FF: Snapshots Left on the Negative 4d/4
Title: Snapshots Left on the Negative (4d/4)
Word Count: ~9,900
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: Up through 3x08 "Camping"
Author's Note: I don't even know anymore. I think it's just one more, but I thought that two parts ago.
Previous
There’s about three seconds after she processes what the man on the phone is saying when she doesn’t believe it, when she’s convinced there’s been some kind of horrible mistake, some awful mix-up. That he’s talking about some other Robert Knope. That her father’s not dead.
Because he can’t be dead. He can’t be dead because she was just going to call him. Because just a few days ago she was sitting on a jungle gym and thinking about all the questions she still needed to ask him.
He can’t be dead because she hasn’t asked them yet.
Because she was supposed to have more time.
There’s a pause on the end of the line and then a gentle, “Ms. Knope?”
It pulls her back, and drags her down, plunges her into the ice-water reality. Her father is dead. Her dad, her daddy. He’s gone, and she’s drowning.
She takes a shuddering, gasping breath, scrambling for air. “Yes, yes I’m here.”
“I’m sorry for this, but there are a few questions I need to ask you.”
Leslie listens as the man starts going through questions she doesn’t know the answers to-“Did you know if your father had any specific wishes about how his body would be handled?” (She doesn’t. Why would she?) “Would you like us to give you the name of some funeral homes?” (Yes? What other answer is there?) “Is there anyone you’d like us to call?” (Oh god, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know her father’s friends or who he worked with or if he had a lady friend. How is she supposed to find that out? Oh god, how is she going to tell her mother?).
And she can feel everything start to rise to overwhelm her, and then just as quickly it’s like her mind’s pulled an emergency brake, hit a panic button. Like her brain has willfully disconnected itself from her body, and shoved everything back, locked it down so she can function, so she can work.
“There is some paperwork you’ll have to come fill out here. Your contact information indicates you live out of town. When do you think you’ll be able to make arrangements to come in? We can make an appointment.”
That one she at least can answer or try to answer. She presses the heels of her palms against her closed eyelids and tries to think. Let’s see an hour to pack up and call Madison, call Ann. She’ll have to track her mother down and somehow tell her. She can’t do that over the phone, can she? No. No, of course not. Where is Marlene usually on Saturday mornings? Is that the literacy group or the woman’s caucus? God, she doesn’t want to do this in a public setting. Why can’t her mother be like normal retired people and take up gardening? And then inexplicably she has a flash of Marlene Griggs-Knope on her hands and knees complete with power-suit and broach pulling weeds, and she can’t help the tiny hiccup of inappropriate laughter that escapes her like a sob.
“Miss?”
No right, refocus, she pushes that down. An hour to talk to her mother, on the road by say noon? Is noon realistic? Does she have gas in her car? Say noon. Then it’s what, almost a three hour drive to her father’s house?
Only she’s not going to her father’s house, is she?
“I’m sorry, um, which hospital did you say you were calling from?”
“Terre Haute Regional.”
“Oh. Is that- Is that north or south of the city?”
“We’re right near the interstate.”
Okay closer than her father’s house, then.
“Um, two-thirty? Three o’clock? I can be there by then.”
“I’ll make the appointment. Forgive me for asking this, but do you have anyone who can accompany you? Maybe a spouse or a friend? Someone who can look out for you at this time. We find it’s often helpful to the families to have an extra set of ears when making these arrangements.”
She thinks of Ann. Ann who’s been sleep-deprived for a week tending to her sick daughter and she can’t call with this. But who will, of course, be the first person she calls with this. She thinks of Madison, who is many things, efficient and capable, but comforting is not one of them. She thinks of Ben, who she’s not supposed to be calling at all, and immediately shoves that thought aside.
“Yeah, I’ve, um, I’ll find someone.”
---
It’s Ann.
Of course, it’s Ann.
Ann who barely lets Leslie get the words ‘my father’s died,’ out of her mouth before she’s over at her house with a file folder of internet research on Terre Haute funeral homes, and packing an overnight bag, while Leslie tries to track down her mother.
Marlene sends her to voicemail twice and then turns off her phone, obviously in the middle of something she doesn’t think can be interrupted. And even though there’s absolutely no reason for her mom to know what’s going on, Leslie finds herself growing more and more frustrated with every wall and roadblock she hits. Until for the first time in recent memory, she is actually truly angry with her mother. Because she’s supposed to be retired, because it’s just work and Leslie’s her daughter, and why can’t she just once, just one damned time step out of whatever meeting she’s in and pick up her fucking phone because her daughter needs to talk to her.
By the time she does get her mother on the restaurant phone, when she finally remembers where the women’s caucus was meeting for brunch this month, she’s wound coil-spring tight. And everything goes horribly wrong.
Marlene answers with an abrupt, “Really Leslie, Marcia Langdon is trying to get everyone to support a petition to revisit the banning ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as promoting witchcraft and debauchery. You know how long and hard I worked to get that ban lifted the first time round. What’s so important that it couldn’t wait?”
