The Beauty of Dandelions
Fiction by Leslie Palleson
She steps over the knee-high dandelion, sunflower wanna-be muscling aside concrete in a sidewalk old as Huntington, and speeds past the Morseby twins playing at the river bank with cracked yellow Tonka trucks, the wrecked stuff of Huntington lasting longer than in most places before drifting towards that huge ocean triangle of rejected plastic. Her father must have taken this same way to the bus stop, as he’d left the Ford in the driveway for Mom, even fixing papers putting it in her name, meaning he knew what was coming that last time he swung Jess.
It had been raining that day too, when the clock hadn’t slowed, or lightning hadn’t flashed. No white birds circling overhead oozing red from heart feathers. No dead doves on the road. Night before, the BBQ had smoked, brothers had tumbled around the yard, wrestling the Big Bear through clover and dandelions and her mother had made a potato salad sprinkled with paprika, though she hadn’t worn a dress and orange lipstick like she used to when Dad came home from the land of movie stars and palm trees, bringing a truck load of oranges back for Canucks, he’d tell them, though he never actually produced any.
That night Mom reclined in a new lawn chair from Walmart, smoking, wearing sunglasses, though clouds hung low, while Dad heaved the mower through thickets of dandelions, ferocious once they think they own a place. Mom was always on about lawn mowing, as though a newly mowed lawn was the very thing that would turn life around, but she didn’t look happy that evening, and for years Jess had been convinced that’s why he’d left. Ingratitude about the lawn.
Her mother hadn’t been helpful as to which trucking line he might be working. Went as far as to suggest that, since he hadn’t sent a cheque for years, he might be dead, but Jess couldn’t believe that because no one could feel nothing if their Dad died. Even if no one told you, you’d feel it somewhere in your body, in your heart maybe, or perhaps an angel would come during the night, whisper it in your ear. Shame about the name though, Dan Smith. What kind of name is that if you want your only daughter to join you on the road, seat belt loose, feet up on dash, and play you her new guitar purchased in a pawn shop?
Goddamn the jacket though. Her mother was right about denim, barely a wind-break, like wearing an ice pack in the rain. Jess should have worn one of those puke-pink fleece things her mother was forever dancing into the house with.
“Employee discount plus back-to-school sale!” Though two days ago, she’d added, “They’re hiring,” meaning Jess, having just turned sixteen, had arrived on the brink of adulthood, and all Jess could think of was Cindy Cross, prettiest girl in the school who’d graduated a couple years ago, who now smoked on park benches and watched her kids in the park.
Jess crams her cold hand into her jeans and brushes against her phone where she has the last family photo that includes Dad, which will help if someone knows him but not his name. She passes two mallard ducks floating between reeds, figures they might be the parents of the duck family she and Jeremy had fed for a week last spring until Jeremy started playing t-ball and they had no time. She didn’t know who’d look after Jeremy now, but her mother would have to figure something out for the surprise present from Dad that had arrived nine months after his only visit.
Jess had opened the door to him standing on the doorstep, his wire-red eyebrows soaked, his old wool sweater smelling like a wet dog. His truck was parked outside their house so he must have been walking around. Over the threshold he handed Jessica a pink T-shirt with a rhinestone horse on the back, ushering her into a sparkle phase that would last two years. Then he had stood there, eyes flitting from her to the new television, his hands shoved into the pockets of his Labatt’s Blue windbreaker. He’d asked about school but she could only think of the intense sadness that overcame her at her desk and that wasn’t what he wanted.
“Mom has a new job at Walmart.”
“But the diner was her home.”
“She gets an employee discount.”
He wiped his feet against the mat. How long did it take until she understood he was waiting to be asked in? When Mom did come back, overloaded with Walmart bags, dyed red hair held together with so much hairspray only a serious cyclone could knock it down — Dad’s joke — he was helping Jess at the kitchen table with a math worksheet. Dying to see her father for eight months, Jess bent over the worksheet with piercing concentration and didn’t look up.
“When did you learn to add?” Her mother forced her icy words out singsong.
“I was keeping my abilities secret.” Voice swaggering, his foot knocked the linoleum. Sent outside to play with her brothers, she watched the house while her brothers sent rocks crashing down the slide. After forever, Dad appeared in the doorway while Mom stayed inside with a headache. He bear wrestled them in wet grass, held them in arms so solid they felt permanent. When he said that he had to go, it raced through Jess’s mind they hadn’t had a chance for ping-pong.
At the bus station, brown sludge gushes out from the hot chocolate machine followed by hissing water. A boy she’s never seen before slumps in an orange plastic chair across the room. He has a silver whale earring and a denim jacket like hers and she ends up at the back of the bus beside him. Nineteen, Gerald has been visiting his sister, who has four kids, a Walmart job, and no husband. Jess tells him about a song she wrote about a broken heart and he nods as though this is the first he’s ever heard of such a thing.
