The doll's head was off, and Penny was crying. He wanted to cry himself; it had belonged to his grandmother.
"It's okay, Penny-punkin, it's okay. Daddy'll fix it, I promise."
Penny ground her eyes with grubby hands, red-raw as she looked up at him, snotty-nosed, nodding her faith in him to put all things right. Jesus, how do they get like that? She'd only been crying a few seconds and she already looked like she'd had the flu for a week or something. Kids are always five seconds away from looking like that, he decided, holding out his hands and gently taking the doll.
Penny, suddenly angry, stomped over to the screen door that had served as guillotine to her doll. "You killed Alexandra!" she barked, kicking the door.
"Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa," Rob cautioned. "Daddy doesn't need to fix the door, too." Daddy can't afford to fix the door.
Penny nodded. "But Alexandra..."
"It's just a stitching job, Pen, honest. She'll be good as new before lunch." But he knew it would never be what it was. Maybe the hackneyed job he was bound to do on it would give the doll a charm all its own. He hoped Penny would see it that way. Somehow, he doubted it.
There was thunder. The clouds were trying to mount the Alleghenies but they couldn't quite make it, and so they were going to take out their frustration on the land. "I was gonna go to Mandy's house," Penny murmured, defeated by clouds.
"Is that where you were going?" Rob said. "You didn't tell me." Ask me, he meant. Ask, not tell. When had he mentally ceded to his five-year-old daughter that privilege? "You're supposed to ask me," he corrected, both himself and her.
Penny shrugged, not wanting to explain something she probably didn't have the words for anyway. "Alexandra," she whimpered, changing the subject.
"Yeah, right. Alexandra. Is that how she got caught in the door?"
"Can you fix her? Her head's off..." Penny's eyes welled up again.
"Yeah, okay. Come on. Let's go in the living room. I'll find the sewing kit."
She pointed up the stairs. "It's in the closet in the big bedroom," she told him, then added, chin dropping, "That's where Mommy kept it."
He nodded. "Okay." He handed the doll to Penny. "Here, you look after Alexandra. I'll go get the kit."
Penny nodded, making a face at her decapitated doll.
Rob climbed the stairs as thunder rolled; truly, it was stuff of waking nightmares. He padded into his bedroom, bed unmade on one side waiting for his return, and as the breeze-stirred drapes danced to summon the rain, he opened the closet and retrieved the sewing kit.
She lived on behind glass and housed in bronze on the dresser. He stopped for a moment and picked up the picture. He'd left them around for Penny's sake, but now he wondered. It was funny how it worked... she'd been the archetype once, and then Penny had come along, growing into a strange, not-quite-right version of her mother. But now, after all these months, it was the mother who looked odd... a mature, warped, unnatural version of Penny. She looked happy in the photo.
She hadn't been happy much in that room. Not towards the end. He looked around in the murk of the coming storm, and he could hear it like the echoes had fallen out of the closet.
Himself. "There'll be other jobs."
Her. Angry. With the situation. With his stubbornness. "Where? Where, Rob? This town had one thing going for it, one thing. And it's gone."
"There's more than the plant. We've got time..."
"We don't have time! Our savings are gone! Do you get that? Jesus, why did I let myself be..." She had stopped herself from saying it, but the implication echoed, still.
But the room was silent, actually. There were no angry words now. No words at all.
And he didn't understand it. Angry with him, sure. But...
He opened the kit. It was full of her, in its minor, detritus of life kind of way. Buttons to outfits he remembered. Patches she'd sewn on Penny's jackets, then recycled for the next one as she grew, but had never gotten around to.
"We have to move," she had told him. Holding the scissors lying dormant in the sewing kit.
"How?" he'd shot back. "Using what for money?" Now it was his turn to burst bubbles. "Where do we go, Carol? Your mother's? Live off her savings?"
"We have to get out of here," was all she'd said.
Me. I have to get out of here. That's what it amounted to. That's what she'd meant. In the end, she'd found the money. In somebody else's pants.
That he got. That he understood.
"Daaaddyyyyy," came the call from downstairs.
"I found it, I'm coming."
But Penny? Nothing but a birthday card in all these months? That he didn’t understand, and he never would. He closed the kit and headed down to make a dead doll live again. There was that much he could do.
She was the bottom of the stairs, still rooted where she'd been, holding a different half of the bifurcated doll in each hand. "Can you really fix her?"
"Well, we'll try, okay?" He took the doll from her and headed over to his chair. "She might not be exactly like she was. You have to be more careful."
"I didn't mean to."
"I know." He sat, digging out the makings. Penny sat cross-legged at his feet, holding a different, less-loved doll in proxy, and giggled as he tried to thread the needle.
Another loud roll of thunder, and then the hiss of their wrath. "Ooo, there's the rain," Penny announced, getting to her feet and dashing to the window, marking it with her palms and her greasy nose.
He wondered if it were raining for Carol, wherever she was. The card had been postmarked Knoxville, but he couldn't imagine that's where she'd be happy to end up. Not after giving up everything. There had to be a bigger payoff than fucking Knoxville.
"Is it going to be a tornado?" Penny gasped from the window.
"I doubt it, but come away from the window, just the same. It's windy. Here, we'll see what they say on the news."
Penny turned from the window and came back to her father, picking up the doll she'd abandoned. Hugging it.
If only it were that simple.
He changed the channel to the news and began lining up the doll's raggedy head and its raggedy shoulders. The news showed a bunch of broken-looking middle aged men milling around in a parking lot, holding signs, few of them very high. The anchorman's voice over told the story. "Halcion-West Switching announced today the closure of its plant in Wheeling, putting 1700 unionized employees out of work. The Teamsters local is protesting the plant closure, but say there's little they can do. Spokesmen for the company said that they have been forced out of the market by foreign competition. However, union representatives suggested that the board of the company has, in fact, reached an agreement with the Chinese government to relocate the plant in China and resume manufacturing there."
