I’m not sure a warning would have made a bit of difference, but nobody likes to be sucker-punched. It wouldn’t have needed to be anything grand. Nothing biblical, like the sun rising in the West or locusts descending, Just a little something that would have given us time to get our guards up. But the day one of us would be called home to meet their Maker came out of nowhere and began pretty much like all the others that long ago summer.
The four of us Finleys were sitting around the yellow kitchen table. Dad was leaning back in his chair drinking his third cup of black coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike; a barely-breeze sneaking through the window above the sink tousled my mother’s pretty red hair; and my younger sister, Birdie, was mopping up the last of her eggs, when the man on the radio announced, “It’s gonna be another scorcher today, folks. A real doozy.”
So handsome in a
blue shirt, my father took a drag off of his cigarette and said through the
hazy exhale, “Sounds to me like a great day to beat the heat and do a little
fishin’ on the
Mom was angrier than usual with him and gave him the silent treatment, but Birdie looked up from her plate and piped in, “No, thank you, Dad. I love . . . love . . . love you.”
Of course, I realize now, decades later, how different things might have been if I would followed my sister’s lead, or been brave enough to confess the secret I’d been holding onto for the longest time. But coward that I was, I was too afraid Dad would love me less if he knew the truth, so I came up with something that I thought would make him love me more. “Fishin’? I’m in hook, line, and sinker,” I joked.
And that’s how I ended-up being somewhere I had no business being on the day that
would change everything.