In his basement room in Burnaby, he opens Classico sauce and makes pasta over a hot-plate. She washes dishes in the bathroom at a sink with no counter, putting down the toilet seat to stack two plates, forks, glasses. He lies across the foamy on the floor, lights a candle that he places in a wine bottle webbed with wax drippings. He’s thin but she likes the way he tastes enough to lose herself in him, though wonders, after the candle goes out and his naked leg presses against hers and the sheets are cold and moist, if this slithery sliding is all there is to losing virginity.
As her father left, Jess kept her head down, her tears dropping in amongst her milk-soaked rainbow-coloured Fruit Loops. Ever since, she’s googled Dan Smith. Doctors, lawyers, a salesman for AstroTurf, three musicians, someone trying to sell a pit bull, but not one trucker. Of the four hundred and thirteen “Dan Smiths” on Facebook, none looked right.
She walks along the sidewalk just after dawn, with some kind of sticky pungent liquid sliding down her inner thigh, and passes sunflowers taller than people that loom overhead, a whole yard, humming-bird whirligigs interspersed amongst them. It’s September, she should be walking to class, English, math, more life skills instruction, a good idea since she didn’t even think about using a condom or any kind of protection from disease, death, babies.
She waits out the morning in a McDonald’s, remembers him buying her an Egg McMuffin and Coke one rainy morning he’d taken her to soccer practice, back in the days she used to do things besides babysit brothers, and so she buys the same and tries not to search the booths as though he might be there. In the washroom, she douses some toilet paper with pink, sweet-smelling soap, and it crumbles when she tries to wipe the dried semen off her leg.
The shopping mall by the McDonald’s is as big as her hometown and she finds a rain-coat for five dollars. Black and ugly, but along with the bubble umbrella she gets for a dollar she figures she can sleep on the street if she has to. Halfway through the day, which she spends locating stores with the mall directory, practicing her skills using a map, she realizes she left her guitar with Gerald. She purchases two boxes of KD and a cucumber and finds Gerald cross-legged on his foamy picking out the notes to “Stairway to Heaven.” He looks up with lost dog eyes.
“You left before sunrise.”
“I brought dinner.” She picks up her guitar, snaps shut the case.
He rifles through the plastic bag. “A cucumber?”
“Genius.”
He holds it up to the light. “I haven’t eaten a vegetable for a year and a half.”
“Well, don’t eat too much at once.”
She puts on a pot of water on the hotplate. At night, after more slithery sex, as she waits for the grey morning to filter through the tie-dye sarong, she spins a movie in her mind, where it’s her father that finds her rather than the other way around. He cradles the white bunny rabbit he brought her at Easter when she was five, which went missing around the time he left. He walks along the river, calling out Jess’s name until he finds her by the ducks with her guitar. He hands her a yellow rose that pricks her, but when she looks at it, she sees it is no rose but a dandelion, soft petals the yellow of Easter and its scent not bitter but more like strawberries.
“I’ve been looking all this time for Bunny.” His face is lit with warmth but angst fills his eyes, like the day he came to visit. “I searched the neighbours’ gardens, the SPCA, and the produce section at Safeway in case she’d gotten hungry, but all this time she was playing with the Morseby twins and their Tonka trucks.
“Silly bunny.”
“Sorry it took so long to come back.”
“It’s okay.”
“Finish the worksheet?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d it go?”
“I’m not much good at math.”
Head tilted back, his laughter shoots up towards the sun. “Who is?”
The ugly black coat encloses air. Her fingernails press into her palms as she passes the sunflowers and hummingbird whirligigs. Why the fuck didn’t he come back to help her find Bunny? She needed to arrange a search party, not be stuck at home looking after two little brothers, and then the baby he made. In cold rain, bunnies need their hutch.
At the intersection on Kingsway, diesel clouds the air. Before her squeals a semi-truck painted with orange trees. She rounds the side of the truck and steps up to the door. A man with a nose wide as a kitchen tap rolls down the window.
“You know Dan Smith?”
Bushy hair, sunken eyes, he doesn’t seem startled. “I know two of them.” He leans out from his seat.
“Either drive a truck?”
“Nope.”
“Ever go to California?”
“Goin’ there right now.”
It’s raining, grey, and bitter cold. “Any chance I could get a lift?”
He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t see why not.” He nods to the empty passenger seat with enough room to stretch her legs and play a few songs. She hesitates. Her mother told her once there are two types of men: those who want sex and those who are dead.
He seems to read her mind. “You can sleep down here. I sleep up in the cab. I can lend
you a blanket.”
The light changes. She runs around the front of the truck and climbs up. In no time they’re in the border line-up for trucks. She’s never talked so much. Craig nods his head. He has a daughter he hasn’t seen for fifteen years. She’d be twenty-three. Jess imagines a little girl staring out at an empty road.
