2025 Pushcart Nominated Story from Stanchion Magazine Issue 17
There she was, Carly Nelson, over by the pool kissing my father. It was a long passionate kiss. She pressed her body against his, tall and leggy, nearly equal to his six-foot height when wearing heels. He ran his fingers through the short strands of her mousy hair. She tugged at his greying beard.
My stomach sank as I stepped through the back door.
Carly and my father living together again after their first go-around sixteen years ago. She was the reason my father left my mother and me before I was born.
My father didn’t know I had recently learned this.
The screen door swung shut behind me. Its metal frame clattered as it bounced off the latch, creaking just before settling in with a click.
Carly and my father separated and righted themselves. She wiped something off his lips with her thumb, then led my father around the pool, spaghetti-like arms tangled in his.
I crossed to the lime-green pool chairs set out on the patio. The legs of one had folded under, backrest slouched forward making it lie there in a crumpled heap. I sat on the other. It felt like sitting on a bed of plastic straws. The chair squeaked under my weight.
My seven-year-old half-brother Mikey splashed in the circular above-ground pool. Carly gave him a wide berth, avoiding the trajectory of the water, but the sharp heel of her peep-toed shoe sunk into the grass. She wobbled as if all the bones went out of her legs, then suctioned herself to my father as she slipped out of the shoes.
“Ethan,” she said. “Be a dear and grab those for me. You wouldn’t want me to ruin my outfit now, would you?”
She ran her hands over the curve-hugging dress. The champagne satin blended in with her coloring so well, from a distance it looked like a second layer of slimy skin.
My father picked up the shoes, then tossed the chunk of sod that was stuck to the heel over his shoulder with a shrug. Mikey giggled, splashing water toward Carly and my father.
She stared daggers at Mikey, then smoothed the hair on top of my father’s head and adjusted his tie. They continued across the lawn. At the foot of the pool chair, Carly grabbed her clutch purse, then pulled out a compact and a gold tube of lipstick.
“Olivia, there are hot dogs to warm up in the fridge,” she applied the fuchsia shade with quick precision, “and a box of mac and cheese on the counter. Help yourself to anything else you like. Okay?”
“And don’t let your brother have any of that candy,” my father said.
“I heard that!” Mikey’s thick mop of black hair bobbed up from the water.
“He’s real sensitive to the sugar, and he’ll be all off tomorrow. We can’t have that.” He eyed Carly out of the corner of his eye.
I stared at my father. For as long as I could remember, not once did he remember to get soy milk for me, that I was lactose-intolerant. And now, he’s worried about a little sugar?
“Also, we’ll be back late. Bedtime at nine.” He furrowed his eyebrows as if suddenly remembering that I was sixteen years old. “For Mikey, I mean.”
Carly handed me a disposable camera and asked me to snap a few photos of her and my father by the meadow at the edge of the lot. Red columbine flowers grew there with their downturned faces, shying away as if burdened to feel the shame that Carly’s didn’t.
My finger may have blocked her in the photo.
They said goodbye to Mikey from afar and walked around the side of the house to the front. My father’s ’98 Oldsmobile Regency rumbled to a start in the distance. The car revved a few times, and Carly whooped out the window.
Mikey stretched out on the grass to dry off with a finger up his nose. He flicked a booger to the sky.
The rumble of the engine faded in the distance, and when the only sound left was the shrill call of the mid-summer cicadas echoing across the flat Wisconsin countryside, I called to my brother, “Hey, Mikey, want some candy?”
#
My mother told me the story earlier that summer. I’ll never forget the face she made when she spoke. Her gaze grew distant. Lips disappeared into a straight line. Pale-faced and featureless. Ghostly.
We were vacationing in New York City, where my mother once lived with my father. After souvenir shopping, we walked through Central Park and when we came across the little model sailboat pond, she wavered there at the edges while I took pictures. I didn’t see her walk away, but when I was done, I found her sitting on a bench across the way, digging aggressively through her purse.
I joined her and asked what was wrong.
“I can’t find my stupid gum,” she said.
“You just left me over there.”
“What?” She looked up at me.
“You left me at the pond all by myself.”
“I did?”
“Mom, what is it? What’s going on with you?”
“I didn’t think I would be so bothered…” She let out a long sigh, then nodded to the pond. “That was where your father proposed to me. And there,” she nodded to the trash can across from us, “was where I stuffed my wedding gown.”
She told how my father left without notice after learning she was pregnant, only to reappear on the day of my birth with some other woman named Carly.
“That’s…awful,” I said.
“A week later your father was leaving again. I asked how he could be so cruel to leave me all alone with a baby. He got all red in the face and said, ‘You aren’t fighting enough for me. She’s nineteen. How can I turn that down?’”
