Hello Beautiful

Sylvie looked at him in surprise. “You did?”

“Butch was an old friend, so I told him to turn a blind eye for as long as he could and then give you a harmless punishment.”

Butch McGuire had been Sylvie’s high school principal, and after more than a year of missing more math and chemistry classes than she attended, he told her that the penalty was repainting the wall behind the school. Cecelia had helped her, always happy to have a brush in her hand. Emeline tended to them with snacks. Sylvie had believed that both her parents were unaware of her truancy and her punishment. “Why?” she asked, meaning, Why did you do that, and why are you telling me now?

“What were you doing during those missed classes?”

“Reading.” Sylvie waved her hand. “The classes were a waste of my time. If I’m not interested in something, I have no hope of learning it.” She’d read in a park near the school, storing novels in the hollow of an ancient oak she thought of as her friend. Sylvie didn’t tell her sisters what she was doing, because she knew Julia would be furious and insist she return to the classroom, and she didn’t want the twins to think that what she was doing was acceptable. That had been, perhaps, when Sylvie first became aware that she was choosing a different path than Julia. Sylvie was reading novels she hid in a tree — a tree she talked to about her thoughts and worries — while Julia was leaping every academic hurdle placed in front of her.

Charlie nodded. “You’re too young to really understand that life is short, but it is. I didn’t want to stop you when you were walking away from something that didn’t matter to do something that did. You and I are cut from the same cloth, baby girl. Neither of us would expect school or work to fill us up. We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more.” He studied her. “You know that you’re more than a librarian’s aide and a college student, right? You’re Sylvie Padavano.” He said her name with delight, as if she were a famous explorer or warrior. “It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

The truth in Charlie’s words shivered up Sylvie’s spine.

He grinned at her. “I’m giving a bit of a speech, aren’t I? Well, so be it. We’re not separated from the world by our own edges.” Charlie set down his beer glass, empty now, and rubbed his hand up and down his arm, as an example of one of his edges. “We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

Sylvie felt like her father had shown her a part of herself she hadn’t known existed. When Sylvie looked back on that moment — now, from the funeral pew, and later, over the course of her life — it would always be one of her great joys that her father had said this to her and that she was able to delight him by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: “We are not contained between our hats and boots.” And then Mrs. DiPietro had come outside with their bags, and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.

The priest was talking about Charlie, trying to make his job sound important, trying to make it seem like Charlie had run his household, even though the priest knew it was Rose who made every decision, and Sylvie ached at how this priest and all the people at the wake defined Charlie with his biographical facts, when he had been so much more. He was vast, and beautiful, and more present in the gift of baby formula to a young mother than in any day he’d spent at the paper factory. He was his acts of kindness, and his love for his daughters, and the twenty minutes he’d spent with Sylvie behind the grocer’s that evening.