Lori had no luck with men. They either drowned on her like her brother Ron, or wrapped their finally paid-for Pontiac Firebird around a streetlamp like her husband Walt, or just disappeared like her father Amos.
Amos didn’t run off when she was little. He didn’t leave after that summer vacation in 1963 when Lake Michigan sucked Ron under a pier and spat him up again on the shore like a deposit of driftwood. He didn’t leave when her mother died of lung cancer twelve years later. As far as Lori could tell at first, he didn’t leave for any particular reason. There had been no lack of crises, but he’d stayed around through all those. Now when he was getting up there in years, when you’d think he’d be glad enough to have somebody who was willing to look after him, he decides to vanish. Just like that. Just one afternoon when she’d come home from work a little bit early so as to surprise him. Well, the surprise was on her.
She was going to take him to see the new Babe Ruth movie at the rush-hour-special rate. It wasn’t just that she was conscious of saving money — Amos couldn’t stay awake through a later movie, not even for John Goodman, who he loved to watch on Roseanne.
When Lori opened the back door, she knew right away something wasn’t right. She looked around the kitchen. Everything was in its proper place, down to the dishtowel folded over the oven door handle. Then she realized she could hear the faucet dripping. That was it. The faucet in that kitchen sink had been dripping for a couple months now, but she’d never heard it in the middle of the day because the television was always on in the next room. Amos played it loud because, as he liked to say, he was totally deaf in one ear and couldn’t hear a damn thing with the other. He turned it on before breakfast and turned it off when he went to bed if Lori wasn’t still up watching. Even when they ate their dinner in the kitchen, he liked to have it going in the next room. It used to drive Walt up the wall, all that disembodied noise coming at them during dinner. Lori would say, “Aw, c’mon, sweetie,” to Walt to calm him down. Amos contended the television was his masking device. He said when it was turned off or turned down, the bells and whistles in his ears just about drove him crazy. Walt said Amos should go to an ear doctor before he drove everybody else crazy. Lori didn’t mind the television. She thought it did mask a host of unpleasant sounds, like the faucet dripping, for instance.
Lori stood in the kitchen with her hand still on the knob of the back door, thinking, “I wonder if Amos has had a stroke,” but as she set her purse down on the simulated butcher-block counter she saw how silly it was to think her father would have turned off the television after he’d had a stroke. “No,” she corrected herself, “it couldn’t have been a stroke. More likely a burglar.” Amos never went out for walks or such. You could depend on that television set being on when you came home.
She stepped into the living room unprepared for what she would find: everything tidy and in its place except her father. She wondered if Amos had taken to napping on his bed late afternoons the days she worked. He didn’t need the television on for sleeping. But he wasn’t in his bedroom. Something told her to look for him in the closet. “Why he’d hide in there, I can’t imagine,” she said aloud. Well, he wasn’t in there and neither was much of anything else. Lori sat down hard on her father’s bed. She didn’t for one second imagine he’d been kidnapped, or his things stolen. He’d run away. Cleared out. As though he sensed she was embarking on a new life and he set out to do the same.
Lori was expecting her first phone call to come at 9:00 that night from a man she had “met” through the personals in the morning newspaper. In the four years since Walt died, Lori hadn’t had a real date. She knew she looked good when she fixed herself up. She still had a tight, trim body — the upside, she figured, of being barren — and men sometimes turned to watch when she walked by, but she felt like she had some dark cloud hanging over her. She was sure most men thought what happened to Walt was somehow her fault. It didn’t matter that Walter was alone in that car. They were still edgy around her. You could tell.
Lori had answered three other ads in the personals. The first two times she didn’t like the responses to her letters so she just never wrote again. The first guy, she saw right off, was too stuck on himself to be of much use to anybody else. “No wonder you have to meet women through the personals,” she thought and then sighed, because what did that say about her? The second guy wrote back this mash note saying he could tell just from her letter she was the only one for him. Well, her letter had been awfully short and more than a little cautious, so he had to be doing a lot of reading between the lines. “Must have two heads,” she thought, “or a chainsaw in his glove compartment.”
She let some time go by before she answered a third ad. This guy just listed his vital statistics and then signed off as Lonely Heart. She liked that. To the point but a little sensitive, too. No hard sell and not one of those sappy rhyming ads. They wrote letters back and forth. She liked the slowness of it.
