This day in early winter was the best day Willow Thorpe would ever have at Robert Kansas Elementary School. It was the only day she ever liked. It was the only day she was truly happy within its brick walls. The days when her hair was pulled or her cubby was covered in diapers were unpleasant. And the days when she walked through the hallway and ate her lunch without a single interaction were bearable. But this afternoon was wholly and entirely likable. Because not only did Willow laugh on this day at school, but her classmates were also happy she was around.
It happened during show-and-tell when Alexandra Phillips got up in front of the class to show off her favorite necklace. Each letter of her name dangled elegantly from the gold chain as she stretched it out between her thumbs and showed it to the class.
Alexandra told everyone that it was a family heirloom. And then she defined the word heirloom for the class at Mrs. McAllister’s urging. As the sun caught the corners, every fifth grader in the class could see the intricate details and careful work behind each letter: A, L, E, X, A, N, D, R, A. Each was etched into its own golden bead. She held the necklace up above her head and tilted it around with pride for everyone to admire.
But then the chain broke.
And each of the golden letters scattered across the tiles of the classroom floor. They skidded off in every direction across the tiles and under desks and into cubbies. Alexandra immediately dropped to the floor. She crawled around frantically, her eyes tracing some beads, her fingers tracing others. Alexandra was in a twisted mess of panic and scattered beads on the floor of Mrs. McAllister’s classroom.
Everyone remained glued in their seats as they watched Alexandra and the letters of her name and her hands and her knees scramble all around the tiles. Everyone but Willow. Because Willow was good at a few things and one of them was identifying letters. And another one was being on the floor unexpectedly. So Willow joined Alexandra on her hands and knees on the floor of the classroom. And Willow effortlessly navigated the tiles and easily located each letter one at a time. Little A, L, E, X, A, N, D, R, A beads each quickly moved to the safety of Willow’s cupped hands.
After Willow handed a fistful of golden letters to her classmate, she walked away not thinking that anyone would have much to say about it. Not because she didn’t do something special. But because she was Willow Thorpe. The girl with the weird music and weird outfit. The girl who peed in her pants and had frizzy hair. So Willow followed the interaction the same way she followed all her interactions with her classmates. Head down. Eyes down. Quiet.
But as Willow turned to sit down, Alexandra came up behind her and gave her a big tight squeeze. “Thank you, Willow! Thank you!” she said, meaning every word. And then everyone else in the class started cheering. Cheering and clapping. It was the best thing that happened to Willow in Mrs. McAllister’s fifth-grade classroom and Willow was beaming.
She was still beaming when she got on the bus to head home from school. And on the walk from the big yellow bus doors to the big heavy doors of her father’s house, she told Asher, whose bus was right behind hers, all about it and he listened with big eyes and a big smile. And as soon as Willow stepped inside her father’s house, she wanted to tell her father all about it too. Asher zipped up to his room to play and Willow headed straight for her father’s office, where he usually was.
But Rex wasn’t there.
“Daaaad!” Willow yelled as she walked through the living room with the stiff couches.
“Daaaad!” she repeated as she walked through the dining room with the glass table with its Do Not Touch sign. But still no response. She made her way up the spiral staircase and burst right into her father’s empty bedroom with the inertia of the day’s excitement in her wobbly legs. “Daaaaad!” She walked toward the octagon-shaped entranceway to the bathroom with its mirrors on every wall, and a rare fuzzy memory of her mother in there came to her.
Willow was sitting in her mother’s lap making silly faces. They were sticking their tongues out and pulling their cheeks in opposite directions. They laughed and laughed at the repeating image of each silly face extending infinitely behind them in the mirror. She pushed the memory out.
Separate worlds. Separate lives.
Willow yelled again, feeling that her father was close by now.
“Daaaaaad. Are you in here, Da—?”
But before she could finish her sentence, Rex jumped aggressively out of the adjacent room with a big scary gray cloud around him. His shoulders were tense and his big hands were pressed into his hips. His bottom teeth jutted out between aggressive chomps of his Bubblicious gum.
“You don’t just walk in here, Willow,” he said firmly. His teeth now clenched to prevent yelling.
Willow froze.
“This is Dad’s space and you don’t just walk in here yelling without knocking. Do you hear me?”
A few flecks of spit hit Willow’s face, and she accepted them without blinking.
Rex stared down at his daughter angrily, leaning his broad chest forward. Seeing her father like that made Willow think about just how much smaller she was than he was. How his bigness would always overpower her littleness. How his bigness could crush her littleness. How for all of time, her father would be big and broad and tall, and she would be small and thin and unsteady. How, for all of time, his bigness would not hesitate to crush her littleness.
There was a long static pause as Rex continued chomping loudly on his gum. His temples flaring and then relaxing. His eyebrows twitching.
Willow was momentarily distracted by a noise she thought she heard in Dad’s closet. Like there was someone moving around in there. Willow instinctively tried to peer around her father’s broad torso to make sense of the sound. Find the undoubtedly slender body behind the noise. Willow felt sure that the same woman she had seen the other day was in there. Hiding.
“I said, did you hear me!”
Willow immediately turned her attention back to her father’s crooked bottom teeth and tense bottom lip.
Willow’s head tilted slowly up and then slowly back down. Still without blinking. Of course Willow heard him. He had shouted it all right at her. Right into her.