“Dad’s dead.”
Silence.
Leslie bends forward on the couch and buries her face in her hands. God she can’t believe she just did that. Why did she just do that? She was supposed to ask her mother to come over. Supposed to sit her down and break the news gently, not pack it with all her own anger and regret and pain and fire it at her mom like a bullet.
Only Marlene’s still not saying anything, not even a muffled sob, and it doesn’t matter that she hasn’t cried yet either, Leslie can feel it all start to build again.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Finally Marlene finds her voice and it’s as business like and professional as always, “When?”
“This morning.”
“What happened?”
“Heart attack.”
There’s a sigh. “He never ate correctly. Man had a sweet tooth the size of Texas. And the eggs. Oh dear god the eggs.”
“Mom-”
“I’m sorry sweetheart but it’s true. Nothing but red meat and breakfast food, and he would hide chocolate all over the house. I tried to get him to at least cut back on the eggs, but-”
“Stop it. Mom, just stop it!”
That seems to snap her back. “No, right, of course- So you’ll- I suppose you’ll go up and make the funeral arrangements?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to call you before I left.”
“Would you like me to come with you?”
The question throws her for a loop, because she’d never expected her mother to make the offer because when all is said and done this is still her ex-husband, the man who left over twenty-years ago. And it’s horrible but at the moment, Leslie can’t think of anything she wants less than to sit in a car for three hours watching her mother successfully hold it together. “No, I’ve, um, I’ve got it. Ann’s going to come with me. She’s a nurse so she knows her way around the hospital paperwork anyway.”
“Oh. Yes. It’s always a good idea to have someone with expertise in the system. Well then, you’ll take care of calling everyone?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll need to let the papers know when the service is. People will want to come pay their respects since he was your father. Particularly so soon after the election.”
She hadn’t even thought about it, but the next thing she knows she’s making a decision all the same. “No. No. Put a notice in the paper if you want, but I’m going to have the service up in Terre Haute. Where he lived. Where his friends were.”
And her voice must be a little harsher than she intends because Marlene pauses, nonplussed, then says, “Well, it sounds like you have everything under control. I should- I should get back in there before Marcia Langdon wins this simply because no one wants to stand up to her.”
“God, Mom, just-”
Her mother cuts her off, with a brittle snap. “It was your father’s favorite play, Leslie. It was his favorite play.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It made him laugh,” Marlene murmurs half to herself.
Yeah it did. Leslie remembers now. “Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Don’t let her win.”
---
The next few days feel like they go by in an absolute blur. Like she’s holding herself together with paper and pen-ink and important details that feel totally inconsequential. But she’s always been good at this, at organization and logistics, at putting together events and making them special, making them memorable.
Her father’s funeral can’t be the one time her talent fails her.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t lose it. She does. The first time happens when she gets to the hospital and goes to identify herself to the front desk only to have a heavyset man about her father’s age get up from a chair in the waiting-room to come introduce himself with a soft, “You must be Leslie. I’m John. I was out birding with Robert when it happened.”
And she’s so grateful to find out her father didn’t die alone, that he wasn’t simply discovered in his house by a delivery man or a cleaning lady that he died doing something he loved, something that made him happy, that she throws her arms around this man. Around this stranger she’s never met who knows her on sight, and finally, finally cries.
John turns out to be a friend from work. The head of the high-school’s science department. Widowed at a forty. As the only two single middle-aged men in a land ruled by women, he and her dad apparently forged a bond that lasted through school transfers and a late remarriage on John’s part.
It is immediately apparent that John is her father’s Ann (was her father’s Ann. God she’s never going to get the tense right). He’s soft-spoken, but loquacious, telling her how Robert always talked about her, about his daughter with her brilliant ideas and her big heart.
“Of course, that’s no surprise given who your father was.”
Except it is a surprise. Because as much as she loved her father, for all the good and wonderful things she saw in him, Leslie never saw herself.
“Tell me.”
It’s all the invitation John needs to talk about his friend. It’s an odd thing to sit in a hospital waiting room and meet her father through a stranger. To have something as simple and basic as the fact Robert Knope taught high-school math for almost forty-years brought vibrantly alive, transformed into a quiet epic in the mirror of someone else’s admiration.
Her father developed the school’s first advanced calculus curriculum.
Her father ran a contest math team that dominated the state tournaments for ten years.
Her father could teach geometry through art and algebra with architecture.
Her father was still changing his lesson plans up until the very last year. Never settled. Never got complacent.
Her father was passionate. Her father was committed. Her father loved his work and the community he served. Her father believed what he did mattered, and he did it better than anyone.
Her father was all the things Leslie ever tried to be.
And she never knew.
When John’s done, she doesn’t quite know what to say. How to put the gift he’s just given her into words. But she tries all the same.
“Will you give his eulogy?”
John looks taken aback. “I don’t know what I’d say.”
“You already said it.”
---
The funeral happens on a sunny, but cold Wednesday morning.
