Back Pocket
The waterproof box was buried deep behind a pair of camel colored worn-out leather boots that her father never parted with despite being unwearable, covered in salt stains with holes in the soles and toes. She opened the box to reveal old bills, faded polaroids of her father with his father, both wearing rugby striped shirts with the same longish surfer-style tousled hairdo. Her father never had hair like this during her life. It was cut short and under a baseball cap or a grey felt fedora that he had made as a replica of his grandfather’s. Underneath the ticket stub commemorating a show with a band she couldn’t imagine her father ever being a fan of, she uncovered a series of notebooks of various size, color and weight. She opened the oxblood book on top and found a sketch of a figure; a 3/4 view of a woman’s back, faceless but for a line hinting at a profile. She thought perhaps it was a study of a volunteer model in art school or from memory or most likely, her mother one morning. This particular notebook housed sketch after sketch, each image in black pen highlighting her father’s skill with simple lines, form and pleasing likenesses to each subject. The orchid drawn on the middle page of the book looked more like the beautiful purple orchid that grew in her childhood kitchen than it did in her vivid memory. The sketch of the simple lines of his fruitless invention, improving upon the toaster oven, brought a small smile to her face. The afternoon he told her how his idea would better the mundane machine was a scorching summer day in the San Fernando Valley. The memory of it as glistening and hazy as the inferior mirage on the 101 she saw earlier that day on the drive to the now uninhabited mid-century modern home. She wanted to ask him everything. That was always true. Since she first saw his face moments after she was born and looked at him like a long lost friend, she wanted to know his mind, in a way to know herself. Their minds were the same and she liked verifying it. How would the internal heat coil operate, would there be a copper element? Usually she was so in awe of him she would freeze before she could share all of her thoughts and questions with him, fearful that she would say something uninteresting and she would see disappointment or boredom in his eyes. She wouldn’t dare ever take that chance and always thought there was time enough to ask later, when she was older. Maybe, she used to think, if they went on a road trip she would feel a new closeness with him or new fearlessness and be free and open.