“Why didn’t you go back?”
“Go back? Aww, I’d just be taking up her time.”
Craig tells the border guy Jess is his daughter and she imagines her straight short reddish-brown hair descending from the tawny wire orbiting Craig’s head. They don’t look anything alike, but the border guy doesn’t look at her, just checks the license plate of the truck. Somewhere in Oregon they pull into an all-night diner where an American flag, a moose head, and two Elvis posters hang over the kitchen. Craig insists he’s buying and she asks if it’s okay if she has a strawberry milkshake and he grins because his daughter always had a milkshake after ballet class. At night, outside another diner, his big hands whack against a pillow and he apologizes that the pillowcase isn’t very clean.
Next morning, every table boasts a vase with a fake daisy. Coffee smells so good she orders one. She stirs in four sugars and plenty of milk and it tastes like warm melted ice cream. Craig catches her searching the other booths.
“I reckon your Dad was so overcome by sadness and guilt he couldn’t even move in the direction of you and your brothers without feeling like he was going to die.”
“I felt like I was going to die.”
She wants him to say something, but only his hand moves, clinking the spoon against the cup. When he finally speaks, she can barely hear him. “Your Dad probably figures you’ve forgotten him.”
This is the craziest idea yet, but it opens a whole new place in her body to feel pain. Now sorrow has room to move about. “Do you figure Christa has forgotten about you?”
He bites into his toast and chews.
As they roll down the I-5, his thick freckled fingers change gears. He asks if she likes Van Morrison and she says sure, because it’s exhausting always saying she doesn’t know. He’s telling her about the local bar in Powell River.
“Get out of your chair to dance or something, come back, and your drink has been smashed to the floor.” He explains it’s where he met Christa’s mother, a waitress.
“Just like my Mom.”
“Yeah? Did your Mom fool around?” Sharp icicles in his voice. Then he shrugs. “Sylvie spent too much time on her hair.”
“Just like my Mom.” Jess slides past his question. Something else she’s never thought about.
That night he asks if she wants to go to a bar.
“I’m too young.”
“Not for this bar. You could be twelve.”
Two hours later he turns down a back road to a clapboard building with a red Budweiser sign in the window and at least five other semitrucks out front. When they walk into the dim smokey room smelling of stale beer, a man playing cards in the corner calls his name. She orders a Chi Chi, and his friends laugh and ask Craig if this is his order too.
He lights a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Brings me luck.”
He slams a black queen on the table. She orders a second Chi Chi, and the bartender gives her extra pineapple on the umbrella stick. Giddy and light-headed, she takes it out into the night and lays her black coat in the field of dried-out weeds and pulls her blanket over her. “Hotel California” blaring, old men shuffling cards in a smoke-filled room, she prefers crickets chirrupin, and the stars remind her of camping with Dad. Way after midnight, she hears Craig opening the cab door. Getting up she steps on the Chi Chi glass, hears it crunch into the ground.
“Need something?” He looks out the open door, wearing a white t-shirt.
“I wanted to see what it’s like up here.” “Just a place to sleep.” He’s blocking the door.
She watches her fingers stroke that big freckled hand. He watches her fingers too, so unfreckled and small.
“I’m not a virgin.” Her voice, like a dagger inside of her, hunting to destroy.
“That a fact?” He has moved back, allowing her to step up. Her hand on his knee, stroking, and then he’s all over her and there is no going back.
In the warm bed she listens to him snore like a bear hibernating and she tells herself this was fate all along, for her to end up with a trucker driving back and forth to California, but, when he wakes and sees her, he turns away and hits the pillow.
“Fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
They pull into a diner and he tells her to order a boxed lunch, says they’re headed to the bus station where he’ll buy her a ticket to wherever she wants to go.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“You don’t want to waste yourself on me.”
At the Redding bus station he pulls up to the first palm tree she’s ever seen in her life and hands her an envelope bursting with cash. “This doesn’t make up for anything, but it might help.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“It’ll disappear faster than you know.”
“Can’t I just get a lift to Sacramento?”
She looks at his set jaw, his eyes fixed straight ahead, and slips out. As he drives away she checks the envelope for his name but there’s no contact information, just fifteen hundred dollars, and on a piece of paper, the name and address of a hostel. She buys a ticket, goes outside, leans against the scraggly palm on a parched mound of dried grass. Trucks heave by, spitting out winds that flatten the roadside California poppies. But they always pop back up. Strong like dandelions that keep going even after their yellow beauty fades into fluff, with seeds that float and roam and when ready, sink into the earth, root deep, feed.
Dandelions probably grow in the parks in San Francisco too, she figures, even with lots of gardeners they’re impossible to control, and she clicks open the latch to her guitar. »