It’s not a large service. She hadn’t expected it to be. (Her dad comes from a small family, just him and a much older sister who moved to South Carolina to be close to her grandchildren and is now too sick to travel.) But it’s by no means an empty one either.
In his own way. In his own, quiet, unassuming way Robert Knope apparently had just as much impact on his small corner of the community as her mother ever had on Pawnee. There are old teachers her father worked with, and new teachers he mentored. Former students he inspired, and current students he tutored for free. There are three men from his bowling team, and a number of couples from his church.
There’s Greg who brings Abigail and comes to join his poor, tired wife who hasn’t left Leslie’s side in three days.
There’s her mother, who comes into the church and stands there almost at a loss, almost small, until Leslie gets up and goes to hug her, brings her to sit beside her in the front row.
And there’s Ben.
Ben who slips in the back and tries to get lost in the crowd. Ben who she doesn’t see until the service is over. Until people are starting to file out, to make their way to the cemetery, and suddenly there he is, sitting in the far corner unmoving, looking to her for some indication, some sign or signal.
When she pauses in the aisle, he gets up and slowly comes over, still a little hesitant, a little tentative. Stops a foot away, and lifts his hand almost as if to touch her, then drops it, unsure whether he’s allowed.
“Ann called me,” he offers apparently thinking she needs an explanation for his presence. Thinking he needs to apologize for it. “I wanted to come sooner, but I knew she was with you and I didn’t-”
He breaks off, still uncertain, obviously half-convinced he’s done exactly the wrong thing, that he’s somehow made everything worse by being here, upended her equilibrium in some way.
She wants to tell him she doesn’t have an equilibrium to upend right now.
Still maybe he has. Maybe tomorrow or the next day or the day after that Leslie will wake up and wish he hadn’t come, wish he hadn’t made himself so available to lean on when their entire relationship is in question, when he might not be around at all a month from now.
But today she’s burying her father, and telling her mother what to do, and everything’s wrong and backwards and nothing’s like it’s supposed to be. And Ben’s here and she just wants to be held, wants it to be him that holds her, and she doesn’t care about much of anything beyond that.
She takes a stuttering half step forward.
It’s all the permission he needs.
Ben wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her to him with a quiet, “Leslie, I’m so sorry.”
And even though she’s heard those same words a hundred times since Saturday, over and over until they feel like the only thing anyone knows how to say anymore, until she thought she’d go crazy if she ever had to hear them again. Out of his mouth, in this moment, they’re exactly right.
---
They don’t say much else, but he stays close after that. Stepping into Ann’s role like a relief pitcher, giving the other woman a chance to breath, to rest, to tend to her own family again.
He leaves his car at the church and rides with them to the cemetery. Stands there beside her as her father’s casket is lowered into the ground. And it’s only when he’s walked back over to the car to leave Leslie alone at the graveside with her mother, and she feels the absence of his palm against hers that she realizes she never asked him to come, never said anything at all.
She simply never let go of his hand.
Marlene looks out over the cemetery to where Ben is standing by the car waiting for them.
“Didn’t he used to work for the city?”
Of all the times to have this conversation.
Still, Leslie has no idea how to start any other conversation, and maybe they both just need to focus on something else for the moment. “Yeah he did, about five years ago.”
“He was part of that state auditing team that came in, wasn’t he?”
Really her mother’s memory for faces never ceases to astonish her. She nods. “That’s what brought him to Pawnee. Then he stayed on for awhile when Chris Traeger became City Manager.”
“I didn’t realize you’d kept in touch.”
There’s something sharp and a little hurt in Marlene’s voice, like she can’t believe Leslie didn’t tell her this. And maybe that’s justified. Her mother’s met every other serious boyfriend Leslie’s ever had. She’s a gauntlet they have to run and not a lot get through (in fact if she thinks about it an astonishing number of breakups came shortly after meeting her mother). Maybe she should apologize for keeping the one man who might have been more important than any other a secret.
She doesn’t. Instead she says. “We just recently got back in touch, but you’ve met him before. He was at my birthday in August.”
Marlene nods like she’s placed him now, then returns to her scrutiny. And Leslie waits for the inevitable list. The bullet-point discussion of his flaws, his failings. He’s too thin, too short, too tall. His handshake is weak, he obviously lacks confidence. His handshake’s too strong, what is he compensating for? He’s too soft with her. He’s not soft enough. And it doesn’t matter that Ben hasn’t said more than ten words to her mother. Marlene Griggs-Knope has judged people and found them wanting based on far less. So when her mother finally opens her mouth what actually comes out blindsides Leslie with the force of a freight train.
“He’s in love with you, isn’t he?”
She’s not actually asking of course, just seeking for confirmation, evaluating the impact. And Leslie’s sure that whatever her mother’s looking for, it’s written all over her face. Because it’s one thing to know Ben’s attracted to her, know he cares for her deeply, but the idea that he might actually be in love with her, might already as far gone as she is? She’s never let herself consider it, never come close to allowing herself to even touch that thought.
