"Can you read this out loud?" I held up the paper. He was sitting on his bedroom floor putting together a plastic model of a '69 Shelby Cobra Mustang. That night I casually swiped the newspaper off the cluttered coffee table and headed down the hallway to find my brother, Jamie. If she was dead, something had killed her, and I wanted a heads up just in case whatever it was might be lurking nearby. I needed to know what had happened to that girl. I couldn't get that school picture out of my head. So why was Dad skimping on the details about this dead girl? Maybe it wasn't bloody enough for him. The disasters took up more reels than we did, and Dad narrated them like a pro. We all sat watching the movies and eating buttered popcorn made in the black-and-white-speckled pan that was always greasy, no matter how many times you scrubbed it. Our childhood was preserved among the big fire at the Catholic church, a Greyhound bus accident on Fort Henry Road, and a tornado twirling up Martha Whitmore's bean field. Christmas morning, four beautiful children in color-coordinated Santa pajamas, squinting summertime, my older brother Jamie's first home run a station wagon hideously wrapped around a telephone pole, blood dripping down the passenger door and plop, plop, plopping onto the road my two older sisters and me in hats with wide ribbons hunting for Easter baskets a dead cow smashed on the front of a Plymouth. Images jiggled past, scenes from our tiny Ohio town of Galesburg. And every Thanksgiving he lined up Mom and the four of us kids on the gold-and-brown-plaid studio couch, hauled out the Bell + Howell reel-to-reel, and rolled his masterpieces. If he was lucky enough to come upon something, he'd jump out and aim his camera at whatever was crumpled, bleeding, or burning. Why wasn't he telling me what happened? He loved talking gore lived for it documented it, even.ĭad drove his Ford pickup with his Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he saw an accident. I looked at Dad: bloated, smudged glasses slid halfway down his nose. She looked like me: same short cropped hair with razor-straight bangs, same heart-shaped face, same wool plaid jumper. Sitting across the breakfast table from Dad, I pointed. It changed everything: a school picture printed on the front page of the Elk Grove Courier, the newspaper my father was reading.
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