My mother stared at the trash can.
“I had just given birth to you and that’s all he could think about. That teenage hussy took away all his sense. I mean we were both thirty-five. What did he expect?” She let out a breath. “Anyway, I’m sorry you didn’t grow up with your father around much, but it’s probably a good thing.”
Her mouth grew thin-lipped.
The one who took my father from me was only three years older than myself at the time. I rubbed my forearm as if to flick away the creeping sensation of fifty flies tasting me with their soft tongues, as if to squash the thought that I could soon be capable of such malice.
“I didn’t know she was that young,” I said.
“Sometimes I wonder what I ever saw in him, why I ever married him.” She looked at me then, her face washed out as if she looked up at me from beneath a pool of water. “But he did give me you. And I can’t ever imagine my life without you in it.”
“I don’t want to go there.” I blurted.
A few days prior, Mikey had told me over the phone about the new house, about a woman named Carly living with them. The sinking of my stomach told me it must be the same one. But I couldn’t tell my mother, not now. All she knew was that my father divorced Mikey’s mom and moved, adding an additional twenty miles to our drive across Wisconsin. In a couple of weeks, I was scheduled for my next visit.
My mother squeezed my knee. “These are the custody arrangements, when you’re eighteen you can do what you want. Anyway, he’s still your father.”
#
“I’ve told you, I cheated on her more than once. I mean, you were one of them.” My father’s baritone carried through the open window of the guest bedroom.
It was around midnight. Mikey was sound asleep across the hall.
“Oh yeah? But have you ever cheated on me?” Carly’s voice bubbled up the way teenage girls do when up to no good. It sounded forced, almost babyish coming from her thirty-something self.
I slid off the bed and looked out the window. At the fringes of the porch light, Carly faced my father with her arms crossed, blocking his way to the front door. Moths fluttered in and out of the light, casting brief, tremorous shadows over them.
“Oh don’t start. You liked it. You liked being the other woman,” my father said.
“But have you ever cheated on me?”
“Carly, I just got divorced…again. You can’t say I was cheating on you when I was married to another woman.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the day Amy came to the gallery opening.”
My father scoffed. “Okay?”
“Don’t play stupid with me, Ethan. Amy was practically drooling at you. I mean, no one can hide that.”
“I told you, I cheated on my wife more than once.”
“Which wife?”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Ethan, you’re hardly ever here.”
“You’ve seen the mess at Dawn’s. You know I can’t just leave Mikey there, not until his mother gets help. I mean the last time I picked him up, I don’t think he had bathed in two weeks. I have to be there. He’s my son.”
The words knotted up my stomach. He never once spoke that way about me. I hoped Mikey never knew how it felt.
“How many times Ethan?” Carly’s voice dropped low. “How many times have you cheated on me?”
There was a long pause. I didn’t dare to take a breath. I didn’t dare to miss a moment. She’s doing it. She’s doing it all over again to Mikey. But unlike me, Mikey would remember how everything was before.
“You should remember who it is I always come back to,” my father said.
A few moments later, the front door quietly opened, then shut. My father groaned about his fifty-year-old knees as he started up the stairs.
I couldn’t sleep in the silence that followed, after they settled into their bedroom. Later, I snuck downstairs to watch MTV, which wasn’t allowed at home — my mother declaring Madonna too raunchy. At some point, I drifted off to a music video of a giant popping robot, battling an equally giant octopus, destroying Tokyo in the process.
#
The orange my father put on Mikey’s plate had a white ring around the middle, capped with a fine green fuzz. It looked like a miniature planet and emitted a smell so sour it shouldn’t have been allowed to exist on this one.
My father didn’t even look when he grabbed it, too preoccupied with pretending to read the newspaper over Carly’s shoulder at the kitchen island, when really he was whispering in her ear.
“What are you guys talking about?” Mikey asked, oblivious to his unsavory breakfast, finger up his nose.
I spread peanut butter on my toast.
Carly straightened from leaning on the counter, then whispered something back to my father. His tanned, olive skin crinkled around his eyes in a chuckle.
“Guys! What are you talking about?” Mikey whined.
My father turned to Mikey, who was deep in his nasal excavation. “Well, Mikey, I was asking Carly here if she knew how to make a tissue dance.”
He grabbed the box of tissues from the other counter and set it in front of Mikey.
“Really? How do you?” Mikey asked.
“You put a little boogie in it!”
“Daaaad!”
After Mikey used a tissue, he finally noticed the disgusting orange. He swatted it away with a curt, “ew!”
The orange rolled to my lap.
“Mikey, gross!” I shot up and the orange fell to the floor in a putrid plop. Pulp exploded all over my foot.
“Oops.” My father grabbed some paper towels and helped me to clean up the mess.
