden and had so many vegetables she could feed half the employees where she worked, which ironically was a food store. As the only person home after school, it became my job to weed and pick and package for transport. My dad, when he came to visit, rated the variation of tomato types for many seasons and I became the mediator between my mother and him on what seeds to save and which to toss out and which varieties to experiment with the next year. I would have voted on the ones that didn’t produce in such volume that I had to lug bushel baskets down fresh-hoed rows to be washed and canned, or packed in paper lunch bags to distribute here and there, but no one asked.

When my dad finally retired, he bought a brick rancher in Garland, North Carolina, near his family blueberry fields. While they had thousands of acres, he was happy with five, and a small tractor where he plowed and maintained his 2 acre garden. He sent me polaroids of his 3 foot watermelons, and expounded on the virtues of this years Better Boy tomatoes, eaten right in the field with maybe a little salt. We couldn’t visit as often since the trip had added 300 miles, but we talked and mailed found interests back and forth. I would send the food section flyers from the newspapers, and we traded State quarters when they came out. When he was found on a Saturday, after suffering a stroke on Tuesday, his mailbox had a letter from me with the new Maryland quarter in it. His brothers became concerned when they kept passing his house and it didn’t look like his car or truck had moved in many days. When they called us on Saturday, they weren’t sure he would survive until we could get there nine hours later. But he did. The doctors told us that the severity of the stroke had paralyzed his one side and he couldn’t speak or swallow. It seemed unlikely that he would ever recover to not need a 24-hour care in a facility. His family were advocating for not putting in a feeding tube because once established it could not be removed. I fixated on the the fact that he had lived for 5 days on the floor and not given up. My sister and I decided to help him keep fighting.

The Carters were not happy with our decision. They knew my dad would not want to live in a care home if it came to that. They told my sister that they had removed some valuables from the house for safe-keeping and would give them to her a bit later. I was the northern born child who they had all decided early on didn’t look like any Carter they’d ever seen, so they’d leave it up to her what happened to it. We decided to move my dad back north for care, where he was finally able to live with my sister and her husband for a few more years before his heart finally gave out. He couldn’t talk or use an alphabet board, but he eventually was able to eat if spoon fed. I would still try to find great tomatoes in season for him, but I never saw his eyes light up again as they did when he held a fat venetian red beefsteak toward the sun like a North Carolina adaptation of the famous Lion King scene.

When it was eventually determined my dad had only hours to live, my sister called me to make the 4 hour drive to her house. When I walked in, she said, “he’s been waiting for you” . I just nodded and went into his room where I thought he was sleeping. I held his hand and talked to him a bit, telling him I was sorry I forgot to check the price of crabmeat at Geresbeck’s before heading out. I felt him squeeze my hand and, perhaps, a small smile. I brushed his eyebrows across and back with my other hand and told him he didn’t have to keep fighting. “You can go home now.” We sat for a little while and I watched his chest rise and fall. Rise and fall. My tears were eventually silent as they fell softly on his favorite blue blanket until his chest stayed still.

When we packed up his house, it was a bit like deja vu. He still had his whiskey decanter collection, his old spice gift sets along with some added Avon cologne cars, a cannonball bedroom set, and a room filled with more canned goods and supplies than a city soup kitchen. We also discovered in his jewelry drawer, settled next to his beloved Bulova watch, a one-carat diamond engagement ring from Greenbaums Fine Jewelers in Baltimore. It appeared to be new in the box. My sister and I wondered for months about the ring; who he had been in love with–did he ask, did he change his mind. Was this another sadness he carried? There was so much we didn’t, and would never know, about our dad.

When my daughter graduated from college, I had the diamond set into a necklace that she wears almost everyday. When I told her this week about my newly discovered paternity, she mentioned that it feels odd , maybe, to wear this necklace now as I’m not even related to him. I told her that the power of a diamond must be amazing as each one is hundreds of millions years old at the very least. And she gets to start this one on what will be, hopefully, a long path. Although my blood relationship with Bennie Mack Carter has been severed, I don’t feel the love has. Certainly not the love her grandfather felt for my her and her brother–his “little man and Angel”. He loved them more than watermelons in a sunny field, or tomatoes warmed in the summer heat, or a golden Egyptian Pharaoh bottle that now sits on my shelf downstairs, maybe symbolic in many ways of the things you can enjoy and the things you shouldn’t.

In Shop Rite, the tomatoes were all hot house versions at this time of year, their color more camellia than red. I realized there really wasn’t anything I needed at the store and passed my cart to an older man just coming in the door as I walked out.