When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

11. Valentine

My father was out of town. This was something that had never happened before. The cement mill where he worked had sent him from our home in Illinois to Ohio to solve a problem in a mill there. He’d been gone for more than a week, and he would be gone for days and days more.

The house felt strange without him. Quiet and...kind of easy, somehow.

In the mail a package came. It was from Daddy. It was for me. This was Valentine’s Day, and in the small package I found a cardboard heart with a little box attached to it and a heart-shaped bottle inside the box. The heart-shaped bottle held perfume. The perfume was called Blue Waltz.

I’d never had perfume before.

I’d never had a present from my father before.

I got gifts from my parents all the time...for Christmas, for my birthdays. But I always knew that gifts from my parents were really from my mother. My mother was here, though, not in Ohio with my father, so I knew the cardboard heart and the heart-shaped bottle and the Blue Waltz perfume were from him.
I uncapped the bottle. I sniffed the perfume. I dabbed a bit behind each ear the way I’d seen my mother do.

Then I took the cardboard heart and taped it to the inside of my bedroom door.

Proof. My father actually thought about me...loved me.

It would stay there for years.