Her eyes fly back over to where he’s standing, and she finds herself scouring his face looking for whatever it is her mom sees.
But she doesn’t see anything. No miraculous change or new light. Just Ben. Steady, dependable, constant Ben, waiting for her. Looking at her exactly the way he always has.
Leslie drops her gaze, uncomfortable with that idea for some reason. “I um- I don’t know- maybe. But we’re not- It’s not-” she shakes her head with a sigh, “It’s just not that simple, mom.”
At that her mother looks down at her the freshly turned earth at their feet and sighs, “No, it rarely is.”
That makes her think of all the things she’ll never be able to ask her father, all the questions she left too late. And this has never been a comfortable subject for either of them, and Marlene’s usually such a force of nature, that Leslie doesn’t fight it. But it’s been a long time since she’s seen her mother this vulnerable, and she just- she needs to ask someone.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“You and dad? You loved each other when you got married, didn’t you?”
Marlene nods, her face softening into something that’s almost girlish. “Oh yes. Very much.”
“What happened?”
Her mother shakes her head starts to recall herself, box herself back up. “Leslie, this really isn’t the time.”
“It’s never the right time,” she sighs. It’s the same rationalization they’ve both been using for over twenty years. When one of them is ready the other isn’t interested. They just keep missing each other, keep waiting for a better moment. But she’s done waiting.
She grabs her mother’s hand. “I was going to call dad.” Marlene looks over at her in shock, and Leslie continues, “You know we never talked about it either. I never let him. Then Thursday before he died I was going to call him, and I didn’t. I lost my nerve again. Mom, please?”
Because at the end of the day for all her legendary toughness, for all her barb-wire and steel-plating, her mother is still her mother and Leslie’s still her little girl, it’s the ‘Mom, please’ that does it. Marlene relents with a sigh.
“It wasn’t any one thing, sweetheart. It almost never is.”
“But it started when you got promoted. I remember that. I remember going out to celebrate, and all of us being so happy. And then everything changed. It was like dad hated your job. Hated that you were so successful.”
Marlene purses her lips considering the idea, her hand moving from Leslie’s grasp to tug at the cuffs of her gloves. Then she nods, “He probably did hate my job, eventually.” She takes a long pause and Leslie can see her stealing herself to say what she’s about to. “To be honest I don’t think your father liked who I became after that very much.”
No, he didn’t. Leslie can hear the doors closing and the hushed voices and bitter note in his voice when he told her mommy had to work late. And these aren’t at all the memories she wants right now, but they’re the memories she has. She turns her head away and whispers. “So he just left us?”
“Oh Leslie, no. No, we left each other. Your father may have been the one to move, but we both left. In some ways you could even argue I left first.”
And she doesn’t know what to do with that, so she doesn’t do anything, just stands there and waits for her mom to continue. Eventually Marlene does. “Back then we were both naïve about what it took to succeed at that level, let alone for a woman to do it. Your father even moreso than me. He didn’t have any political ambitions, all he’d ever wanted to do was teach math and be married to the woman down the hall who read Shakespeare out loud to her class.”
“You?”
“Me.” Her mother smiles and Leslie can see the start of tears in her eyes. “I was the one with all the ambition. And I was willing to do whatever it took to fulfill that ambition. I wanted it so much, but I suppose you could say it didn’t always bring out my best side. At least not side your father fell in love with. And of course your father was so set in his ways he refused to change at all. He could be so stubborn that way. Eventually it was like we’d forgotten how to live with each other.”
“But still. He shouldn’t have expected you not to change. Just to stay an English teacher all your life.”
“Probably not. And I probably shouldn’t have expected him to change quite so much. We got married young and I didn’t have the first clue who I wanted to be and your father thought he knew exactly who he wanted to be. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. It worked for plenty of our friends. They grew into themselves together. But I think with any marriage that every once in awhile there’s comes a point where you have to choose that other person again. At some point your father and I simply stopped choosing each other.”
Leslie stares down at the ground at her feet and tries to process her mother’s words. Tries to come to grips with the idea that she had gotten it all right and all wrong at the same time. She’d always known her father hadn’t been happy after her mom was promoted to the school district’s administration, but she’d thought it was because he resented her mother’s success while he just remained a teacher, because he’d given up something for her mother’s dreams.
But It had never occurred to her that the something Robert Knope gave up was the woman he married.
“Why did you do it? If it made dad so unhappy, if you cared about him, why didn’t you quit or change less or try to do something to stop it?”
Marlene shakes her head like Leslie should know better. “Griggs women barrel full speed ahead. Quitting isn’t really in our nature.”
It feels like a life sentence, like a prophecy, and even though she knows it's true, knows she's never going to be the type of person who would be able to walk away from a job half-finished any more than her mother is, knows she doesn't really want to be, instinctively Leslie bristles against it all the same, mutters half to herself. “Maybe it should be.”
Her mother tilts her head and looks over at her with an assessing eye, raises one eloquent eyebrow in inquiry. “This has something to do with that man over there, doesn’t it?”
