Part I | Part II | Part III

His name is Dan. Dan frequents this old-fashioned lamppost at the end of the string of newly built stores every day. Some days he pulls out a harmonica a young boy gave him and teaches himself the strains of songs he catches from people’s whistling lips as they saunter past him. His solace is when he tucks his matted, grey hair under his orange bike helmet. He becomes a turtle, tucked away into his body, ready to roll down the slight decline of the curb and onto the street at any shove from behind: his pennance.

Dan is the second of two children. He was raised in a northern Wisconsin town called Crimenchee until his freshman year of high school. When Crimenchee slowly died of Alzheimer’s disease and heart attacks, Dan’s father, Robert, moved the family to the city. During holidays, Robert drove Dan and his older brother, Pete, back to the town’s ghostly remains to hunt deer on their great-grandfather’s property. The cabin was Dan’s solace.

Other than during the ritual hunting trips, Dan was ignored by his father while Pete received unlimited attention and favor. When Dan was sixteen, he swore he would never again be the unnoticed one. He moved out of his family’s home on the day after his eighteenth birthday. He developed a muscle toning regimen and faithfully kept to it, adding one repetition per set every other week. In doing so, he shed the cloak of invisibility out of which he previously only peeked. Dan finally asked his friend, Maggie, to join him for dinner and a movie. Their casual flirtations accelerated until both graduated high school and decided to marry. Dan was accepted into business school while Maggie worked her way into a reputable nursing school. To Dan, every interaction had a formula for success.

One evening while he was sitting in his cozy study, Dan wrote the words “empty, shallow, hollow, limited” on a fresh legal pad. Directly under that list, he devised a plan to change the direction his life was headed. He walked back to his bedroom, rummaged through his wife’s closet, and pulled out a small blue dress. She had worn it on the first evening of their honeymoon but rarely brought it from the far recesses of her walk-in closet. He dug through her orderly piles of shoes until he found the silver heels that she had worn with the dress. He carefully laid the dress on the bed, set the shoes on the floor next to it, and placed a deep red rose across the top of the dress. He walked back to his study, reserved a table at the Swan, an elite restaurant in Minneapolis, and stood in the hallway near his room.

“Maggie,” he called from the room. “There’s a situation in here that needs your attention.”

“Ok, dear, I’ll be right there,” Maggie answered as she walked into the hallway, wiping her hands on a towel. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s something on the bedspread I noticed. I was wondering if you knew the best way to take care of it.”

“Well, let me check,” Maggie said as she walked into the room. “Oh, sweetie, that’s my old dress. What’s it doing out?” She reached for the rose and held it to her nose.

Nine months later, Dan became a father.

Dan likes to watch the children as they are tugged by their parents to a safer part of the sidewalk, far away from him. He sees the knee-high toddlers and remembers the joy of bouncing them on his leg. Now he looks at his dirty leg hidden under mud stained tangerine pants and is ashamed. Some days he manages to make eye contact with a child who is stumbling along, holding his mother’s finger as a lifeline. Dan smiles with his lips together. His eyes remember their twinkle and dance when another nearly toothless grin is returned. He quickly glances away when the mother looks past him at the growing puddles of gravy slush and hefts her precious son onto her hip. Sometimes, Dan indulges himself and waves his fingers at the boy looking back over his mother’s shoulder. He keeps a tally of the waves he receives in return.

Continued