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Candle
After the call came, we drove straight to Wisconsin, fourteen hours to his empty place, to clean out his refrigerator, meet his friends, decide which coffin would suit his body best. It was mid-December. Close to Green Bay, the landscape turned white, light reflected on snow. His place was also snowed under: blank index cards, letters to Madame Corinne, articles about Martians. On his night table, his passport, and There are No Coincidences. This is the closest I ever came to loving him, standing in his empty room, looking through his things, learning. He was born in Georgia, not in Florida as my mother always said, and he was five years younger than her, though she claims her passport is wrong, and in his passport picture he looks older, worn out behind his glasses, emptied out, wrinkled skin sagging, nothing like the blue-eyed football player towering over my mother, slow dancing in their honeymoon snapshots from New Orleans. Yesterday, she said, again, "marrying your father was the worst mistake." El peor error de mi vida. "Light candles in front of their pictures," a medicine woman advises, so I light a candle in front of them, dressed up and dancing in a night club in New Orleans. He holds her close. Even in high heels, she doesn't reach his shoulder. Behind them, on the dinner table, champagne, unfinished wedding cake, candles. "Candles are for the dead," para los muertos my mother says. I wonder, how many should I light, then? How many times has he been dead? Cuantas debo comprar? How many candles should I buy? One for each afternoon he spent drinking in the neighborhood? One for each time he left? How many for the years he was away? And what of those neatly wrapped packets he carried in his suitcase? He wrote to share the news from a Brazilian jail, as if he suddenly remembered he had a daughter, and prison could bring us closer. The stamps on his passport, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Spain. And now, in West Virginia, his ashes mailed here by the Wichman Funeral Home, as I requested. For months, I drove around with him in the trunk of my car. Late spring, to please my husband, we went to the river, poured my father, one scoop at a time, on the towpath, on the bluebells, in the water.