Leslie doesn’t say anything. Right now she doesn’t want to hear what her mother thinks she should do.
But to her surprise, for once Marlene doesn’t offer any advice or opinions, just looks over at Ben for a very long time and then finally says, “Your father would have liked him. He would have liked the way he looks at you.”
---
Ben takes her back to her hotel after they leave the cemetery. There’s an impromptu wake happening at the bowling alley where her father played his league matches and Leslie pulls out a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt in bright green color she thinks her father would have liked more than black, intending to get changed and go over.
Only she’s so tired.
She toes off her shoes and slumps down on the bed. Hands braced on either side of her, staring straight ahead into nothingness.
It’s over. It’s done.
She’s planned a funeral.
She’s buried her father.
She feels like she should feel something. Should feel more. More grief, more loss, more completion or resolution or sadness or anger or anything really.
And instead all she feels is bone-achingly, soul-crushingly tired and completely at sea.
“Hey,” Ben whispers, coming over to sit beside her on the bed.
Instinctively Leslie slips her hand into his, and drops her head to his shoulder. “Hey.”
They don’t say anything else. Just sit there. Then Leslie closes her eyes, and turns her head to press her face into the curve of his neck, breathing him in on a shuddering inhale. Just taking in the fact that he’s here with her right now, reveling in the closeness the physical connection to someone.
Ben brings his free hand up and combs it through her hair, carding his fingers through the strands until he meets the pins holding up her chignon. One by one he starts to slip them free, undoing her, messing her up. And with every pin he removes, every curl that comes loose, it like he’s taking away little of the rigid control she’s been using to hold herself together for the last few days. Until her hair is unbound, and her composure is gone and quietly, silently she starts to cry.
There’s a shift on the mattress as Ben moves a little, and she can feel his body start to draw away, instinctively clutches at him harder.
“Shhh, it’s okay, I’m not going anywhere, just- just here-” and then he’s scooting behind her on the bed and pulling her to him, letting her curl around him like a small child-arms looped around his neck, face buried in his shoulder, legs tangled together with his, until she feels like she doesn’t know where she stops and he begins.
It’s a nice feeling, and for the first time since her phone rang on Saturday she doesn’t feel quite so lost, quite so untethered. She lowers her hand and undoes two of the buttons on his shirt, slipping her hand underneath it to press her palm over his heart. The steady beat, the warm life of him makes her think about her father again, about how impermanent everything can suddenly become. About time she didn’t have and things she never said and how she’d give anything to change that.
“I love you.”
She says it quietly, softly, but loud enough that she knows Ben can hear it, feels it in the hop-step of his heartbeat under her fingers, the way the muscles of his throat shift as he swallows. And she knows he’s trying to figure out how to respond, what to say to the grief-stricken, crazy woman curled around him, continues before he can. “Don’t- Don’t say anything please. I just- I love you. I don’t think I ever actually stopped. And I know that maybe it’s not fair to tell you right now. That it doesn’t really change anything. It’s all right, I don’t expect it to. But I just, whatever happens, I needed you to know that.”
Ben doesn’t say anything for a beat, just lays there with her, his fingers trailing through her hair. Finally, he says, “I have a lot of vacation stored up. If you wanted, I could, I mean I’d like to-” he tilts her head up a little and brushes a kiss along her hairline, “Leslie, let me be here for you, okay?”
Maybe it’s not an ‘I love you, too,’ but that’s all right. She doesn’t need it to be.
Not right now.
Right now she just needs him.
---
The thing about losing a loved one that no one tells you. The part movies don’t show and people don’t usually write about. The dirty little secret of death in the modern world is that when someone close to you goes, when they’ve left you, they don’t leave a void, they don’t leave a hole or a gaping open space into which you can pour your grief.
They leave paperwork.
They leave releases you have to sign, and to-do lists you have to cross off, and hundred different decisions you have to make at the absolute last time anyone should expect you to make a decision about anything.
People die and they leave a mess behind.
And it’s that mess, that wreckage, that grief comes. You sort through it. You catalog it. You stumble over a joy that had been misplaced. You uncover a hurt that had been left to rot. You go through piles upon piles of meaningless garbage and think it’s all getting better and easier, until suddenly the stack shifts and you cut your heart on the hidden razor blade of some unanticipated memory and you’re bleeding all over again.
People die and their stuff stays.
And someone has to clean it up.
---
In the end the funeral turns out to be the easy part. The hard part comes after.
But that’s the thing isn’t it? The hard part always comes after.
All the rituals, all moments you think of as important, that you build up to-graduations and weddings and baby showers and funerals-they’re just the signage, the landmarks that denote the beginning of the next leg, the start of something new. It’s the hundreds of days that come after, the ordinary, everyday mess of traveling that new path that’s difficult.
It’s not winning the election, but being worthy of the vote.
Not saying ‘I love you’ for the first time, but figuring out what you’ll give to say it thirty years from now.
Not burying your father, but learning to carry his memory without breaking under the weight.
