My Father Before Me Read Free Page A

there; he doesn’t miss many dances. A few teachers—chaperones—stand discreetly in the corners, responsible looks on their faces. Most of the boys and girls linger shyly on their side of the room. Only a few brave souls have met in the middle. Among them is someone Eddie hasn’t noticed before: a slim, pretty girl with wavy dark brown hair who has been twirling dance after dance in and out of the arms of a boy named Brodie. The two of them seem to know each other well, but Eddie is interested and bold. In a pause between songs, he approaches Brodie and asks if he can take his place for a dance, and Brodie replies, “Be my guest.”
    The girl is a sophomore but only fourteen: round-faced, with a smattering of freckles across her high cheekbones and a cute swoop of a nose. She tells Eddie her name is Ange—it sounds like Angie but has no i in it. Her last name is Peterson. She will one day become my mother.
    But now they’re just dancing, first to one song, then another. Brodie, poor, courteous, understanding Brodie, who has recently begun dating Ange, doesn’t stand a chance. “Your father asked me to dance,” as my mother explains, “and we were together ever after.”
    On the gym floor, Eddie is smooth, and he knows it—a jocular talker and slick dancer, though not as slick as he thinks. He and Ange are doing the slide, and Eddie can’t help himself: he’s sliding this way, sliding that way, sliding in exaggerated fashion, goofing off, showing off. To Ange, he’s adorable. And nice. Handsome. Charming as all get-out—and she’s a sucker for charm. As a child of divorced parents—a mother glum and inward, a father far off, with little affection to spare her—she hasn’t had much of that in her life.
    They begin acting as smitten teenagers do. At basketball games, they sit in the bleachers side by side, hand in hand. When other dances are held, they attend them together. When Eddie learns to drive, he escorts his sweetheart to a movie or to the Triple XXX drive-in. He cracks silly jokes—real groaners—and nudges her, telling her she ought to lighten up, abandon some of that Scandinavian reserve. Sometimes he visits Ange’s house; less often, she visits his, where he lives with his grandparents. They are not keen on the idea of him being so involved with a girl, and such a young one. The welcome in that home is chilly.
    But what, think Eddie and Ange, can be wrong with their devoting so much time to each other? For their ages, they are quite grown up, they think. And they understand each other well, they think. Still, there are parts of Eddie’s life—some invisible, tangled shadow he trails behind him—of which he will not speak. When Ange asks about his father, Eddie clams up. The man is gone. Why mention him? And his mother, yes, is dead. Forget it. There’s nothing to say, nothing to figure out about that.
    Why talk about the past when one can sing? “To each his own, and my own is you,” Eddie croons. This is their song, he informs her. The first months of their romance, they can hardly listen to the radio for an hour without hearing “To Each His Own.” “I need you, I know, I can’t let you go.” They might be, they probably are, in love, whatever that might mean. They have a chance to prove that to the camera onespring day—Roosevelt High’s White Clothes Day. From the school, they amble down to a nearby lake, Eddie in a white button-down shirt, white sailor pants, white socks, and white shoes; Ange in a plain white knee-length dress, white ankle socks, and dark penny loafers. For one photo, they stand near the water, on a wooden dock, arms around each other, gazing into each other’s eyes; they look gorgeous and jubilant. For another, they sit on a low wall at the edge of the dock; their knees point in opposite directions, but Ange falls backward into Eddie’s