Free And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida Page B

in all the time he'd been gone, my mother never changed the locks.

    My feet are still sore. Something's wrong with them. My mother has poured hot water and dishwashing soap in the orange plastic basin she usually uses to hand-wash her bras. "Soak up," she says. Then she goes back to the kitchen to finish washing the dishes. She insists on doing them by hand.

    My father and I have the same freckle on our lower lips. It's right on the cusp of lip and skin. A few people have said it looks like it fastens mouth and chin together—a button. We resemble each other so much, my father and I, sometimes I can't look at him.

    My father closes his eyes before he starts a sentence. He opens them and says, "I have something to show you." From a drawer under the TV he pulls out a picture of himself when he was younger. It's a school picture he's just come across, from when he was eight and lived in a small town outside Szczecin.

    "Who were your friends?" I ask.

    He points out the people in his class whose names he remembers.

    "Something sad ended up happening to this one here," he says. His finger rests on the stomach of a boy sitting cross-legged in shorts and long socks. "His father was a fisherman. He had a fishing boat and every weekend we'd go out on it with him."

    My father pauses. He closes his eyes.

    "One weekend I was supposed to go, but my parents wanted me to stay around the house because someone was sick—I can't remember who. Anyway, that weekend I was supposed to go, the whole boat capsized and everyone drowned.

    "He died," he says, his finger still on the stomach of the boy. "If I had gone that day, I would be dead."

    "So would I."

    "No, you just wouldn't have been born." "That's the same thing."
    My father ignores my comment; he's somewhere else. "The most bizarre thing was, he had left a birthday present for me, a sixteenth-birthday present. His mother found it in his room after he died."

    I ask what it was.

    My father taps my shins, signaling I should take my feet out of the basin so he can fill it with more hot water.

    "Cufflinks," he says. "I still have them somewhere upstairs."
    He lifts the plastic basin with both hands. Holding it steady, he carries it to the kitchen. I wonder if all my belongings—the skirt I sewed and spray-painted in high school, my Softball bat from sixth grade, the concert ticket stubs I saved—would have more weight, be more valued, if I'd been killed in the park. I know that if my father died tomorrow I'd keep the basin. I'd tell the story of his last night, how he sat with me while I soothed my feet. I try to appreciate my father, his stories, his love, all of it. I swallow it in like I'm holding my breath before diving under water.

    I've given the police in New York, and the doormen, my number at home, so when the phone rings, I put down my book. I hear my mother running to answer the phone and I wait to hear her call my name. She doesn't and I relax. I go back to reading about the history of worlds fairs:
    "The first world's fair was held in England in 1851 at the Crystal Palace, so called because of its stunning iron and glass structure. It was designed by a greenhouse builder …"

    Five minutes later, my mom comes into the living room.

    "Don't sit on the couch!" she says. Furniture is the one item my parents spend money on— but they won't use it. When they watch TV they sit on the floor.

    I roll my eyes.

    "It's Jason on the phone for you." "What?"
    "Jason."

    "You've been talking to him this whole time?"

    "Yes," she says, and gestures that I should pick up the extension. I hear breathing on the phone. "Mama," I say. "I got it."
    She hangs up.

    "So how are you?" he asks. "Good," I say. "Great," I lie.
    "Good, glad to hear it." He does sound glad to hear that I'm good, and I like him all over again.

    Jason was two years ahead of me in high school. We ran into each other a few summers ago at a blood drive at my mother's hospital. When he asked me out, I felt