He told her he was widowed and that all he seemed to do was go to work, take care of his house, and go to church. He said he wanted something more out of life. “Fair enough,” she thought. The part about church made her feel more secure, even though she wasn’t a regular churchgoer herself, so she took the next step and sent her phone number to Mr. Personals Number Three. He still didn’t know her real name and she wasn’t sure how many times she’d have to talk to him on the telephone before she would tell him. When she thought of him it was as Number Three because she figured he wasn’t using his real name yet either, and she was right.
Two days after she mailed him her phone number, the calls started coming. Nasty calls. Words you’d never hear in church. Sometimes she’d listen longer than she meant to, caught between a dream and a hard place. She knew her nasty caller was Number Three not just because of the timing, but because she never heard again from the guy who had titled himself Lonely Heart (David Watkins in his letters)–no note, no normal phone call.
That had been a bad few weeks. He would call sometimes several times in one night and sometimes not at all for several days. The phone company said the calls weren’t frequent enough to justify putting a trace on her line. She thought the company must have a limited supply of traces and an unlimited supply of nasty callers. She considered going to the police but she didn’t have any proof of anything — there was no David Watkins in the phone book — and she would have to confess to a policeman that she answered ads in the personals and they would laugh and talk about her.
The times that he phoned and she hung up and then snatched the receiver off the hook before the phone could ring again were the times she grew most frightened. First came that horrible insistent shrillness demanding that you replace the receiver in its cradle, then came the silence which she felt he inhabited. When the phone was off the hook, it was as though his presence could enter the room through the holes in the mouthpiece.
Some nights she preferred to let the phone ring and ring and ring rather than lift the receiver and give him access to the room where she slept alone and unprotected. The calls finally stopped, petered out. She wondered why. She never told Amos about the calls. She didn’t have to explain them because he couldn’t tell the ringing of the phone from the ringing in his ears.
She looked around the room for a note from Amos. He had taken most everything with him, including his pillow. The bed was made up all nice and neat, but she noticed it was flat where the pillow should be. He’d been using that same pillow since before he’d moved in with her and Walt, probably since way before her mother died. “Yes,” she said to herself, “that’s like him.” Lori would have thought he was a man who didn’t like change.
The clothes he had left behind in his closet were things that didn’t fit him any more. And the boldly patterned cardigan sweater she’d given him a couple Christmases past. “It’s a Bill Cosby kind of sweater,” she had told him. He liked The Cosby Show or, rather, he used to. He said the show was better when Rudi was little. For some reason, he never had any trouble hearing her. He watched the reruns every day. The last episode in the series had recently aired. From now on there would only be reruns. Lori wondered if that had something to do with her father’s departure. He’d never worn the sweater. Not once. When she tried to cajole him into it, saying again, “It’s a Bill Cosby sweater,” Amos turned back to the television and said, “So send it to him.”
She checked the wooden student desk by the window and found scattered papers — letters from the Gray Panthers and the ACLU and the AARP and other snatches of the alphabet, an appointment reminder from the dentist, a Crimestopper’s bulletin, and a postcard from his cousin Madge sent from Las Vegas. No note. Then Lori realized his typewriter was gone. The fact of his typewriter being gone made her start to cry. It was like when the policeman came to her house and told her Walt was dead and then gave her Walt’s watch and wedding ring and wallet. “I know it sounds terrible,” he said, “but sometimes these things get taken, so I wanted to see to it you got them.” She had opened Walt’s wallet — she wasn’t sure why. Maybe to find out there had been a mistake. Maybe it was somebody else’s wallet, somebody else’s Pontiac Firebird. It could have been somebody else’s wallet for all she knew. She had never looked inside Walt’s before. But there was his driver’s license. And his social security card and his AAA card. It was the photograph of Meryl Streep he carried in his wallet that made her cry.
It wasn’t like the typewriter wasn’t Amos’s to take. It wasn’t that she hadn’t realized he’d left for good when she had looked into the closet. She was darned if she knew what it was. Maybe it was that he thought enough of the typewriter to lug it away with him but hadn’t thought enough of her to write a note. Like Walt thinking enough of Meryl Streep to carry her around but not having any picture of Lori.