---
Ben goes with her to start packing up her father’s house, and she knows putting her dad’s affairs in order isn’t going to be as simple as she’d hoped when it takes them half a day just to find the key to the safe deposit box.
Robert Knope lived in a small two-bedroom track home from the fifties located within walking distance of the high-school. It’s crammed full of paper and books and old tools he never used and metal signs for places that closed down long ago. The kitchen has a hodge-podge of mismatched plates and plastic cups from the bowling alley, and more pans than one man could possibly need, particularly since there’s almost nothing but takeout containers in the refrigerator and frozen dinners in the freezer.
But that was her father. He liked things, liked stuff. Liked garage sales, and trading posts, and the turkey pan he inherited from his mother even though he wouldn’t know how to cook a turkey if his life depended on it. He has a box of math-team t-shirts dating back to 1979 in one closet and three boxes of college t-shirts from all over the country in another (and she doesn’t understand those until she stumbles across a photo album over a week later filled with group photos of graduating seniors posed in a patchwork of colors and mascots. Almost gets arrested when she tries to get the boxes back from the Goodwill and can’t).
He has financial papers going back ten years shoved into shoeboxes, and desk drawers and in one inexplicable instance an antique safe that doesn’t lock. He has five full bookshelves lined up against a wall in the den, and another three in the spare bedroom (at least she thinks it might still be the bedroom, she can’t actually see a bed).
Leslie pulls one down at random and turns it over to find a bar-code for the Vigo County Public Library on the back, a collection notice shoved into its pages.
It’s twelve years overdue.
The realization makes her laugh, and then it hits her. All the stuff, all the things, all the paper and clutter and mess that made her feel safe when she never understood why.
It’s was her dad’s mess, her dad’s memory. It was his desk that always spilled over and drove her mother insane, his stacks of books on the coffee table and his piles of newspapers in the garage.
God she is so Robert Knope’s daughter.
Still holding the book, she sits down on the floor, drops her head to her knees. And even though she’s never thought of herself as particularly religious, she feels like if there’s a chance he can hear her, it would be here. It would be now. Among his books and his stuff, holding this small rebellion in her hands.
And there’s so much she wants to say. So many things she never said or didn’t say enough or said all the time, but she just needs to say again, that she can’t seem to find the words for any of them. So eventually she stops trying, stops worrying about the language and the tense and the syntax, and just thinks about him.
Thinks about riding on her dad’s shoulders at the Harvest Fesitval. Getting sick on too much cotton candy and kettle corn, and begging to do it all over again tomorrow. (‘I love you’)
Thinks about sitting at the kitchen table as her father reads the comic strips out loud complete with voices, and her mother laughs in way Leslie had almost forgotten she could. (‘We miss you’).
Thinks about standing at the top of the stairs the night before her high-school graduation listening to her parents talk through books and tuition and how they’re going to split the cost of the surprise trip to D.C. they’ll give her the next day and never once hearing ‘it’s too expensive’ or ‘I’m not paying for that’. (‘Thank you’)
Thinks about going with him to her cousin’s wedding in South Carolina seven years ago and watching him toast his godson with words too eloquent for someone who left his wife, and resolving if she ever got married she’d walk down the aisle alone. (‘I’m sorry’).
Listens to Ben rummaging around in the spare bedroom, trying to make sense of her father’s financial recordkeeping or lack thereof, and thinks about phone-calls she never made. (‘Daddy I’m in love with a boy. I think you would have liked him.’)
---
She’s still sitting there when Ben emerges an hour later, shirt-sleeves rolled up, shoebox in hand. What had been one book has grown in to stacks. Paper-back mysteries and hardback biographies. There’s old dime-store westerns and beaten-up, leather-bound classics like ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’. He’s kept a copy of every text-book he’s ever taught from, and she gets lost in the tiny chicken scratch of his handwritten notes about terms she’s long since forgotten.
Ben comes over and sits down on the floor across from her using the side of the couch as a backrest. He nudges one of her feet with his own and she shifts her legs a little so his knee can slip between hers and hers between his, locking them together like puzzle pieces.
“How you doing?”
She hands him one of the biographies of Truman with a smile, “Read that.”
Ben takes it and traces his finger until he finds the underlined quote, reads aloud “I learned that a great leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do and like it.” Turns the book a little and reads her father’s margin note, “Send this one to Leslie.”
He looks up. “Did he?”
She shakes her head. “No, but there were others. There are at least ten in that book alone. I remember getting some of them.”
“You should keep the ones that have writing in them.”
“I think they all do. At least I haven’t found one yet that doesn’t. It’s as if he used whatever he was reading like an appointment book. There’s a telephone number in Treasure Island and a grocery list on the back-page of an Agatha Christie novel.”
He laughs and turns to set the Truman biography up on the couch. “Well, keep this one at least. We’ll have to sort through the others.”
That makes her sigh and she leans her head back against the shelves to look up at her father’s books. “I didn’t think it would be this hard. Figuring out what to keep and what not to. It feels like I’m trying to decide what pieces of him are important.”
