The woman he fell in love with on the dance floor at the army base had a small child at home. He must have been disappointed, but he proposed to my mother without even knowing her last name. A flight of fancy? I was disappointed, too. Mom didn’t choose Jim or Mick or one of the nice ones who brought flowers for her and a book for me.
His eyes didn’t reflect his smile when he told me we would leave Minnesota for his native St. Louis the day after they married. When he said, “Missouri,” it sounded like “misery.”
He waited in silence as I set the table each night. He would not sit until his salad bowl was in place, napkin tucked under the left side of the plate. “Your other left, Sue.”
My stepfather flew helicopters in Vietnam, transporting generals across war zones. Back home he was a baggage handler. Their first argument was because Mom wanted a job. He wanted her to work for him—clean the apartment, polish his shoes, keep me quiet so he didn’t have to get out the belt.
He used his hand to steer her by the back of her neck. When I was ten, he took to steering me, too. My brother, Jay, born two years after we became a family, was not so easily piloted. In the face of his father’s rage—who touched my chair/my tools/the garage door?—Jay laughed from beneath his slightly-too-long Dracula cape, unafraid of the hit that never came. I admired my brother’s fearlessness but stayed close just in case.
My stepfather was the life of the party until he wasn’t. I wanted him to never stop telling jokes, even the stories that made me cringe, like the one about the one-legged hooker. When everyone was laughing, he was flying high and the world was lighter. But he could turn it off like the light switch he flicked when he was done. “Time to go home, y’all.”
He sent me a boombox my first year at college in Iowa. A note in his blocky printing was taped to the cassette: “PLAY THIS.” The recording contained not fatherly advice, but twenty minutes of hearty belching. I hit the pause button long before my roommates stopped laughing.
I called him after JFK Jr.’s plane went down. “Pilot error,” he dismissed, reassuringly. He was in the air again, flying private planes for well-off clients. A month later my mom left him and he called me to ask, “How could she do this to me?” I did not answer, though I wondered, How could she not?
He made the trip from St. Louis to Minneapolis every summer. When Mom moved in a block away from me, my house became the demilitarized zone. He held court in one corner while she grimly anchored the other.
During one visit, while I organized his requirements (ice cold Bud Light, four queen-sized pillows, specialty meats), he gave my four-year-old a backyard golf lesson. Ten minutes later she trudged inside. “He yelled at me,” she said, in tears. I dumped chips into a bowl and repeated the hollow words that had recently lost their place in my mother’s vocabulary.
“That’s just how he is, honey,” I said, tossing the bag in the trash and giving her shoulders a light squeeze. I wish I had slammed the door and held her tight.
One night, after tucking Mom into her hospice bed, I skimmed my messages. One from him expressed displeasure at the travel ban I had imposed a year earlier when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My numb reminder that Mom was actively dying and I was still getting treatment provoked this reply: WELL I’M SICK, TOO.
When we told him Mom was gone, he sent a list of grievances. Puzzling, decades-old perceived indiscretions. Did she really sit on Mr. Anderson’s lap at the church choir party or was it one of his dreams that caused him to wake up livid? Behavior unbecoming a wife. I could have told him off. Instead, I coached my brother to respond with restraint.
Life after Mom and cancer left little space for my stepfather. It was awful and easy to keep the distance intact. I softened briefly to mail drawings of monkeys and carefully lettered cards from my daughter. They went unacknowledged. Only a visit would do, he protested through my brother. I clung to my silence like a weapon and wondered if it had always held this much power.
Two years later, in a St. Louis hospital, my stepfather was grounded for good. He lashed out at sisters, nurses, Obama, and even Jay, who remained by his side for days. My brother called after postponing his return flight home for the third time. “Dad is so angry,” he said, despair and sleep-deprivation clogging his voice. Chest pounding, I gripped the phone.
“Go home,” I said, with uncharacteristic abruptness. “Enough.”
The quiet at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery was more deafening than the gun salute, more agonizing than the forlorn bugle. He had told his last story, flown his final flight. But the show wasn’t over. I stood behind Jay as helicopters hummed in the distance, then banked neatly over the Mississippi River to whirr above our heads in formation. Fading back into the horizon, their drones became murmurs and I pretended my stepfather was still flying high.
“Godspeed, Carl,” I said, and felt the world exhale, releasing the breath it had been holding for decades.
