Dead Daddies

by Nicole Brogdon

Mama’s perched on the plastic chair in our kiddy pool wearing cutoffs, baking her legs sweet-potato-brown. We set the pool on the lawn of our apartments, Bastrop Pines. Nobody stops us. Gripping a tumbler of spiked iced tea, Mama lolls her head. Crooning throwback Stevie Nicks, “Players only love you….” Mama says, “She wrote that about Lindsey, before he heart-attacked.” We smell like summer coconut oil, wading calf-high like we own the place. Me wearing Mama’s red bikini, eating Oreos from the bag balancing on my Barbie boat.

“I hate Barbie,” Mama says. “That bitch has everything!” 

I dangle my Shivery Ghosts paperback. Like we’re on the gravy train, on vacation, somewhere good. Trying not to pee in that pool. “Humans are 75% water, Mama.”

“Smart Girl.” She bends for more Captain Morgan’s rum, butt slipping off her chair. 

“We’re full of liquid today, Mama.“

She winces like it’s a toothache. “Maybe I’ll soak till morning, Missing night shift. Livin’ the dream.”

“I’ll stay here too, Mama. A dolphin. Never returning to algebra class.” 

Next I’m seeing blurry inside my eyelids what will happen-– someone revving towards us on HW71. Trouble. Like looking through the bottom of a Coke bottle, I see circle pictures of the future. Summer, before Daddy left, I knew a woman’s body lay dead under leaves in the runoff. Behind our apartments, where the trees still droop black from forest fires. I saw her. In a milky cameo, inside a round moon in my head, her blue-green body, arms and legs bent wrong ways. I told the office manager. She shook her head. Called the cops to search. There she was, the body. Like it was, inside my misty circle. It’s women and girls who end up dead. 

A man rides up into the grass, straddling a Harley. Mama can never resist a biker in jeans and shit-kicker boots.

Mama sits up. “Howdy Cowboy.” 

He slings his leg off the bike, stares over his shoulder, gifts us a butt view. Wrangler jeans, a dirty yellow mustache like a caterpillar riding his sunburnt face. His eyes eating Mama like I’m eating Oreos. 

Then his eyes— hazel like mine—talk to mine. Those are my dead daddy’s eyes.    

Daddy’s body lays in the county cemetery, wearing a new shirt. I hope he still has his own mossy eyes in his face. Hoping this ghoul didn’t leave Dead Daddy with gouged out spoon shapes. 

Sandy-haired’s eyes are locked, lips unmoving, saying, “Tell her nothing.”

He lights a cigarette. “That’s Olympic swimming, ladies.” 

“We’re world class ladies,” Mama giggles.

He ashes his cig in our pool, plants it in her lips. 

“Mama’s quit smoking.”

“Looks like she wants it in her mouth.” 

I stand. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Mister?” 

He scans me, “You only live once,” landing on my sixth grade chest. “You’re growing buds.”

The warden lied when he said Daddy died alone, in his cell, his hard head hitting concrete. But I saw Daddy in my eyelid ring. Heard him calling the muscled guard, “Fatso!” Seen the guard boot-kicking him backwards. Before the phone call said, “accident”, I knew Daddy was bloody-dead. Then we were free. Sad and happy-free.

Mostly, Mama worked HEB Grocery produce, pocketing a tangerine or a banana for me. Or we were home, eating chunky Campbell’s soup and Pringles, playing Uno. She waited till five o’clock with shaky hands, before pouring drinks. I knew to turn her sideways when she slept. 

Blondie unzips his Wranglers, and Mama gasps, spilling rum. He steps outta jeans—wearing blue undies—into the pool. Stretches his lean legs, sipping Mama’s drink. I sit by his leg and pee, staring off. He’s taking cookies from Barbie’s boat—“She’s got everything, don’t she?” Dabbing sunscreen with his fingers like he’s icing himself. He rubs cream on Mama’s warm legs too, howling, “I’m a victim of love.” 

“Let’s get us some bar-b-q,” he drawls. Doritos-beer breath. Daddy breath. 

“She’s swimming now,” I say. 

“Get you some dry clothes,” he tells Mama. “I’ll take you for a ride.”

I stand like a referee. “I’ll bet you will!”

“Grown-up business,” Mama corrects. Stumbling out the pool, doing what she’s told. Leaving me with this bad Tom Petty. 

Mean as a stepped-on skunk, he swoops his horseshoe hand round the back of my skull, pushing my face down in the pool. Smashing my nose on the blue bottom printed with happy tropical fish. Dead Daddy forcing my head, my teeth clicking plastic, mouth screaming underwater. Those motionless fish turn into black stars. 

This same asshole, he found us. There’s always another him.

This is how Daddy rolls, making us bow, me and Mama. Months before Daddy went to prison for assaulting that waitress, he caught me sneaking his Marie Callender coconut cream pie, sticky box and spoon in my lap. In my eyelids, I seen Daddy walking up to hurt me, but I wanted something sweet. Wanting gets me trouble. Sure enough, he pounced, grabbing the back of my head, smashing my face into goo. Then he lifted me by the armpits, shoving my face against the refrigerator, my lips coconut-white, then red. 

I’m coughing up water when Mama floats towards us in her flowered dress. I honk mucus out my nose and throat. I clutch Barbie’s legs—in case I need to stab him. “Don’t hurt her.”

“Ain’t your business.” He’s tonguing Mama’s ear like he’s known her forever, getting reacquainted. Like nobody’s mom, she slides loose and wet onto the motorcycle seat. 

“Hon, I’ll bring you back wings.” Her promises, empty, like that shitty pool will be. 

“Hold on,” he says.

She’s got that dopey look—Stevie Nicks, in the documentary, when Stevie was working on the Tusk album, an exhausted songbird, hopped-up on cocaine. But old Stevie finally broke up with Lindsey. 

Mama hangs her head, spineless. 

She could never look closely and know a person. She can’t let herself know what happens next. Can’t see the train crash or the Harley rumbling towards her. Looking through the murky glass sphere, I see Mama’s body, small as a child’s. You’ll never getaway. My eyes stinging, I see where she’s headed.