‘Tender’
David Summerfield’s photo art has appeared in numerous literary magazines/journals/and reviews. He’s also been editor, columnist, and contributor to various publications within his home state of West Virginia. He is a graduate of Frostburg State University, Maryland, and a veteran of the Iraq war. View his work at davidsummerfieldcreates.com
Tender
The first time I saw my father cry was at confession. While I didn’t know what it was then, I remember sliding between the pews in my puffer coat, pretending I was a goat sliding down hills of marshmallow. I remember tracing the art sculptures in the Vatican with my index finger, pretending the crying angels were princesses welcoming me home.
When his divorce from my mother was fresh he fell out of that faith he used to preach to me before bed, mumbling quiet prayers into the shy tunnels of my ears. On those quiet nights–when snow was busy swirling and sticking slick to the windows of our empty house, the one being rescinded and collected back from the bank–he would tuck me in up to my chin. I would never tell him he was doing it wrong, even though the whiskey-stained sheets would scratch against my flesh like a pinecone and the chill from my window panes would reach the tips of my toes. Sending a shudder I’ve only ever felt on those lonesome nights, when I could almost feel my fathers faith slipping like cloudy bath water.
Sometimes, as he pulled me from the tub and wiped my hair and my face dry with damp towels, I saw faces in the water. Little clouds of ghosts swirling into the drain, whispering something indescribable. A secret swapped between bubbles. Later, I would believe that image to be the white holiness of my fathers religion sinking into the drain, leaking back into the ocean where hopelessness was a common ancestor in a sea of dreams left dead and bone-dry.
In the mornings with my father, I always woke up to the smell of pancakes. There would be batter smeared on the countertops and orange juice propped on the table ready for me to pour. I would pick out the splinters in my highchair that stuck my bare toes, while waiting for the pancakes to flip on my plate because while we couldn’t afford socks that winter, we could always afford batter and blueberries.
As if we weren’t getting pummeled to death with the weight of the world already crumbling on our tattered shoulders, this condemned God sends sickness to my fathers younger offspring.
My socks had all gone to my baby brother who was still at my mothers, getting nursed back to health after pneumonia ravaged him like starved, barbarian racoons. My mother attainted to him like a personal nurse, and sometimes I watched her nursing a few times that winter when my dad would drop me at her doorstep and wheel away in his cherry red convertible.
She would bundle up every inch of his skin in socks, these big, fluffy socks that were stained with my scraps of food and blood from my routine splinters. Then, she would take the big lard of fat that was my brother into her chest, warm him like he had been sitting out in the North for days while the wind whips his cheeks raw and red. I asked her to do that to me, once. To feel a touch other than my fathers calloused, construction hands. To feel the essence of my baby brother’s lotioned tummy, his lotioned face and feet. Maybe even to hear my mother’s heartbeat, hear Jesus whispering and confessing his identity to me. Maybe that would’ve made me reserve my Sunday mornings when I became a young, red-heeled woman.
“Can’t you be like that with me, mama?” I pleaded. She looked up from his face then, let him continue suckling what was left of her inside her aged, wrinkled breasts. “He needs tender.” She whistled through clenched teeth. Grizzly. “You had that tender before. You don’t need more.” She said, plainly. She looked through me like I was a hologram, like I was an aloof daughter mistakenly placed in the wrong house. A mute daughter who expresses feelings through her fingers, her wrists, her eyes.
And I did when my father buckled me in on Sundays. For months on end, those chilled, frigid months, we survived solely on the circle bread they would feed us between hymns. He
would get to drink the juice that smelled like roses and coins. I wasn’t old enough, or maybe I wasn’t holy enough. I never heard the priest right. I don’t think I ever heard him right until his old battered hands went up my skirt after my first confession, and he dangled his twisted fingers into a crevice I was told was too valuable to let another man destroy. But he justified it with the word of God, forgave me of all of my sins that had been littering my mind.
I walked out of that thin box fixing my skirt and wiping the blood from between my legs. My father was waiting for me by the great big doors, shook hands with the priest, an evil grin plastered on that wrinkly face, and led me to his car that was blanketed in iced snow. “Daddy?” I croaked on the way home.
“Yes?” he muffled through his mustache.
“Do God’s people commit sins?”
“Sometimes.” His eyes were locked on the road. We drove over frosted roadkill. “Are they forgiven?”
“They aren’t witnessed.” He cleared his throat. “They are pursued in silence.” I didn’t know what that meant as we traveled through dirt roads on flat tires. I merely felt the bump and potholes in the road a little stronger that night, I merely hurt a little more in the shower and on the toilet and under my sheets that still smelled of whiskey. I burned.
Jovi Aviles is a teen writer whose work has appeared in The Malu Zine, PWN Teen, and Pen&Quill. Her favorite authors are Madelaine Lucas and Sylvia Plath. She is often found at her favorite cafe writing.