“I know. But-” he leans forward to take one of her hands, “Try to think about it this way. You’re not really keeping things. You’re keeping memories. So you just need to choose whatever holds those memories for you.”
“Like a pensieve.”
Ben tilts his head in confusion then places the ‘Harry Potter’ reference and smiles. “Like a pensieve.”
---
Sunday morning rolls around without her realizing what day it is (everything’s started to blur together). They’re nowhere near anything resembling packed up, but Ben had the bright idea on Saturday to start fresh with the kitchen, which turns out to have far fewer memories and less difficult decisions. And there’s something cathartic about scrubbing the refrigerator clean and dropping off boxes of canned goods at the food pantry, so it’s all starting to feel a little less impossible.
She can’t bring herself to sleep in her father’s house yet, so they’re still leaving every night to go back to the hotel. And every evening Ben walks her to her room and puts a different Jimmy Stewart movie from her father’s dvd collection into his laptop and lets her fall asleep in his arms. And every morning they pretend it was an accident and he gets up to go shower and change in a room he hasn’t slept-in in four days.
Except Sunday morning he doesn’t get up so quickly, just lies there wrapping a strand of her hair idly around one finger, thinking. Leslie shifts a little, rolling onto her stomach so she can look up at him, and her hipbone scrapes one of the belt loops of his now thoroughly rumpled khakis. She frowns, “You need to stop sleeping in those, and you need to do laundry.”
He quirks his lips. “About that-”
That grabs her attention, and for a second she thinks he’s going to tell her this thing they’re doing, this pretense has to stop, and she panics because she’s not ready for it to, not yet. But his eyes aren’t quite that serious and his hand is still playing absently with her hair, and she somehow manages not to assume the worst.
“Yeah?”
“I need to go back to Indy for a day or two. There are some meetings I couldn’t reschedule because of the holiday.”
That takes her a second and then she realizes Thanksgiving is this Thursday.
Thanksgiving when she drives up and back to Terra Haute in one day and eats omelets and pancakes on tv trays while watching ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ and ‘A Christmas Story’. Thanksgiving when she helps her father put up a twenty-year-old fake tree that looks every second of its age and puts on reindeer antlers and opens badly wrapped Christmas presents a month early.
Her dad’s stupid, haphazard, perfectly, imperfect Thanksgiving that she’ll never have again.
It’s like a knife in her gut, and just that fast she’s bleeding out.
Ben picks up on it immediately, sits up a little. “Leslie? Leslie, what is it? What did I say?”
She can’t catch her breath enough to tell him.
“Okay, okay.” He runs a hand up and down along her back, and brings them both to a sitting position so she can get more air, calm down a little. “This isn’t about me leaving is it? Cause I was going to ask if you wanted to come or at least suggest you go back to Pawnee so you’re not here by yourself.”
Leslie shakes her head, takes a shuddering breath and then another. Finally finds her voice, “It’s Thanksgiving on Thursday.”
It doesn’t take him more than a split second to put the pieces together. “And that was your Dad’s holiday?”
She nods. “It was our Christmas, too.”
“Do you want to go back to Pawnee?”
Leslie thinks about it for a few minutes trying to imagine the prototypical Thanksgiving with a turkey and all the trimmings around Ann and Greg’s table. Tries to imagine going to the spa with her mother and her girlfriends. Tries to imagine something that doesn’t include her father. Doesn’t succeed.
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Ben thinks for a few minutes, hand still running up and down her back, finally offers, “Okay, how about we do this? Come back to Indy with me for a few days. I think it would do you good to get away from all this for a little while anyways. You can hang out with Diane and play with Harrison and start looking for a sublet for when the term starts. Then if you want to go home for Thanksgiving you do that and if you want to stay with me I’ll cook you whatever you want and if you want to come back here and have your dad’s Thanksgiving we can do that too. Whatever you want, we’ll do. How does that sound?”
Leslie nods, “Yeah, that um, that sounds good.”
---
They drive to Indianapolis separately and between Ann and then Ben it’s the first time she’s been truly alone since she got the call about her father.
Leslie turns up the volume on her music and tries not to think about it too much. And the farther she gets from Terra-Haute the easier it becomes. Somewhere in the back of her head she can feel the sadness, the loss hiding there waiting to jump out at her when she least expects it, but for the moment she almost feels . . . normal.
Diane’s waiting for them at the townhouse with Harrison and takeout Thai food that gets cold when Ben’s dog demands at least an hour’s worth of solid petting as payment for having been abandoned for so long. And when they all finally crowd around the table Diane immediately starts asking about the election and her plans for when the Assembly goes into session in January and how much money she can afford to spend for a sublet, and for three whole hours Leslie doesn’t think about her father at all.
When she realizes that, it almost feels like a betrayal, but she tells herself her dad wouldn’t have wanted her to live her life in stasis, and tries to think of it as a positive step.
