The Late Arrival

Sometimes I think about it. Sometimes it's a fleeting thought in the seconds before I drift off to sleep and glance at his arm around my middle and my brown hand resting on his not so brown arm. It always looks like a painting to me. Simple and beautiful. Sometimes it's the rare occasion when all three of us are captured in a candid picture. Our daughter between the two of us, making the picture look as if we're posing in graduating skin colors, from lightest (his), to medium (hers), to darkest (mine). Her face, her skin a blend of both his and mine. Sometimes he thinks about it when I'm oblivious. Like when I give him a little extra room at a checkout counter, but am still within his personal space, and the clerk helping him asks if she can help me. He lets her know that "uh...that's my wife " in a stern, sharp voice before I can answer. He's my protector, a sensitive set of second eyes. But most of the time, I don't t

Percy . I only called him “Dad” selectively, usually when I needed something. My friends marveled that I had the balls to call my dad by his first name. But it wasn’t an act of rebellion, my mom called him Percy and we just parroted what she said. He never seemed to mind. It’s taken years to piece together who Percy really was – and how that same Percy intersected with Dad -- a title I instinctively started using only after the picture of who he was as a man, as a father, became clearer as I grew older. *** “Shell- LEE !” I hear the smile in his voice as he bellows his pet name for me up the stairs on my birthday morning. I race from my bedroom to the top of the stairs.  He’s standing at the base, a shadow pitched against sunlight behind him and balancing a faded blue Huffy 3-speed that was my ninth birthday present – a surprise. It’s easy to hear his smile and see his broad white grin, a sharp contrast to his dark chocolate skin because Percy didn’t smile a lot. But