Amos had talked about wanting to see The Babe. Lori wondered if he would have left if he knew she was coming home to take him to the movie. Maybe he’d still be there if she hadn’t decided to surprise him.
She wasn’t worried about him. Even though she’d been taking care of him for the last seven years, she knew he could take care of himself.
She wasn’t even angry with him. How could she be angry with a deaf old man who never made trouble except with his television or by being gone?
No. She was only disappointed.
Then she realized people would think she must be a pretty terrible daughter for her father to run away like that. That made her angry. She knew some people thought she must have been a pretty terrible wife. She’d done the best she could, but that’s not the way anyone else would see it. It wasn’t fair. “Life’s not fair,” Amos would have said. “Life is a magazine.”
He knew about unfairness. He’d had his share and then some. But he sure didn’t know anything about comforting someone else when unfair things happened. He never learned that trick.
When she was crying so she could hardly speak, just twelve years old and trying to tell him she was the one who had yelled out to Ron, the one who had been hiding under the outcropping on the pier, calling her younger brother’s name and then ducking under water and swimming around the pilings, she wanted Amos to say, “It’s okay, honey. It wasn’t your fault.” Instead he said that she was a true Lorelei, that she had been named rightly.
A few weeks after Ron’s funeral, she gathered her courage into her chest, taking deep breaths as she approached the desk of Mrs. Sandler, the librarian at the branch near her house, the pretty one who had helped Lori with her report on volcanoes. She asked Mrs. Sandler what a Lorelei was and Mrs. Sandler guided her to a book on women in mythology. She was horrified when she read that a Lorelei was a siren who called men to their deaths in the sea. She closed her eyes and thought of the siren on the ambulance that had come screaming to the beach. Her hands gripped the library table until her knuckles went knucklebone white. Mrs. Sandler asked if she was feeling all right. She couldn’t tell the librarian, who had always been so nice to her, who possibly even liked her, that she was a siren and had killed her brother. She ran out of the library, knocking things down, making a great deal of forbidden noise, but it didn’t matter. Lori knew she’d never be able to come back.
For some time after that, years certainly, Lori thought she had been christened Lorelei and that her parents had wanted to keep her real name from her and from others so she wouldn’t be an outcast; Lori was the nickname they had camouflaged her with. It was some comfort to know that being a Lorelei wasn’t her fault, even if Ron’s death was. She had been born to it. It wasn’t until after her mother died, when her father was moving in with them and she and Walt were emptying out the old house, that she came across her baptismal certificate with the name Lori Ann on it. She wasn’t really sure if she had already realized Lori was, after all, her real name and that she had not been the preordained instrument of her brother’s destiny. She had wanted to ask Amos about it at the time, if he remembered what he had said to her three days after Ron’s body washed up, three days after he had been summoned from the golf course — that’s when she had started calling him Amos — but if he’d said he didn’t remember, she would have felt foolish.
She had thought they would get home from the movie a little after seven. Amos would have had a hot dog and a Snickers bar at the theatre so she wouldn’t have to feed him dinner. He would have watched television until 8:00. At 8:30 he’d still be sitting in front of the set, but he’d be asleep and she would gently shake his shoulder and ask him if it wasn’t time for bed. Amos would have been asleep in his room by nine o’clock when her call came.
Number Four sounded like the best bet yet. Not that the other three were hard to beat: one self-centered, one desperate, and one an obscene caller. She wasn’t going to try a Number Five. If this guy didn’t pan out, she was going to resign herself to life with Amos. That had been her thinking. Now she was going to have to get used to his not being there. To cooking for herself alone. It would be her responsibility to bring in the morning paper and the mail and to take care of the garden. She wondered if she should call the police about Amos. Better not. She could just imagine what they’d say if she phoned to tell them that her father had run away from her.
With Amos gone, she would use all the time between now and nine o’clock to compose herself. She had been nervous enough about the phone call before all this. Should she tell Number Four her father had just up and left? Better not. It might make her sound hard to get along with.
Lori opened a can of concentrated cream of chicken soup and poured half the undiluted contents over a bowl of rice left over from last night’s dinner. She had planned to make a nice rice pudding for Amos’s breakfast tomorrow. She heated the chickeny rice in the microwave and ate it slowly, as if she were tasting each bite. She sifted through the day’s mail, not opening anything she didn’t have to. Amos had liked the “occupant” letters. He usually took them directly into his room when the mail was delivered. She didn’t even thumb through the catalogues. No sense putting yourself in temptation’s way.
