The Day You Left

By: Ben Bielert

I wasn’t that old on the day you left. Just a 7-year-old girl with scabby knees and tears streaming down my cheeks. I watched your car crawl away on the bumpy gravel driveway, the crunching sound under those bald tires seemed to never end. I might have been able to catch you, even on my skinny little robin’s legs, but I didn’t run. I stood transfixed, watching you disappear. I already knew there was no point. You couldn’t be reasoned with, and I lacked the ability. You couldn’t be guilted either. Even your child crying for you to stay wouldn’t have stopped you, your mind was made up, wasn’t it?

Walking back to the house, not feeling the overgrown grass under my feet or the warmth of that August afternoon, I passed mama at the door.

“Good riddance,” she said, spitting on the ground. A little of her spittle splattered my feet.

I had bawled then. “I’m going to miss him.”

Mama sneered. “He was a good for nothing, all he ever did was drink and cuss. Couldn’t even keep a job.”

I reached out for mama, but she pulled away. “Go clean yourself up, you look a mess.”

She was right, but I was only 7. You would have held me, you would have comforted me, you always had before.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my tears had left tracks in the dirt on my cheeks. It was like the little streams that formed in the spring and disappeared by the summer, only vestiges of their presence remained. By the time I’d gone to the bathroom, my tears had all been cried.

Maybe she was right, maybe you never did hold a job. She called you a foolish dreamer.

But you had such beautiful dreams.

You were home all the time, always available. You had built me blanket forts that smelled musty because the old blankets had been tucked away in the upstairs closet for so long. It didn’t matter that they were smelly, or that one time a spider came down from one and spooked me half to death.

Mama never noticed when I was hungry. Even when I asked her and pulled at the hem of her skirt with my dirty little paws. She’d shoo me away and tell me to look in the kitchen. You always cooked me Mr. Noodles, putting in a bit of onion and some canned peas too. I still eat that when I’m sad.

You read me the stories we could get at the library. I remember how you did all those different voices for the different bugs in James and the Giant Peach. I liked your voice for Mr. Centipede the best.

All that was gone then. Mama may have worked, and she made sure the lights stayed on and there was some food in the fridge. The old farmhouse we lived in belonged to her daddy once and was hers now, so there was always a roof over my head. But she couldn’t do the things that you did, Papa. My childhood had been far from perfect before that day, but there was love in it.

Love left that day. Love left on the day you left.

© Benjamin Bielert, all rights reserved