Carly watched from the rim of her white coffee cup. Her eyes narrowed at the splattered floor as if she were offended by a bad piece of abstract art someone was trying to sell at her gallery in Lake Geneva. Thoughtless blobs atop birch flooring. She set her mug down, leaving behind a half-moon smudge of pink lipstick, thin like her lips, on its rim.
Carly tugged on my father’s arm. “Ethan, come look at the gutters. I think something’s wrong with them.”
“Clean it up now.” My father stood and left me with the rest of the mess.
“I wanna go too!” Mikey said, running out the door.
Alone, I made sure to accidentally leave a few pieces of the rotten orange under the rug.
#
Water slapped the ground as Mikey switched between drinking from the hose and creating a massive puddle on a depression in the lawn so he could splash in it. Carly talked with my father off to the side, pointing to the gutter dramatically. I stepped closer, wanting to hear, but was hit with a frigid splash of water.
Mikey snickered.
“Oh, that’s it!” I said and lunged toward him.
He squealed, dropped the hose, and ran away. I grabbed it and sprayed him a few times as he zigzagged across the yard. I caught snippets of my father’s conversations with Carly:
“You need to say something, Ethan.”
“Why?”
“It’s not right.”
“Kids are sensitive, especially her.”
“And where’s my kid, huh?”
“It’s not that simple, Carly.”
“I’m waiting, Ethan. Waiting and waiting.”
Mikey dashed toward the gutter in question.
Carly pressed herself against my father.
I used my thumb to direct the spray of water toward Mikey. He ran behind Carly. The water followed.
She gasped when it hit her face. Eyes bulged.
My father bellowed.
“Mikey!” She yelled, dripping. “Ethan, get me a towel.”
Ignoring her, my father chased after me and Mikey. And I was swept away into that magic, that blissful moment when a parent is present with their child, feeling like I was small all over again, running around with Mikey as if this was how our lives always were.
Eventually, we all ended up in the pool, except for Carly. When I came up from under the water, the screen door crashed to a stop like the giant octopus from the music video that shook the ground when it was finally vanquished.
#
That night, I read to Mikey until he fell asleep, then peeked out of the bedroom door. Carly was applying her lipstick in the bathroom across the hall, pouting her lips like a fish in the mirror. I ducked behind the door when she finished and walked passed. Once I heard the screen door clatter shut, I slipped into the bathroom.
Hanging on the back of the door was one of Carly’s bikinis. I took the top off the hook and slipped it on over my baggy I Heart NY t-shirt. There was a can of Old Milwaukee Light on the counter, half-full, a pink smudge on its rim. I chugged it — sour. Setting the can down, I bumped Carly’s tube of lipstick and it rolled across the speckled, powder-blue linoleum counter. I grabbed it, slid off the top, and smeared it on my lips. It felt waxy, the color too bright and clownish, clashing with my fair skin and ashy blonde hair. It filled my mouth with a bitter taste, or perhaps that was the beer.
From the open window, I heard my father’s booming laugh. He was on a pool chair. The light from the kitchen window laid across him like a blanket. Carly knocked back the rest of her beer and tossed it onto the small pile of empty cans next to the pool.
I twisted and untwisted the tube of lipstick in my hand.
She approached my father and climbed on top of him. Sitting across his hips, she leaned forward in a kiss, untying the strings of her bikini top.
My cheeks grew warm.
However, before her lips reached his, the chair collapsed to the grass and she tumbled over my father’s head. They laid in a tangled heap, howling in laughter, then resumed the kiss on the grass.
#
“Ethan, have you seen my lipstick, the one in the gold tube?”
“No.” My father groaned, resting his head on his knuckles as he leaned against the counter.
Carly searched around. Her eyes were puffy, her brow crinkled. She looked as miserable as my father.
“Where is it?” She lifted the stack of junk mail for the fifth time.
“Just use the other one,” my father said.
“The other one doesn’t go with my dress.” She opened and closed the kitchen drawers, huffing.
“Then pick a different dress.”
“The others are still at the cleaners.” She headed toward the stairs. “It’s gotta be up here.”
My father rolled his eyes over dramatically. Mikey giggled.
“I guess I’ll see you later then?” My father said.
“Oh, right.” Carly turned and smiled, walking down the stairs. She sat on the stool next to me.
I buried my face in a bowl of dry cereal, as there still was no soy milk.
“Well, it was good to see you Olivia. Your father talks about you all the time.” She patted my shoulder stiffly.
“Mm-hmm” I said, mouth full.
“And I hope you can visit again soon.” Carly stood, then walked upstairs.