Then she went down the basement and heaped the contents of the dryer into a plastic laundry basket and carried it upstairs. Amos had forgotten to check the dryer before he left. His favorite sweater was in there. When she finished folding and sorting and ironing, she sat at the kitchen table to do the day’s crossword puzzle. She wanted to be calm, unruffled when he called.
But he didn’t call. Not at 9:00 as they had agreed. Not at 9:30 or 10:00. At 11:00 Lori turned out the lights, closed the door to Amos’s room, and went to bed.
The next morning she decided to go in to work late. As long as she got her work done, her boss didn’t mind if she came in a little late or left a little early now and then. She wanted to stop by the post office to check her box. She thought maybe Number Four had written to say he wouldn’t be able to call last night and his note just hadn’t reached her in time, but the box was empty. She only used her box for correspondence with the guys from the personals.
She made herself stay away from the post office for the next couple days. It wouldn’t do to make a habit of being late. She waited until Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. when she was the first customer in after they unlocked the door. All the waiting and the hurrying were to no purpose. The box was still empty.
Eileen, the woman who had worked behind the counter since before Lori and Walt moved into the neighborhood, called to her as she was going out the door. “Hey there, Mrs. Laskey, is your father all right?”
“What makes you ask?” Lori said, suddenly wondering if he had complained about her to other people.
“Well, he hasn’t been in since Monday. Usually he comes in every morning to check his box. I just thought maybe he was sick or in the hospital or something. His box was full already two days ago. We’ve been holding the rest of his mail behind the counter.”
“He’s not sick,” Lori answered carefully, precisely. “I don’t know why he hasn’t been in to get his mail.”
“Well, tell him I said ‘Hi’ and it’s piling up.”
“Okay,” said Lori. She walked down the steps of the old, solid post office building, built during the Depression by the WPA, and headed back toward her squat, solid little house which had been built around the same time. What need did Amos have for a post office box and where was he getting all that mail from?
When she got back home, she opened the door to Amos’s room that she had left shut since Tuesday night. Even though his things were gone, the room still smelled like him. A heady mix of Right Guard, Old Spice, and Listerine. She opened every drawer in the bureau and even the drawer in the nightstand. He’d only left behind the things that weren’t worth taking: empty pill bottles, socks with holes in them, undershirts made lingerie-sheer from repeated washings. No papers at all. She went back to the student desk and this time examined each letter. That’s when she found the second clue. Caught between the pages of the mailing from the Gray Panthers was a white sheet of blue-lined loose-leaf school paper, folded. Lori opened it and then sat on the bed. It read Dear Mr. Sandman, Already I see you in my dreams. It was signed Yours truly! The Lady Is A Tramp.
You could have knocked Lori over with a feather. Amos was writing to some woman he’d “met” through the personals. She shook her head in wonderment. “Her father’s daughter,” she said aloud. It seemed funny to her now that she had been so sure he’d disapprove.
There weren’t any more letters in the papers scattered on the desk. Lori checked the wastebasket. Nothing there either. Still, there couldn’t be any other explanation. First the bulging post office box and now the sultry note to a dreamy sandman. It could only add up to one thing. She wondered if he’d placed an ad himself or answered other people’s or both.
She hadn’t the nerve to place an ad. She’d tried to write one but the descriptions of herself sounded either boring or like false advertising.
Lori wondered why she hadn’t heard from Number Four, her last hope. He had asked for her phone number every time he’d written. The last time he’d said, Let me call you Tues. evening at nine. That way you can give me the number of a friend or a relative or even a pay phone where I can reach you if you’re not comfortable with my knowing your home number yet. That was what finally convinced her to trust him with her number. He was sensible and thoughtful, her Number Four. If he couldn’t call that night, wouldn’t he have tried again? But maybe not if he thought that the number she’d sent was somebody else’s. She hadn’t told him it was hers. But why didn’t he write to explain what had happened? She had grown used to getting a letter from him every few days.