And as quickly as Alexandra’s hug brought happiness to Willow’s day, Rex’s flaring temples and crooked teeth yanked it right out of her.
Rex thrust his pointer finger in the direction of the door, and Willow’s right knee buckled.
She walked out of Dad’s room exactly the way she originally walked away from Alexandra earlier. Shoulders slumped. Eyes on the floor. Afraid to be noticed any longer.
But this time, no one came up behind her and hugged her.
* * *
Willow retreated to her own room and curled up in her beanbag chair with her word search book. She stared at the page looking for the word FAUCET.
She scanned the grid of letters for all of the Fs. And then she traced her eyes a box around each one, looking for an A. And then continued along that line of letters looking for a U. It was repetitive but not boring. Just entrancing enough to make the rest of the world melt away. Just engaging enough to make her forget about what just happened with her father. Just simple enough to make the game approachable. Word searches always made sense to Willow. They allowed her to have many, many small victories in a day. And each of those victories was marked in different colored pencils or crayons surrounding all sorts of words with all sorts of letter combinations and all sorts of meanings. It was fun to flip back through the pages and see the rainbow of her little successes. How many times she made sense of the mess on the page and illuminated a word. A meaning.
There it was. F-A-U-C-E-T. Going backward on the last row of letters. She pulled out her purple crayon to circle the word.
When she looked up from the page, her father was standing in her bedroom doorway.
He was posed with his left elbow resting against the door frame. Willow quickly ran through the afternoon checklist in her mind. Was her homework done? Did she miss any chores? Had she left anything downstairs? Did she leave the door open?
But when she ran out of reasons for her father to be standing at her door like that, she simply and kindly said, “Hi, Dad.”
Willow considered that her father may have come to apologize, but instead of saying sorry, or bending down for a hug, Rex pulled a soccer ball out from behind his back.
“I was thinking we could go play some soccer in the basement?”
And while this wasn’t the apology she was expecting, perhaps even aching for, Willow was pleasantly surprised at the gesture. But then she was a little bit nervous. She wasn’t any good at sports. She wasn’t even any good at standing. “Should Asher come?” Willow asked earnestly. She usually sat on the side while Rex and Asher played sports together.
Rex said, “How about just us this time?”
“Okay,” Willow said a little bit shyly.
Rex was pleasantly surprised at his daughter’s willingness.
And there it was, father and daughter, Rex and Willow, surprising each other. You could feel it in the air. In the space between their rigid bodies. In the too-long pauses between questions and answers.
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”
Willow nervously followed Rex down to the basement in her purple leggings and black Converse shoes. As Willow fumbled down the stairs, she wondered if she would be able to do this with her father. For her father. She really hoped she could.
Willow stood there with straight spine and stiff hands, waiting for her father to kick the ball to her. And when he did, the black-and-white orb rolled its way across the floor toward her. It rolled to the left of her legs, which were staked rigidly into the ground. When the ball rolled behind her and then stopped when it hit the wall, Willow looked up at her dad.
Now what? she asked Rex with her eyes.
“Just put your leg out if the ball is going to go by you. You can stop it with your foot or your shins,” he said in thinly veiled impatience.
Willow nodded, then continued to look up at her dad. Legs still staked into the floor.
“Okay, go and get the ball now,” Rex instructed.
Willow could see that he was struggling to stay calm.
Willow walked toward the ball, already worried what it was going to look like when she had to kick it back. She imagined herself doing it. She imagined herself doing it gracefully. She imagined herself kicking the ball a few yards ahead and racing her father toward it. She imagined him picking her up and tickling her and playing keep-away until he eventually let her take the ball from him. He would playfully knock her over onto the floor, and then she would pick the ball up and toss it away from both of them. And when she did, Willow and her father would be on the floor, out of breath and happy. She could see it so clearly. She wanted it to happen as it did in her mind’s eye and right there on the floor. She wanted it to happen so badly.
But the reality was that Willow could barely get control of her gangly legs enough to walk competently. Kicking the ball forcefully and accurately enough to cause it to make a full revolution was a physical impossibility. She tried her hardest anyway. But when she lifted her right leg to kick the ball back toward her dad, her left leg collapsed immediately. It left the soccer ball right where it started and Willow toppled over next to it.
Couldn’t they just dance and sing to a movie? Or play word searches? Do something that didn’t involve so much body? So much coordination?
“It’s okay. Try again, Willow,” Rex forced out through clenched teeth.
And Willow did try again. And this time she even made contact with the ball. But it just wobbled a little bit, and then came back to stillness in the same spot it started out in.
Rex huffed over toward Willow and demonstrated a proper kick. He waved his leg back and forth like it was so easy. Like everyone could do it.
But everyone couldn’t do it. Willow couldn’t do it. His daughter couldn’t do it. And maybe she was the only person in the whole universe who couldn’t do it. But Willow was Rex’s only daughter in the whole universe. Didn’t that earn her a few moments of extra instruction? A little warmth? A little patience? A little love?
After no more than two minutes of Rex swaying his legs and Willow looking confused, Rex had his hands over his eyes in frustration and Willow had her hands on her thighs in disappointment.
So Willow and Rex silently agreed to go upstairs.
It wasn’t working. This father-daughter soccer pass in the basement.
This father-daughter anything anywhere.