Along the south face of our new home, I liked best that the softball-sized stones were cold, always, on their undersides. Dents filled with centipede and roly-poly neighborhoods where I invited myself to tiny potlucks and brought salads made of torn weeds to share.
Mostly, Daddy and I don’t have pictures together from that house, from after I was four years old—there was no third there to take them. No evidence of that southern curb strip where I sat in the rocks and the poison ivy patch below wily sunflowers and he squeegeed the car. No evidence I never welted.
The house itself was a worn-out sky blue with white trim when we moved in and a gleaming off-white, lined with careful navy, when we left it, fourteen years later. His care was like this: planned over years, dealt in small spoonfuls, given time to dry without drips.
That overgrown side stretch was something separate from the rest of our world, a world where he cared nothing for aesthetics or design but mowed the grass patch on the other side of the driveway in a perfect diagonal each week and where we turned the television volume only to even numbers when we turned it on at all. When the colorful, saturated spill of Mom tried to press in, driving over to fix the rocks up with overwhelm: zinnias and flats of pansies, dahlias and Maltese cross, he waved her off like always—like she was a fly, and he, someone who didn’t care enough about flies ever to buy a swatter.
Our gangly sunflowers were my favorite. They weren’t at all the reason he pushed her away, but it’s the reason I give myself now: that preserving my special version of mess—the stray epiphanies of my delight, the yellow of me—was worth more, perhaps, than his order.
I, alongside him, folded every napkin in the same direction. Nudged straight the faded carpet samples that made every cement step down to the basement a different frugal pattern and color. I wished our house number—off by only one digit—was a clean 12345. But the house with that address was around the corner, where he’d walk me when I begged to see perfection for the tenth or twentieth time. Again, he’d say, “Do you think we’ll find it?” And I’d become unsure, giddy in the possibility that something I’d seen for myself a week before could turn folkloric, unknown, in the present tense. Giddy that I, alongside him, could be on the precipice of seeing how well arranged we might become.
The day of his heart attack, his naked body—Hanes briefs—was crooked on the floor. Mom’s Saturn charged from her house, then the ambulance cut the southern curb and knocked rocks into the street.
Really, I think, the thing larger than the pristine was Daddy’s exasperation with Mom: to be an agonist against her sprawl manifested mostly in the same way that his daily order did, but in this case, it came, too, with muscle contraction. Heft.
It was always going to cut us in half—I being made of them both. Alongside was, after all, born from an old word for “entire” or “continuous” but also from a Germanic word for “against.” Sunburned in the poison ivy patch, I knew early that I was everything to my dad, of my dad, and, also, I was just Mom in smaller skin. A girl with Mom’s barbell shoulder girdle and Daddy’s piano hands.
It’s the kindest and most awful thing that he knew what I knew. In the weeks he still pretended he wasn’t dying, Daddy said his biggest of all regrets was nabbing the hose from my little hands every time I held it so I wouldn’t cast spots on whatever glass or metal was clean.
That last day, I walked from him and lay in cool morning grass alongside a building that wasn’t blue or white or ours. With all my mouth, I screamed.
Afton Montgomery was a finalist for the 2023 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize and has recent work in Electric Lit, The Millions, Chicago Review of Books, Pleiades, The Common, Passages North, DIAGRAM, High Country News, Prairie Schooner, Fence, and others. She earned her MFA from University of Idaho, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from Centrum, Lighthouse, and Fine Arts Work Center. Formerly an independent bookstore buyer in Denver, Afton calls the Rocky Mountain West home.
Photo by: Zeynep Sümer