Harvesting the Heart Read Free Page B

old coffee grinders and rusted hinges and purple Hula
Hoops. In the evenings and on rainy Saturday afternoons, Daddy would
disappear into the basement and work until it was dark. Sometimes
I felt as if I were the parent, hauling him upstairs and telling him
he really had to eat something. He would work on his latest
inventions while I sat off to the side on a musty green sofa and did
my homework.
    My
father turned into a different person in his workshop. He moved with
the grace of a cat; he pulled parts and wheels and cogs out of the
air like a magician, to make gadgets and knickknacks where minutes
before there was nothing. When he spoke of my mother, which was not
often, it was always down in the workshop. Sometimes I would catch
him staring up at the nearest window, a small cracked rectangle. The
light would fall on his face in a way that made him seem ages older
than he was; and I'd have to stop myself and count the years and
wonder how much time really had gone by.
    It
wasn't as if my father actually ever said to me, I know
what you did. He
just stopped speaking to me. And it was then that I knew. He acted
anxious and he wanted time to pass quickly so I could leave for
college. I thought about something a girl in my PE class had said
once about having sex: that once you did it, everyone could tell. Was
the same true of abortions? Could my father read it on my face?
    I
waited one week after the fact, hoping that graduation would bring
about some kind of understanding. But my father suffered through the
ceremony and never even said "Congratulations!" to me. That
day, he moved in and out of the shadows of our house like someone
uncomfortable in his own skin. At eleven o'clock, we watched the
nightly news. The headline story was about a woman who had bludgeoned
her three-month-old infant with a can of salmon. The woman was taken
to a psychiatric hospital. Her husband kept telling reporters he
should have seen it coming.
    When
the news was over, my father went to his old cherry desk and took a
.blue velvet box from the top drawer. I smiled. "I thought you'd
forgotten," I said.
    He
shook his head and watched with guarded eyes as I ran my lingers over
the smooth cover, hoping for pearls or emeralds. Inside were rosary
beads, beautifully carved out of rosewood. "I thought," he
said quietly, "you might be needing these."
    I
told myself that night as I packed that I was doing this because I
loved him and I didn't want him to bear my sins for the rest of his
life. I packed only my functional clothes, and I wore my school
uniform because I figured it would help me blend in. Technically
I was not running away. I was eighteen. I could come and go as I
pleased.
    I
spent my last three hours at home downstairs in my father's workshop,
trying out different wordings for the note I would leave behind. I
ran my fingers over his newest project. It was a birthday card that
sang a little ditty when you opened it and then, when you pressed the
corner, automatically inflated itself into a balloon. He said there
was really a market for this stuff. My father was having trouble with
the music. He didn't know what would happen to the microchip once the
thing became a balloon. "Seems to me," he'd said just the
day before, "once you've got something, it shouldn't go changing
into something else."
    In
the end, I simply wrote: I love
you. I'm sorry. I'll be fine. When
I looked at it again, I wondered if it made sense. Was I sorry for
loving him? Or because I'd be fine? Finally, I threw down the pen. I
believed I was being responsible, and I knew that eventually I would
tell him where I'd wound up. The next morning I took the rosary beads
to a pawnshop in the city. With half my money, I bought a bus ticket
that would take me as far away from Chicago as it could. I tried very
hard to make myself believe there was nothing for me to hold on to
there.
    On
the bus I made up aliases for myself and told them to anyone who
asked. I decided at a rest stop in Ohio