BY RAE STRINGFIELD
They collect dads year-round, but mostly during cold months. Christmas lights go up and blink loud like the VACANCY sign at the motel, bring dads knocking with rough knuckles and grease-stained fingers from the jobs they mostly still go to for a while some days. At first there are no smiles. “Thanks,” they tell her dad, tell her, for having them. “Thanks,” they say without looking into eyes. “It’s all right,” her dad says, she echoes. New dads tuck under blankets, slowly melt off the cold with steaming coffee mugs. “Lonely time of year,” a dad says sometimes, but it doesn’t always feel so lonely to her with the chorus of lawn-mower leaf-blower dad snores seeping under her bedroom door, louder with each new dad who brings harmonica-wheeze snores, motorcycle-engine snores, high-pitched-wind-whipping snores. Some dads are young, some old, some Santa-round-belly dads. Almost all are needs-a-haircut dads. There are the dads she thinks of as “Ed dads,” some combination of Edwins, Edwards, Edgars—enough of these to make four, sometimes five when haired-buzzed beard-buzzed Ed who dresses like the army is in town drinking all the coffee in the bags-under-eyes, most-dads-still-snoring hours of morning.
The first new dad she remembers was Uncle Charlie, her dad’s little brother, who showed up one night with clothes in a trash bag, slept on their couch. This was back when he was an uncle, not a dad. Back when there was Mom who would complain about Uncle Charlie. Sitting in the kitchen and pretending not to hear, she and Uncle Charlie would listen to Mom’s shouts at dad drift under the closed bedroom door: “He’s always getting a job, never having a job!” Then Mom would come out with the bedroom-door-slam and the front-door-slam, and Dad would sit at the kitchen table too, the three of them pretending not to hear the car-door-slam and the squeal of tires down the driveway, sometimes with a plastic-crash into the trash bins, only once a wooden-snap into the mailbox. She doesn’t remember which day Mom stopped coming back.
Most of the rules are used-to-be rules. She goes to bed when she’s tired, some nights past tired, some nights past night, not till a dad peaks through the curtains—“Here comes the sun,” they sometimes say, other times hum—and lets in a dull butter knife not-quite-sunrise glow or a cover-your-eyes blade that slices the dim living room in half. The dads get her the Nutty Buddys she can’t reach from the freezer for breakfast or dinner or whenever she asks, then wait with an outstretched dad-palm for the nut-crumbs she doesn’t like, flicks one by one off the top of her cone. Some of the dads help with math, but some don’t remember their schooling and teach her real-life instead: which bugs to smash because they sting or bite and which to scoop up in hands to toss outside; that duct tape fixes most everything; how to brew a fresh pot without grounds mucking it up; all the other words that don’t really sound like coffee but are: joe, java, dirt, morning mud, liquid energy, daily grind, battery acid, wakey juice.
The moms—never her mom—don’t come inside, stand on the front steps, doorbell ringing with a bag of socks and underwear, one time a dog that chewed up a bed and spread mattress stuffing all through the house. Sometimes the moms bring dad-snacks like soft cookies always hoarded from the other dads, shared only with her—“Shh!” they tell her in mock-hushed voices, “Our secret”—and beef jerky she has to gnaw with her pointiest tooth. At first, the longer moms stay away the sadder dads become, frowns dripping down to their needs-washing shirts like the first sip from the lip of a too-full mug. The sad feels like years, they say, but she knows it’s only for a little while once they get here, knows there’s not much room for sad here in this scrunch-crowded space. She tells them, “It’ll be all right,” points the new sad-face dads to the dads with smiles returning, even if it’s only a just-for-a-second smile, a just-for-a-joke smile, the just-around-the-eyes smiles even the saddest dads have sometimes.
When there were only a few dads they slept on the couch and the lazy corduroy chair with the legs that kick out and the too-small-for-dads foam mat she’d used for naps at preschool. Then there are more dads and not enough couch, not enough chair, and the more dads bring more beds, Tetris the furniture, fill the corners of the living room. Beds with frames and just mattress beds, hair-buzzed Ed Dad’s sleeping bag rolled tight each morning, and spring-trampoline cots. Beds spill into the kitchen, scoot the breakfast table further and further till further is outside on the back patio bricks where she eats her Nutty Buddys and sometimes cereal and lots of pizza out in the “Get some sun!” and the “Get some fresh air!” space when the weather is nice enough. Sometimes there are so many dads she doesn’t know where they all sleep, goes to bed in her dad-empty room and pictures them stacked up on each other, Lincoln Logged—ankles in the crooks of necks, necks stacked on ankle bones, ankles-necks and necks-ankles all the way to the ceiling. The so many beds for so many dads makes stepping through the rooms when she wakes up like playing hopscotch where almost all the squares have a rock to jump over.
“Little darling,” a dad calls sometimes, “make me a cuppa, would ya?” She new-filters fresh-grounds the pot, watches steam rise, then tiptoes with palms warming on the no-room-for-cold-here full mugs through the not-so-much-space between dads and between beds where only she fits easily, spills only sometimes. “That’s all right,” dads say when a little mojo drips onto blankets or socks or slides down foreheads into eyes that blink awake, always with just-the-corners-of-lips smiles slipping onto their faces.
Some of her own smiles she’s never surprised by, like her gathering-dad-stories smiles. But then she feels some more-than-sometimes smiles creeping up, some warm smiles, some more than make-the-dads-feel-better smiles, more than her greet-the-new-sad-dads smiles. Her dad-joke smiles morph into accidental smiles, surprise smiles she finds already on her face when she catches her reflection on the window glass in the dimming night. Eventually she sees her more-than-accidental smiles reflected in the dad-faces, and when their smiles return sometimes dads leave. Sometimes they’ll only be sometimes-gone, other times they’re back-before-long-gone. It’s the dads with smiles sliding smoothly onto faces who become always-gone, who she’s not sad to see go because she knows they don’t feel so cold anymore. The more always-gone dads who leave, the more she opens the door to collect new dads, she finds she has all sorts of smiles to share: finally-no-homework smiles and just-sitting-in-the-sunlight smiles. She remembers her own no-smile time when Mom was gone longer then longer became maybe always, and knows these new just-another-morning smiles on her own face mean none of them—not her, not the dads once they stay for a while—will be cold for too long.
Rae Stringfield (she/her) is a fiction writer and freelance editorial consultant who grew up in the Tennessee Valley and holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University. When not reading or writing, she can sometimes be found exploring the nearest mountain trails or working on her quarantine project—renovating a 1993 Fleetwood Jamboree.
Rae can be found at raestringfield.com and on Twitter @Rae_Stringfield.