#
As my father loaded the car, I climbed in the back seat with Mikey. He cranked down the window to feel the first few sprinkles of a morning rain. My father’s Nokia cell phone was on the armrest. I grabbed it and started a game of snake. Mikey leaned over trying to watch on the tiny green screen.
“Can I play?” He asked.
“In a minute,” I said.
My father got in the car and started the engine. After he backed out of the driveway, a voice called from the house. He stopped.
“Wait! Wait!” Carly came running, barefooted, into the street with a trench coat tented over her head.
“Your turn.” I handed the phone to Mikey, then draped my arms across my lap, obscuring the tube-shaped lump in my pocket.
“Ethan, let me check the car quick, one last time,” Carly said.
My father put the car in park.
Carly climbed in the front seat and searched around, then leaned through the opening in the back. “Mind checking under the seat Olivia?”
I nodded, unbuckled, then reached under the seat, keeping a hand on my pocket so the tube didn’t slip out.
Carly stepped out of the car and opened Mikey’s door. “Mikey, can you move your feet please? I’ve got to check under here.” She jiggled his knee.
He looked up from the phone, and smiled at Carly. “Oh, are you coming to see Amy too?”
“What?” Carly stepped back.
“Shit,” my father muttered.
“Oh. I knew it.” Carly shook her head. “I knew it Ethan. How long has it been with Amy this time?”
She slammed the door.
Mikey gasped, dropping the phone.
Carly stomped toward the front of the car, but before she could round it my father pulled out.
I watched her out the back window as we drove off. Her thin, naked lips pressed together. Eyes empty. She lingered there, wavered as if she floated just above the ground.
The skin on my face prickled.
#
As my father drove, the small residential town melted into rolling farmland. The rain steadied, drumming rhythmically on the roof. Puddles of water splashed the side of the car when he drove through them. I know he did this to distract Mikey from what happened. It worked. He giggled along.
However, the distraction was short-lived. Looking in the rearview mirror, my father swore under his breath. A white car was heading toward us. Fast. He gripped the steering wheel.
When it reached us, the car swerved into the wrong lane. Carly’s face passed in a pale blur, eyes fixed forward.
My father shouted, “What are you doing? Get off the road!” As if she could hear him.
Then, she cut right in front of us.
The road was slippery from the rain. My father’s car swayed. He tried to correct it, but the tires screeched, car fishtailed, then we went off the road.
Mikey yelped. I grabbed his hand, braced myself against the window as we were jostled around, bouncing down to the bottom of the ditch. The car shuttered to a stop.
My father nearly threw the door off its hinges when he opened it. He hollered for Carly as he got out of the car. Then, he slipped in the mud.
Carly stood at the side of the road. Her clothes soaked through, hands covering her mouth.
My father struggled to get footing.
Rain poured in the car through the open door.
“Are the kids okay?” She called.
“Fine! Everyone’s fine, except you. You’re crazy!” My father shouted, finding his footing. “Are you just going to stand there or what?”
“I…I…” Carly looked down the road, then back at my father in the ditch. She ran around her car and drove off.
“What the hell, Carly!”
After yanking his shoe out of the mud, my father returned to the car. The plush driver’s seat squished when he sat on it. He groaned as he tried to drive the car out of the ditch, but it only sank deeper in the mud. A short while later came the sirens.
“When they ask you what happened, you tell them the truth.” My father said. “You tell them a crazy lady ran us off the road, then drove away.”
I gripped the tube of lipstick in my hand.
Red and blue lights flashed along on the road. My father got out of the car grumbling to the officer who helped him through the mud. Rain drops sprinkled on the window. In them, blank faces stared back. Some escaped down the window when the door opened, and a hand held out. I grabbed it, pinching my lips together to soothe the words of guilt that burned on them.
#
“When you are ready, Olivia,” the police officer said. “Step over to my car.”
I pressed my cheek to the cool metal of the umbrella post, a relief from the humidity that followed the rain.
My father squeezed my shoulder. “Is this really necessary? I’ve told you everything already.”
“Your daughter is a witness too. I need her statement.” The officer said.
My father sighed, then leaned down to whisper in my ear. His breath was grossly sour, like stale beer. “Go on. Tell the man what happened. Tell him the truth.”
I swallowed hard. The worst part of it all was that my mother was right. He was my father. And I hated how much I still loved him.
“Over here, please.” The officer called.
I looked away to the mud encrusted grey car. From here, I could still make out the little raindrops on the window. I knew that if I stood there, the tiny faces staring back would no longer be pale and featureless, ghosts scattered across the glass. In their place, the faces would have warm, flushed cheeks. The same grey-green eyes as my father. And pink lips parted, ready.
Abigail Kemske is a speculative and literary fiction writer from Minneapolis, MN. She's twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is working on a speculative short story collection and a YA horror novel.
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