She opened her pajama drawer and took out the cake tin she kept his letters in. She loved his typed letters, all carefully folded, white and crisp like starched shirts stiffened with cardboard from the laundry. She had written her replies at work using the company word processor. His looked more personal, more intimate, with their lines of xxxxx’s through spelling errors and with the shadings of characters peculiar to the typewriter they’d issued from. Hers had looked antiseptically correct, airbrushed by Spell Check and the Delete key. She spread his letters out on her bed and ran her hand lightly over their surfaces. The half moons on all the lower case e’s were filled in. The t’s were all printed slightly above the line. She found each typographical quirk an endearing flaw, like a little scar on a handsome face.
She picked up one of his letters. It said Dear Lorelei — that was her nom de plume — I have been thinking about you constantly since I received your last letter. What strikes me most about you is your sincerity. Sad to say, I’ve known some women who didn’t mind deceiving men. You’ve probably known some men who weren’t above a little lying and cheating too. Of course it’s not always easy to figure out who is an honest person and who isn’t, but I’d be willing to bet a lot that you are someone I can trust, someone with a pure heart. I’d stake my future on it. He signed his letters Andrew. How could the man who wrote that not call when he said he would? How could he not write?
She sat down and wrote her first handwritten note to him. I was looking forward to your call. What happened? Lorelei That was all. She didn’t want to write more and embarrass herself. That much was hard enough, sort of like having to start all over again.
Her post office box stayed empty and her father’s stayed full. She could see that Eileen would look at her funny when she came in, but Lori couldn’t help that. She didn’t have any information on Amos to offer.
She tried to recall certain facts about her father — where he had gone to school, what his mother’s name had been — but his past was like a small empty screen in her mind. Amos used to say he didn’t remember his childhood any better the older he got the way some do, but what was coming back to him vividly, without any static, were old TV shows. He said he would flash on scenes of I Married Joan or December Bride. He’d talk about Spring Byington as if she lived next door. Once he announced at breakfast that not only had he dreamed about The Real McCoys but there was Walter Brennan in living color when he was sure he had only viewed the program in black and white. Other people would place an occurrence in time by associating it with an historical event or era — the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy years — but Amos located the last several decades with the television dial: “the year Jack Benny made the switch from radio” or “when Carol Burnett used to be on the Garry Moore Show.” It had bothered Walt. He’d said that Amos had no life of his own. What would Walt think now, Lori wondered.
One evening Lori was sitting on her bed looking at Number Four’s letters when suddenly her hand went to her heart. Those cockeyed, quirky t’s. Wasn’t that the way Amos’s typewriter printed? Lori couldn’t breathe. She pulled her blouse out from the waistband of her skirt and unfastened her bra. Still there was a tightness in her chest. She got a brown paper lunch bag from a drawer in the kitchen and tried inhaling from that. Big gulps of stale air, less oxygen. That helped. Then she drank a tall glass of water very slowly.
The next day Lori went to the post office. She checked her box but she wasn’t really expecting anything. She walked over to the counter, very casually. “Has my father come by to pick up his mail yet?” she asked Eileen.
“Well, no, he hasn’t. It just isn’t like him, is it?”
“Well, why don’t I just pick it up for him,” she said idly, almost mimicking Eileen, trying to sound like she was giving voice to an idea Eileen had in the back of her head.
“Oh no, Mrs. Laskey, I’m afraid we couldn’t do that. If you had your father’s box key then you would be acting as his authorized agent, so to speak. But we can’t just hand over the mail to someone, not even his daughter,” she smiled tightly, as though Lori had suggested that she relax, unbutton her collar button in the close, stuffy post office.
“Sure,” Lori said. “That’s okay. I just thought . . . Well, bye.” She left with her cheeks flaming. “It was like being caught,” she said to herself. She had wanted to see if her handwritten note to Number Four was among the stacks of mail waiting for him. She couldn’t bring herself to ask Eileen what Amos’s box number was. She had been so pleased when she first saw that she and Number Four shared the same zip code. It had seemed like an omen then.
When Lori got home, she turned the television on and then went in and sat at the kitchen table to think. Her father had been Number Four. That’s why Andrew didn’t call. That’s why he didn’t write. Amos had been Andrew. Amos and Andy — that was just exactly his idea of a joke — and all those uneven t’s. What more proof did she need? Had he done it on purpose? Had he put his ad in just to snare her? Was he paying her back? For what? Her cooking? Walt had complained about her cooking but that was no reason to twist your car around a lamppost. Maybe Amos was trying to get even with her for Ron drowning. Maybe he thought if her father was missing, people would hold her responsible. They would remember Walt and then Ron and then they would accuse her. They’d say losing one could be an accident, two was outright carelessness, but three — Amos had exposed her to the worst suspicions.
