He Remembered My Birthday

         I reached up to take what he was trying to give me. As I stretched my hands up, he leaned down and his beard brushed the top of my head. I was shocked to smell his breath; it didn’t smell like alcohol. I looked in his eyes, and for once they weren’t clouded and red. This man standing above me was not someone I recognized. Or rather, someone I had forgotten. Someone who had went away when I was small. The rest of him was here, the stained teeth, which I could see for once, because there was a sheepish smile played out on his face. There were tobacco stains on his shirt, and his hair wasn’t combed. But as I took the box, wrapped in pink with a lacy ribbon wrapped around, i almost felt like I was taking it from a stranger. Someone who sends Christmas cards; but whom you never see.
         “You remembered it’s my birthday.” I looked up at him and said. I even managed a little smile to hide my surprise.
         “Mhmm.” He grunted. “It’s not every day my girl turns eleven.”
         I decided not to point out the fact that I turned eleven last year. Even a twelve year old knows not to ruin magic like that. And besides, he had called me his girl. That was a name he usually saved for the women he had on his arm. The ones that yelled and drank all his whiskey before leaving. There was even one woman who searched my room and stole my pearl necklace before hightailing it out of the house while Dad and I were sleeping.
         “Gwine. Opn ut.” He spoke through a mouthful of tobacco. I tried to ignore the saliva dribbling down his chin, and tried not to look when he spit a hunk of it into a crack in my floor. I didn’t want to think about how I would be able to smell it all night, the dead, rotting smell of it. I tried not to think about those things, because at that moment, I opened the box, and I almost loved my father.
         The dress took my breath away. It was the purest, whitest fabric I had ever seen, with tiny, baby blue flowers sprinkling the whole thing. It looked like the perfect length, not high above my knees like my other dresses. They were too small, this dress was glorious. There were perfectly round pearl buttons going all the way up the back of it.  I started to count them. I had gotten up to fifteen, when my father grunted to get my attention. I watched him pull a ribbon out of his pocket. This ribbon looked like it had used to match my dress, but the glowing whiteness of the material was now smudged with spots of gray and black. Who knows what was in my father’s pockets. But I didn’t care.
         I laid the perfect garment down on my bed, and jumped up to hug him. It felt like a foreign thing to do. Like finding an onion among the turnips in the garden; perhaps it is a pleasant thing if you’re in the mood for an onion. Still, it isn’t something that you find often. I hugged him anyway. I threw my arms around his belly and hugged with all my might. He returned the gesture lightly, as if afraid of hurting me. I didn’t care. There was nothing that could ruin this.
         All that night, as I faced the wall and tried to sleep, ignoring the sound of the television blasting, I thought of the dress hanging in my closet. I just knew, deep in my heart that things would be different now. Surely if he could remember my birthday, he would remember tomorrow that we needed food in the cabinets, and not whiskey. That we needed to get the truck fixed so I didn’t have to walk three miles every morning to the bus stop; he could take me. He would of course remember that we both needed new glasses, not tobacco. Usually, these thoughts worried me at night. But tonight, I fell into a calm, deep sleep, confident that things were going to get better.
         Even the next day, when I woke up to find he was passed out on the couch, beer bottles spilling out everywhere and a lit cigarette burning a hole in the carpet, I was not discouraged. My hope died a little, when I contented my growling stomach with ketchup crackers, but nobody can really be hopeful when they’re hungry. And I hate ketchup. I still believed in him, though. I cleaned up the house a little, throwing away all the beer bottles and I wiped off the kitchen table. I opened each cabinet slightly, hoping maybe he would notice that we didn’t have much food. That had to be the problem, he just didn’t know that we needed it. He never ate much anyway.
         Even the next week, when I came home from school to see that he’d sold the truck. I still believed in him. It didn’t run anyway, and we’d never have the money to fix it. And besides, walking a few miles never hurt anybody. My shoes were only a little tight, they didn’t even hurt yet. I smiled at him as I walked in, and he scowled and yelled for me to get him a beer. That was fine, he was probably just upset that he had to sell the truck. I was sure he was planning on filling up the cabinets with food anyway, with the money he got. And he had remembered my birthday.
         Even the next month, when I walked tearfully to town and sold my dress at the secondhand shop for fourteen dollars and fifty cents, my faith wasn’t gone. I mean, now I had a few dollars to buy what I needed. I went to the grocery store and bought sandwich bread, peanut butter, and a bag of apples. My total came to seven dollars and twenty cents, so I still had almost seven dollars left. I went back to the secondhand store and got myself a new pair of shoes. I tried to ignore my dress hanging in the window. When I got home and found my father sleeping off a bottle of whiskey on the couch, I still believed in him. He was probably just tired. And after all, he had remembered my birthday.