Chapter 2: Tan Line

I dreamed of my father that night.

Not the way you dream of the dead when you want them to come back soft and whole of answers. I dreamed of him the way you dream of a photograph you’ve stared at too long: flat, silent, and slightly yellowed at the edges.

He was standing in the Smitty’s checkout line. That was the whole dream. Just him, in his work clothes, khakis, and a button-down, because even on weekends he dressed like he was about to argue something, holding his limes and his bread and his sympathy card. The cashier was ringing up the person in front of him. The conveyor belt was moving. The fluorescent lights were humming.

And then he looked at me.

Not with surprise. Not with recognition. Just ... looked. Like I was a stranger he’d noticed in his peripheral vision, someone who didn’t belong in the frame but was there anyway.

I woke up with my hand on my chest, feeling my own heartbeat, counting the spaces between beats like they were Morse code for a message I couldn’t translate.

The clock on my nightstand said 3:47 AM.

I didn’t put on clothes. I’d stopped bothering after the third night of sitting in the dark with nothing between me and the air. Now I just swung my legs over the side of the bed and walked to the window.

Our apartment faced east toward the mountains, toward the rising sun, toward the part of North Phoenix where the houses got bigger, and the yards got greener, and the people paid more to pretend they weren’t living in a desert. From my window, I could see the outline of Piestewa Peak in the distance, a black shape against a slightly less black sky.

Seventy-three days since he died. Seventy-three days of coveralls and sandals and bare feet on hot pavement. Seventy-three days of not feeling anything except the weight of fabric and the pressure of grief.

Tomorrow, no, today, technically was the last full day before school started. August 15th. The day when students across Phoenix would panic-buy notebooks and mechanical pencils, and the specific brand of calculator that their math teacher had sworn was required but that they would never use. The day when my mother would obsessively check the school supply list, even though we’d already bought everything in July, because checking things off lists was the only way she knew how to feel in control.

I looked down at my body in the dim light from the streetlamp.

The tan line was still there, the ghost of the coveralls, the map of my hiding. But it was fading. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but fading. The skin on my arms had started to even out, the pale stripes darkening to match the rest. My neck was no longer two different colors. My legs were becoming one continuous landscape instead of a patchwork of grief and exposure.

He would have noticed, I thought. He would have made some joke about it. Something about how I looked like a reverse raccoon. Something that made me roll my eyes and smile at the same time.

My father had been good at that. At making you smile when you didn’t want to. At finding the funny in the unfunny. At arguing that a colander was a religious headpiece, a tan line was a form of self-expression, and a sixteen-year-old girl had the right to walk through her own apartment without apologizing for the body she lived in.

I walked to my closet.

The coveralls hung there, the only thing on the rack, because everything else had been packed into boxes or donated or just ... abandoned. I’d stopped wearing normal clothes in June. After the funeral. After the reception at the church, where people brought casseroles and said things like “he’s in a better place” and “everything happens for a reason,” both of which were lies so ridiculous that I’d had to excuse myself to the bathroom just to keep from screaming.

I touched the fabric.

It was soft from washing, the blue cotton had faded to something closer to gray, the pockets had started to fray at the corners, and the zipper stuck halfway up if you didn’t hold your mouth right. These coveralls had been my uniform. My armor. My answer to a question I hadn’t known how to ask.

What now?

I took them off the hanger. I held them in my hands. Felt their weight not heavy, not really, but heavier than they should have been. Like they’d absorbed some of the grief I’d been carrying, like they’d been holding it for me while I figured out what to do next.