If only he hadn’t borrowed The High Life boat from his friend Joey T so him and me could do a little fishing on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 1st, 1959. And after he slipped on the bottles of beer rolling around the bottom of the boat, hit his head, and fell overboard, if only I hadn’t sat there laughing my head off because I thought at any second he was going to swim to the surface and say, Thought I was a goner, didn’t ya, Tessie? Ha . . . ha . . . ha. Gotcha!, Birdie and me wouldn’t be able to see the curve of his gravestone out our bedroom window.
With every beat of my heart, every breath, every lightning bolt, and every joke, I miss him. There is not a minute that goes by day or night that I don’t wonder how I’m going to live to the next minute without him. But I had to force myself to stop bawling every time I pressed Daddy’s watch against my ear or when I smelled his Old Spice stuck in the seams of the white hankie or felt the weight of his Swiss Army Knife in my hand. And when I waited outside of Lonnigan’s Bar, I had to stop pretending that the only reason the best bartender in the world didn’t come laughing and stumbling out of the back door after his shift was because I got my nights mixed up. What choice did I have? A broken heart is so heavy to lug around that a kid can feel the life seep out of them with every step, and I needed every ounce of strength I had left to honor the promise I made to myself to step into Daddy’s shoes. It was the only way I could figure out to pay penance for not even trying to save him.
6:30 a.m. I’m so excited to tell still-snoozing Birdie that I’m 95% sure a murder got committed in the cemetery last night, but from years of experience, I know that if I don’t want her to go unruly on me, I have to settle myself down and follow her TO-DO list instead of mine. It’ll take me four tries to wake her up. It does every day. That’s her favorite number.
I wipe her too-long bangs off her forehead and say, “Morning!”
Neither one of us are even close to being as beautiful as our Irish mother. My sister and me got more of Daddy’s English blood running through our veins, thank God. But with her blah-brown hair and nose that’s turned up a little too much and slightly bulging eyes, my sister is the much better looking of the two of us, which is good by me, because the poor kid doesn’t have much else going for her.
On try #2 to wake her, I slip my hand under the top of her pink baby-doll pajamas and play her ribs with my pointer finger like they’re a xylophone. “Time to face the music!” (Joke!) Since I turned eleven two weeks after Daddy died, that makes Birdie ten years old, because we have the same birthday—August 15th, which just so happens to also be the Catholic holy day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. (Probably why I have such a horrible tendency to assume things.) We weren’t supposed to be born on the same day, but even before she came into this world, Robin Jean Finley couldn’t stay put. She popped out of our mother two months too soon at St. Joseph’s Hospital on Burleigh St. weighing too little under five pounds. After the nurse cleaned her up and placed her in Daddy’s boxing arms and he got a load of her fluffy hair, big eyes, and little bones, he smiled and declared my new baby sister a “featherweight.” He tried out a couple of different nicknames but settled on Birdie, which was darling once upon a time but had a bad ending. (How was he supposed to know that “Birdbrain” would be just one of the names kids in the neighborhood would end up calling her if I’m not around to set them straight?) And no matter how much I wish and pray it wasn’t so, as the Titanic would say, when it comes to my sister, being dumb is just the tip of the iceberg. (Joke!) Try #3. I whisper straight into her ear, “Time to get the show on the road, kiddo.”