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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Six hours later I was out on my every-second-Sunday visit with my 12-year-old daughter, Megan. Megan is short and fast and scrappy, not only the captain of her soccer team, but the only girl in the entire Greater Houston AYSO to get a red card this year. "Great eyes, ref!" she had said after a terrible no-call, clapping sarcastically and paying no attention to the blood dribbling from her split lip.
That's my daughter.
If she got a certain streak of cussedness from me, Meg inherited from her mother her blond hair, her athleticism, and -- thank God -- a complete inability to see the dead. I never told Megan about me and ghosts. No kid wants to think her daddy is a freak.
I don't drive, so Megan and I take the bus when we go out, which she is beginning to think is lame. Today we'd spent an hour bumming around the Cactus Records on Shepherd listening to the free tracks. My current shitty job was at Petco, and on my budget, free was good. This had been a reliable outing even six months ago, but this time Meg was so obviously unimpressed that I decided to spring for a root beer float at the 59 Diner to salvage the afternoon, only to hear Meg say that she was trying not to drink extra calories.
Jesus.
"You're too young to give up beer," I said.
She rolled her eyes.
The bus ride back to her house in Woodland was long and awkward. Woodland is a professional suburb on the north side of Houston, all carefully manicured pine trees and midscale housing developments. Even the Taco Bells are clean and neat.
"So, how are Trish and Fonda these days?" I asked, hoping I had remembered the names of Megan's posse.
Meg reached to ring the bell for our stop. "I don't even know or care about Trish. Fonda and Azul are at Six Flags today." Tickets to Six Flags are $39.99/day for each person over 48 inches tall, and that doesn't include bus fare, balloons or Dr Peppers. Not easy to do on Petco money. "They asked me to come, but..."
But your mother made you come out with me.
In 12 years I have never missed a Christmas pageant, a Brownie merit badge ceremony or a school concert. I planted pumpkins at Megan's daycare, I picked up books at library sales and donated them to her school, I sold raffle tickets to send her to science camp. Josie, my ex, once said, "Will, you've been a great..." She floundered. "...the best estranged father I can imagine."
Best Ex-Dad in the Lone Star State. I'm thinking of putting it on a T-shirt.
Megan and I stepped into the steamy Houston air at the bus stop in front of Jamison Middle School. Heat waves shimmered off the metal slides in the playground. "How come your name isn't on my birth certificate?" Megan asked.
"What?"
"Mom had it out last night. She was looking for my shot records. Your name isn't on my birth certificate. Dad's is."
Dad meaning Don, the jarhead fucking ex-Marine Josie married a year after leaving me. "My name's not on the certificate?"
"That's what I was trying to communicate."
I said, "By the time you were born, your mother and I weren't together anymore. I guess she decided it would be easier to have Don's name there."
"Don't they do a blood test or something?"
"No, I think they just take the mother's word." Or maybe the nurses didn't even ask Josie. Maybe Don went and filled out the paperwork himself. "She never told you I wasn't your dad." Silence. "She never said Don was your biological father."
"No. She always said you were." Meg not sounding convinced here.
As we turned up the walk to Meg's house, Josie waved at us from the living room window. "See you, kiddo," I said. When I leaned forward to kiss the top of her head, I saw she was wearing a bra.
My daughter stood a moment on the front steps, her hand resting on the doorknob. "Will, why don't you even have a car?"
Then Josie pulled the door open, and Megan disappeared inside.
I ride the bus a lot, which is not a very Houston thing to do, but I have my reasons. Every second Sunday for 12 years me and Megan had been going out together; half my memories of her are about riding buses. Megan nine months old and screaming with laughter as I zoomed her around like a fighter plane, until an old hag at the bus stop said, "I never did see anybody treat a child so reckless!" Megan gurgling with laughter the whole time, pounding on my arms with her fat fists to make me do it again. Bottles of formula sticking out of the pockets of my leather jacket.
Megan, still chubby at three, kicking her feet until one of her canvas sneakers -- she called them her slip-offs -- went sailing into the head of a Vietnamese grannie across the aisle.
Megan skinny and eight, absorbed in a classroom copy of "Charlotte's Web." Me watching the way her bangs fell in front of her eyes. When she came to a hard word she would squint, and the tip of her tongue would stick out.
Now she was wearing a bra, and I didn't even have a car. She was looking nowhere but forward, at 13 and 16 and 21. All those little Megans were invisible now. Ghosts, and only I could see them.
