“I think both,” Janet had mused. “A scorned lover and then yourself.”
At the time, Mabel had silently agreed to disagree, but now, as she watched Daddy-o eating crackers through a smile, whose trembling hand remembered something he refused to, Mabel thought Janet was probably right. A person should have big reasons for dying. And unlike Daddy-o, big reasons for living.
Daddy-o squirted cheese on a cracker and held it out for Mabel. Two dots for eyes and a big cheesy smile. Mabel turned the cracker upside down so it looked like two eyes under a frowning forehead, then she threw it into the motel trash can. She no longer felt compelled to entertain him. He already was and for no good reason.
“I find it works best like this,” Daddy-o said on Wednesday. He stretched out as long as he could in the back of the yellow van, then folded his hands corpse-like across his chest and closed his eyes. “I start with my toenails.”
Mabel stared up at the van’s velveteen ceiling where Daddy-o had tacked a postcard of Tahiti, and a starry map of the universe, and a bumper sticker that said: I Brake for Butterflies. She wiggled her toes. Janet Yuri had passed her a note in English class with four scribbled ballpoint drawings and the words: Pick One.
“I think of coconuts and waterfalls,” Daddy-o murmured. “I imagine a place where the lion lays down with the lamb.”
Mabel had taken her time to decide. There’d been a stick figure hanging from a noose, a stick figure jumping off a skyscraper, a stick figure with red ballpoint ink spraying dramatically from its wrists, and finally, a stick figure lying next to a bottle of tiny black dots.
“Sleeping pills,” Janet had whispered.
In the background, Daddy-o took a conscious inhalation. “‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle.’” His exhale sounded like a long, exaggerated sigh of relief. “‘The cow jumped over the moon.’”
Mabel had taken Janet’s fate into her own hands. While the class read aloud from Shakespeare, she drew a fifth option: a stick figure being hit by an asteroid. Ha! Mabel had scrawled on the bottom after circling the scenario. Ha! Ha! Ha!
Janet hadn’t seen the humor. For the remainder of English class she stared straight ahead, and when the bell finally rang, she dropped a note on Mabel’s desk before storming into the hall.
It must be nice, it said, to have so much to joke about.
Mabel looked over at her father. There was that smile. That stubborn arc of idiocy. “Why did you draw a mustache on that picture of Mom?” Mabel asked suddenly. “Why do you keep a knife around?”
Daddy-o didn’t open his eyes and he didn’t stop smiling. “I thought if I made your mother look ugly I wouldn’t miss her so much.”
Mabel didn’t buy it. “And the knife?”
This time Daddy-o opened his eyes and raised up on his elbow and his smile softened to a grin. “Remember this, Mabel. The happier you are, the more danger you’re in. People fear goodness.”
Mabel did buy this. She saw every day that misery loved company.
Daddy-o laid back down and closed his eyes and his smile returned less forcefully. “‘The little dog laughed to see such sport,’” he whispered. “‘And the dish ran away with the spoon.’”
When Daddy-o wasn’t cleaning toilets for chump change, he was walking the streets with his seventy-five-cent Can Do! pamphlets, preaching and teaching to those willing to listen to his concocted brand of salvation. It was a little bit Norman Vincent Peale, a little bit John Lennon. It involved thinking positive and eight tracks of sitar music, incessant smiling and zoning out. Daddy-o called it a sunny outlook, an “attitude of gratitude.” Her mother called it plain and simple denial. The proprietor of the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge called it nuts.
“That ole man a-yours,” he said to Mabel in the parking lot. “He ain’t right in the head. If I find drugs in his room, you can bet your ass I’ll call the authorities.”
Mabel stared. “Did you say something about my ass? ’Cause if you did, it’ll be me on the phone.”
“Well, well,” the owner shook his head. “Someone sure don’t take after her daddy.”
“And it’s not drugs,” Mabel said. “It’s optimism.”
“I say it’s drugs,” said the man.
“I say drop dead,” said Mabel.
Janet Yuri cornered Mabel in the girl’s bathroom at morning break on Thursday. “Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Sunshine,” Janet said. “Seen any asteroids lately?”
Mabel smiled, then fast decided against it. “I’m no sunshine.”
Janet rolled her eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. You’re as dark as a May day. I bet the worst thing to happen to you is a B. B-plus? Oh, sorry. A-minus.”
Mabel thought of her father. How after the accident she and her mother had gone to visit him in the hospital. How her father had smiled through the bandages, how his swollen purple mouth could barely open for the straw that Mabel held to it. How he’d tried to whisper a knock-knock joke but didn’t have the strength to get past the second knock.
“You know, Janet,” Mabel heard herself say, “some people can’t be broken.”
Janet leaned in close to Mabel as if she might kiss her. “Oh yeah?” she said. “Like who?”
“My dad,” Mabel said. “He’s never down.”
“Then he’s a liar,” Janet whispered, leaning in to unbutton the top button of Mabel’s blouse. “Just like you.”
That day after school, Daddy-o drove Mabel out a winding country road to a fishing pond. He paid a man in a peeling shack four dollars, before backing the van right up to the water’s edge and opening the rear doors so it looked like the two of them were floating at sea. Daddy-o sat on a tattered pink cushion in the back of the van and folded his legs underneath him and Mabel did the same.
“We’re not fishing for fish today, Maybe Baby,” Daddy smiled. “We’re fishing for enlightenment.”
“Hmph,” Mabel said. “Looks like someone’s out four bucks.”
At that, Daddy-o laughed and laughed until his cheeks shone with tears. Mabel watched his joy with secret distrust and sad delight. The scar that ran along his jawline, as raised and shiny as a nightcrawler, was unaffected by Daddy-o’s glee, unlike the three men who’d jumped him outside the bowling lanes, where he whistled while he worked as a janitor. They’d cracked him across the face with a baseball bat, because, as Mabel had heard her mother tell a neighbor: “He owed them thirty dollars for weed, but what they really wanted was to beat the smile off his face.”
At last, Daddy-o stopped his cackling and grew as serious as he knew how. He closed his eyes and placed his hands, palms up, on his knees. “Some people say om,” he said. “But I say home.”
Mabel scowled. Home made her think of a scummy landlord, a parade of wine coolers on a Formica countertop, a stale plaid sleeping bag curled in a Volkswagen bus. Daddy-o read her mind.
“I don’t mean home as in Apartment 7B, Maybe. I mean h-o-m-e home as in you and me both know we ain’t from here.” Daddy-o’s eyes stayed closed as he said this, and Mabel watched him with fresh curiosity. He breathed in deep. He breathed out home. His face softened and thawed to something blank, relieved from the chore of constant optimism. When Mabel saw Daddy-o forget she was there, she closed her eyes and copied him, breathing home-home-home until she heard Daddy-o say, from somewhere distant but clear: “Let the things that get you down fall away.”