Maybe it had been a mistake really. Maybe he hadn’t figured out who Lorelei was until she sent him her phone number. He must have been grossed out, too, when he realized it was his daughter who’d been daydreaming about him. Maybe he left to spare her.
She shook herself. Who would have thought Amos had it in him? These ads and letters and phone calls, these walks to the post office. He never went out when she was home so it must have taken a great deal of maneuvering to keep up these relationships with the women. Did they give up on him eventually or were they happy just to have a pen pal? Or did he make more visits than to the post office? He wasn’t the man she had thought. She had to face that.
Suddenly Lori wondered if it weren’t the w’s on Amos’s typewriter, not the t’s, that jumped out above the line. She could see those out of sync w’s at the beginning of every interrogatory, making the words who and why and what leap out at you. And besides, Amos always went to bed at 8:30 and there was no phone in his room, so he never would have arranged to call a lady from the personals at nine. Amos wasn’t Andrew! But that couldn’t be right because then there’d be no explanation for Amos leaving or for Number Four not calling. Then nothing would make sense. No, it must have been the t’s.
The small black letters seemed to move subtly on the paper. Lori heard a sort of buzzing noise, as though the letters, perhaps only some of them, were insects that could rearrange themselves on the page at will. She shut them back inside the tin and the buzzing grew fainter.
That night Lori waited until midnight to carry her tin of letters under her arm and out through the kitchen door. With a flashlight she surveyed her garden, three rectangular beds symmetrically bordering the small square backyard, reined in on three sides by a silver cyclone fence. She propped up her flashlight and took her spade and dug up the earth next to the pink azaleas. Lori lifted the letters out of the cake tin and planted them in the rich, wormy soil. She mounded the earth over them and stepped back, hand on hip, wondering how long it would take the stiff white paper to become crumbly black earth.
That night she slept well, but the next night the phone calls started coming. Sometimes several in one night, sometimes none for several days. She never picked up the receiver.
She saw Eileen one evening at the A & P. Lori was shivering in the frozen foods when she heard, “Hi there, Mrs. Laskey.”
She had to blink a few times before she could get a fix on this woman in the swishy dress with giant strawberries all over it.
“I was sorry I missed your father the other day when he came in and closed out his box. I hope that doesn’t mean he won’t stop by to visit now and then. You tell him I said to take care now.”
Lori was so relieved she was surprised she didn’t burst into tears on the spot, but she managed a smile and a little wave back at Eileen. At least no one would be thinking any more that she had Amos locked up in a room. No one was going to report her to the authorities. There was no reason to dredge up the past.
That night, when the phone started ringing, she got out of bed and dressed herself in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. She took a plastic squeeze bottle of insect repellant outside along with the flashlight and the long spiky tool Amos had used to dig out weeds. She turned on the flashlight and began to weed the garden. She started in the bed where the evening primroses grew. Amos had liked working in the garden when his back would let him. He’d wear a headset radio that Walt had given him years ago with the hope of weaning him from the television, but the idea never caught on with Amos. He kept the headset in the basement with the gardening tools. Lori noticed it was still there when she went to get the spade a few nights back.
Lori never seemed to find the time for gardening, until now. There was no point in lying there listening to the phone ring. She found she didn’t need to use the bug goop. She guessed even the mosquitoes were asleep. Eventually he would stop calling. If she never answered, he’d get tired of it, probably sooner rather than later. But if it was later rather than sooner, her flowerbeds would be in order. The neighbors wouldn’t know why her garden flourished. They would think she was lucky. They would think it just happened to her, like a blessing.
Margaret Hermes’ novel, The Opposite of Chance, was named as a favorite book of 2021 by the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Relative Strangers, a short fiction collection, won the Bakwin Book Award and was given a special second place award in the Balcones Fiction Prize competition. Dozens of her stories have been published in magazines, including Laurel Review, Fiction International, The Literary Review, and the Green Hills Literary Lantern.