Dreams of her Dad

Nothing has changed. His notes still come to her on yellow, legal sized paper, torn neat at the perforations. With black Flair ink, he mixes equally  his capital and lower case letters, his cursive and print. The notes start the same  - Hey! How ya doing partner? - and always contain a twenty dollar bill – got lucky on the Brown’s game & want to share with my pal,

his signature, a capital D, underlined next to a few x’s and o’s.

When she wakes, she feels she has won something, the twenty fresh in her hand, but the content of the letter drifts away and the emptiness is great. She finds herself seeking signs of him, in a cardinal flying by, in the face of a customer, anything to bring back the dream, to bring back his note.

Is he doing this on purpose, sending letters rather than visiting her in dreams? Is he disappointed in the way she lives, in a studio apartment that smells of pesticide and rattles next to the el? Is he upset that she is bartending and beginning to go round in the middle from beer and shots that carry her through the double shifts?

When she gets to bed, bar sounds ringing her ears, the dream skulks back to her as if waiting for her all day. Little clues - a flash of the note and his hand, dark from age and bluish from poor circulation. There is something he wrote – a request? A complaint? She remembers a detail, a hand drawn map with a star and an arrow.

She slips to sleep and dreams again of the map on the lined yellow paper, and again she won’t remember that he is writing to request that she bury him. It has been too long, he writes, and my pen is starting to fade.