Page 2 of Her Rival

The conference room had a view of the East River and a box of tissues on the table, and the HR guy had a folder he slid across to me before Caroline finished her sentence. Six weeks' severance. COBRA paperwork. A deadline to clear my desk, which was that same day, because that's how publishing worked.

I packed four years into four boxes. Hugged Caroline. Let Frank from the security desk walk me to the curb, because my badge was already deactivated and I couldn't ride those elevators down without one.

The book on top of the first box was a hardcover of the literary magazine that ran me at twenty-two. The Gnomon Review, spring issue. An essay called The Kitchen on Iris Street. Six hundred words about my grandmother. My thesis advisor had made me send it, printed the envelope, addressed it, stood over me until I licked the stamp. They took it. For exactly one summer, I'd been a writer. On paper. In a small, careful way.

That fall a graduate writing program offered me a fully funded spot, the kind I couldn’t have afforded any other way. Another piece got picked up somewhere else. My advisor took me to dinner to talk about the next ten years of my life. And on the train back to Brooklyn I sat with my forehead on the cold window and understood, all at once, that every byline I ever published was a thing my father could see. Calvert was a small town. The local paper picked things up. Aunts mailed things. Magazines ended up on the rack at the same Family Dollar he bought his pens from. A byline was a flag with my name on it, and he'd see every single one I planted.

I turned the offer down the next morning.

I took an editorial assistant job at twenty-two instead. It had health insurance, and editing other people's words kept my own name off the page where he could find it. I told myself I'd come back to my own writing eventually. When it was safe. When I figured out a version of being a writer he couldn't follow me into.

I never figured one out.

Four years went by.

Two months ago I broke the seal, on impulse, the way you break the seal on a bottle of something you've sworn off, and let a little magazine run a short essay about the small kitchen where my grandmother had been the only person in my childhood who ever shielded me from anything. Six hundred words. My byline. Dani Hartley. At the time it felt like a win.

It wasn't a win. It was a flare.

I'd put the boxes in a cab. Come home.

The boxes were still in the cab.

I'd left them there, told the driver to keep the meter running, and gone up to breathe before I hauled four boxes up four flights, because the freight elevator had been broken since June and I'd been working around it for five months. Four years of books were down there. One Comic Sans coffee mug Brynn sent me last Christmas. A framed cover of the first novel I ever acquired. All of it in a yellow cab on Lafayette with the meter running, and I didn't care about any of it. The driver could come find me. Or he could keep my books and resell them on a sidewalk in Williamsburg. Either way.

I'd been fired ninety minutes ago.

I'd come home to a Tennessee envelope and the name my father swore he'd never use again.

I drank what was left of the bourbon and went down the hall and opened the bottom drawer.

Old shoebox. Adidas. White and green, gone soft at the corners from too many openings.

I lifted the lid.

Forty-seven envelopes, oldest at the bottom. I'd put them in order once, when I was twenty-four and a year sober, not the bourbon kind, the I'm going to be a healthy person about this kind, the kind that lasted six months and got me into the first therapist I ever actually trusted. She asked me once why I kept them. I gave her an answer I'd been polishing for a week, about how throwing them out would be its own kind of denial, how naming the pattern was the first step to disarming it, a bunch of language I'd cribbed off the pamphlets in her own waiting room.

She let me finish. Then she said, real quiet, Dani, you keep them because counting them makes you feel like you can see him coming.

I cried in her office for forty minutes.

I kept the shoebox.

I added forty-eight to the top. Lined the corner up with forty-seven, which had come in August.

He'd never come for me. That was the part nobody got, the couple of times I tried to explain it on bad dates. Never showed up at my school, my college, my office, my apartment. Never called the building. Never tried to be in a room with me in eight years.

He just mailed.

Every two or three months. Birthdays. Christmas. A random Wednesday in March. Sometimes a holy card from a funeral he figured nobody told me about. Sometimes a clipping. Sometimes nothing at all, a blank sheet of stationery with my name on the front, like he wanted me to see his handwriting and nothing else.

The patience was the worst part. A man who shows up at your door is a man you can call the cops on. A man who mails you a clipping every couple months for eight years is just your father, staying in touch. He had nothing in his life but the church and the Family Dollar and the Bic pens and the PO box he'd kept since 1991, and a daughter he hadn't laid eyes on since she was eighteen. He was happy to spend whatever years he had left reminding her, one envelope at a time, that he was alive and she wasn't free of him.

I closed the box.

Put it back.

Shut the drawer.