Rob felt his guts knot up, all over again. "Fuck," he whispered, his eyes shooting to Penny. She didn't seem to have heard.
The needle licked at the doll’s disjointed ends, meatball surgery with a hope of success. The thread was dark… Rob hoped his little girl wouldn’t wind up playing with something that looked like a Frankenstein’s monster with button eyes.
The anchorman offered what they were after: the hopes of hearing about the weather… but first, they had to pay the bills. Almost as if in answer to the prayers of the laid off men — men like Rob himself — Uncle Sam came knocking. Urging. Pride. Pay. Patriotism. The Army.
Rob felt his heart sink. He remembered it springing from Carol’s lips. Just for a couple of years, she’d said. Till things were better; till he could find another job. But the war was already on; he knew what it meant. Back then, he was sure it would mean he’d lose her. He still thought so. But now he knew he’d been straited on all sides. There’d been no way out.
He knew men, friends he’d worked with, men in their thirties, who’d enlisted. He could hardly believe it. When he’d been younger, it was young man’s game. Increasingly, it devoured anyone, everyone. Two of his friends were overseas as it was. He paused in stitching the doll.
He gazed at Penny, patiently playing with her doll and a toy car. Wondered if she’d be better off with her grandparents, and her father earning an honest wage again, somewhere on the other side of the world…
Jeff, up-ending a beer at The Tooth and Nail... what was it, February? March? The icicles dripped with the coming spring; there was the hope of flowers and warm weather but nothing similar for jobs. It was a couple of months after the layoffs, anyway. "The Army," Jeff nodded.
"What do you mean?" Rob asked.
"Signing up," Jeff said. Rob watched him wash the taste of the words down with the cheap beer.
Rob remembered staring at Jeff as though he didn't really know him, despite working on the line together for four years. "You're joining the Army? Already?"
"I was in before, after high school. It's not so bad. I know the drill."
"There wasn't a war then."
"I would have signed up anyway. I only missed the Gulf War by a couple of years." Jeff set down the mug. "You think I'm scared to go?" Rob didn't miss the insinuation: are you?
Rob said, "I was just wondering about Francine. And Terry and Lacie."
Jeff looked away, staring out into the somnolent street, eyes stung by the boarded up windows and tumbling newspapers. "They'll be fine," he said. More beer mouthwash.
Spring arrived. Jeff departed.
Sitting there in late summer, staring at his daughter but not really seeing her, Rob wondered who'd made the better decision.
Rob flicked his finger at the screen as the answer to her question was presented; a brief interlude for the weather before back to commercials. “So can I see Mandy when it stops raining?” she asked.
“I guess so, if it’s okay with her mother.”
“I want to take Alexandra, too…”
Rob nodded, getting back to work.
Suddenly, Penny started, and bounced on her knees, pointing. “The dream house, the dream house!” There on the screen, two little girls swarmed all over the latest thing: it was a large, complex plastic doll house for an expensive, trendy doll.
She came to him. “Daddy, if I’m real good when school starts, and I get a good report card, can I have that?”
He wanted to say we’ll see, but he knew that would just fuel the fire, and it would be all the harder to extinguish later. “Penny, honey… we don’t have a lot of money just now. Daddy’s not working.”
“But pleeease, pleeeease… Mandy’s got it… it’s not fair, Daddy.”
Who could he pass this off on? Santa? Mommy? Neither one was going to come to her rescue… or his. “I don’t think we can do it this year, Penny. Maybe next year.”
“It’s not fair. How come Mandy gets it and not me?”
“Things aren’t good for us right now, Penny. You have to be grown up and try to understand.”
“Everything’s been bad since Mommy went away. I wish she’d come back! It was better with her.” She grabbed her doll, half-stitched, out of his hands.
“I got laid off, Penny, remember? Mandy’s dad still has his job.”
“How come he has a job and not you?”
“That’s how it works sometimes. It’s not fair. But that’s why they have money for things like that. One day soon, I—”
“You always got money for beer! Mandy’s mommy says—”
It happened and it was over, like a rattlesnake strike. She stumbled and sprawled, knocked back by the slap he'd given her. There was this instant of satisfaction, release, response; it splashed inside him like warm milk. It curdled instantly. There, on the carpet, propped on her elbow, her hand clutched to her stinging cheek, the thing he loved most in the world; the thing he'd die for in an instant without a second thought. His little angel, his tiny daughter. Penny blinked at him, too shocked for the moment even to cry.
Rob wanted to die. He wanted to be 10,000 miles away, his life ebbing out as he faced an enemy to protect her. Instead, he was the instrument of her pain.
Some part of him reared up and demanded he absolve himself, draw the line, tell her it was her own fault. Hide in his own power and authority, transferring responsibility for what had just happened onto Penny herself. But he couldn't.
He dropped to one knee, holding his arms out. "Oh, baby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it. Please forgive me..."
Penny held back, cringing a moment, and it broke his heart. But she, herself, could not maintain the distance. "Daddy," she whimpered, and swallowing, beginning to cry, she came to him and hugged him. "I'm sorry," she sobbed.
"No, no, Penny, it's not your fault," he told her through his own tears, stroking her hair. "You didn't do anything wrong. It's alright, Penny-punkin," he whispered. "I'll never ever touch you like that again. Ever. I promise," he swore to her, kissing her. But he wasn't so sure. It had been on him like an animal, and he hadn't even known it was there. She was trembling in his arms. He was shaking.
And he was afraid. Now, he was afraid.
