Hallowed

“Thanks,” she says with a bit of a squeak, unable to hang on to her sucky attitude with him around.

Yep, my dad’s a charmer.

He teaches me to become invisible. Well, maybe teach is a strong word. It’s a complicated thing, something that involves the bending of light. He tells me all about it like it’s a formula a genius is going to scribble in marker on a window someday. I only half understand, but then he does it. He makes us both invisible, which proves handy for flying around wherever you want, without someone pointing up into the sky and saying, Look, an angel! It’s even better than Jeffrey’s white bird theory.

I’m still in a bad mood, after Angela, but it’s hard to stay mad when my dad radiates joy, and then I’m flying with him, the wind carrying me like notes of a song. I haven’t flown in so long I was afraid I forgot how, but it turns out to be as easy as breathing, with Dad. We spiral down, swooping the edges of the trees. We shoot upward, breaking the cloud banks, up and up until the air grows thin around us. We soar.

We end up at a car dealership in Idaho Falls. We come down behind a building, Dad in the lead, and he makes us reappear.

Angela would have peed herself to see this, I think. Serves her right.

But I used to be jealous, too. All that time, thinking she was the strong one, the one who always had it all together. She knew everything before I did, even about my mom dying. She mastered flight first. She could change the form of her wings. She’d met a real angel, and spent her summers in Italy.

“Don’t dwell on it,” Dad says. “Her reaction was natural. As was yours, before.”

“You read minds?”

“I can. I’m better with feelings. Like you.”

Like me. I can’t help but shake my head at the craziness of that idea, that he and I resemble each other, even in that small way.

“So, we’re in Idaho Falls,” I glance at my watch. Four p.m. It took us twenty minutes to get here, what would be more than a two-hour drive by car. We flew fast.

“What are we doing here?” I ask.

“I want to buy you a new car.”

What sane girl would say no to that?

Dad turns out to be quite the haggler. I’m pretty sure we get the base bottom price for the new white Subaru Forester we end up driving off with.

I drive us home, since driving is another thing he hasn’t had to do in a while. I wonder if this is going to become a regular thing, spending time with him. Or if, the moment Mom is gone, he will be too.

“I will be here as long as you want me,” he says. “Not every minute, by your way of seeing things, but in a sense I will always be with you.”

“It’s a time thing, right? Yeah, Mom tried to explain.”

“For you, time is like a line drawn across a piece of paper, a succession of events. A to B

to C, one moment following another. Where I come from, there are no lines. We are the paper.”

“Okay, totally confused now.” I pull over into the Rainy Creek Country Store, a gas station.

“You’ll understand, someday.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Swan Valley. You’ve got to taste their square ice-cream cones.”

“Square ice-cream cones?” he repeats, blank-faced again, like this must be another newfangled thing he hasn’t learned about yet.

“See, you don’t know everything. I get to teach you something, too.” We get our ice-cream cones, made with special scoopers that shape the ice cream into perfect squares. Dad chooses chocolate mint. I go for strawberry.

“When you were small, you were my strawberry girl,” he says as we’re leaving the store.

“Your mom planted a patch in the backyard in Mountain View and if we couldn’t find you, that’s often where you’d be, eating strawberries, smeared with juice. Your mother had quite the time getting the stains out of all your tiny outfits.”

“I don’t remember.” I walk around to behind the building where there’s a bench to sit on.

I sit. He stands behind me for a minute, then sits next to me. We look out in the fading light at the mountains, listening to the voice of a small stream gurgling not too far away, the sounds of cars passing on the highway, which sets a kind of rhythm. “I don’t remember much,” I admit.

“I know. You were very small.”

“I remember you shaving.”

He smiles. “Yes. You were fascinated with that. You wanted to do it yourself. Your mother came up with the ingenious idea of cutting up old credit cards into the shape of razors, so then you sat up on the bathroom counter and shaved along with me.”

“Weird that an angel would have to shave.”

He rubs a hand over his smooth chin. “I don’t. Although sometimes, in my profession, I’m required to wear a beard.”

His profession. I turn the word over in my mind.