Still that night, when she stands in the middle of Ben’s too-silent guestroom, staring at the empty day-bed, all she can think is she’s not ready for this.
There’s the sound of water shutting off, then the sudden spill of light as Ben opens the door to the bathroom. Leslie moves to the doorway of the guestroom just as he’s stepping out into the hallway and he freezes at the sight of her.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” she whispers back. Someday maybe they’ll find a new way to start a conversation, but honestly she kind of hopes they don’t.
“Can’t sleep?”
She shakes her head, “Haven’t tried yet. It’s stupid. I know.”
“No. It’s not.” Ben glances over at his bedroom at the end of the hall and then back down at where his hand is still on the bathroom door handle. And she can see him considering the question, trying to figure out what he wants to do. And it doesn’t matter that they’ve been sleeping together for the past four nights, this is different. It’s his house, his bed, and he’s tousled and freshly showered and wearing pajamas for the first time in half a week and there’s absolutely no way they could pretend this was anything other than exactly what it is.
And she feels horribly stupid and selfish for putting him in this position. Because he’s given her so much, so willingly, she shouldn’t be looking for more. Because it’s probably time she starts to stand on her own two feet again.
So she lets him off hook and reaches out to shut her door with a quiet. “Good night, Ben Wyatt.”
He looks up at her, and she can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed or both.
“Good night, Leslie Knope.”
She closes the door. Stands there for a long time, listening for the sound of him walking back down the hall, the click of his bedroom door.
It doesn’t come.
Instead she hears him move closer, sees the shadow of his feet in the sliver of light spilling through the crack at bottom of the door, and she puts her hand to the hollow pressboard, imagines him doing the same.
Finally after a long moment, he steps away, and Leslie goes to curl up on the bed.
A few minutes go by and the silence is just starting to crawl inside her head and feel oppressive, when there’s a soft knock, and Ben’s whispering, “Leslie?”
Getting up, she walks back over and opens the door part way to find him kneeling there with Harrison.
He looks up at her. “Hi. Sorry for bothering you, but Harrison wanted to know if he can sleep with you tonight.”
God, she is so in love with this man.
---
Coming with Ben to Indy proves to be a good decision. It’s a practice run, a half-step back into the real world without the full immersion.
Leslie doesn’t sleep well, but with Harrison at her feet she does sleep, and it feels like a kind of victory. And when she gets up the next morning to find Ben standing in the kitchen fully dressed in suit-coat and tie, drinking a cup of coffee as he scrolls through emails on his phone, there’s only the smallest twinge of panic at the prospect of spending the morning alone with her thoughts.
It’s actually kind of nice. Kind of normal. She walks Harrison and does a load of laundry and reads the papers for the first time in a week. It makes her realize how much she’s missed, how far behind she is, and when Ben comes back that afternoon it’s to find her sitting at the dining table, scratching out page after page of notes.
He sits down at the other end without a word and goes back to the unenviable task of trying to sort through her dad’s financial records.
It’s dark by the time they stop, and Leslie’s so tired she feels like she’s run a marathon. But it’s not the hollowed out, empty tired that’s been plaguing her, it’s a good kind of tired, an accomplished kind. The kind she remembers from what feels like a lifetime ago.
And for the first time she thinks ‘okay,’ thinks ‘I’ll get through this.’
---
On Tuesday Ben calls her around lunch, voice tinged with an excitement that almost approaches giddy. “Hey, what are you doing this afternoon?”
The question makes her laugh, because he asks it like she could possibly have something truly important going on even though they both know Madison is under strict instructions from Ann not to put a meeting on her schedule until after the holiday. “Well I’m supposed to go play fetch with Harrison in an hour.”
“Yeah, blow him off.”
“And why would I do that?”
“I have a surprise for you.”
Idly she drags her finger through the circle of condensation her water-glass has left on the countertop, turning it into a heart, feels immediately silly and wipes it away with her hand. “With an offer like that how can I refuse?”
Ben picks her up around one and immediately drives them back downtown, parks in his office’s garage. And she’s about to tease him about being a workaholic, when he takes her hand and turns right instead of left.
And suddenly she’s standing at the steps of the Statehouse.
“You didn’t.”
Except he did.
“They’re out of session right now. I made a few calls.” he smiles that self-satisfied little boy smile at her incredulous delight, like he’s just given her the world on a platinum chain.
And in a way he has.
“Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”
He takes her through the halls, showing her the clerk’s office, legislative services, all the committee rooms. He’s only familiar with the chairs of the committees with some tax or financial authority, but he does his best to tell her what he knows. Finally he leads up to the third floor and pushes open the door to the floor of House Chamber.
And even though she’s seen it a couple of times from the gallery above, it’s different walking onto floor, knowing she belongs here.
She belongs here.
Her. Leslie Knope, Deputy Director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Pawnee who eight years ago wanted nothing more than to turn a pit into a park.
Mom? Dad? Look at your little girl now.
Ben takes both her hands in his and walks slowly backwards down the aisle stopping midway up the rows, pulls out one of the chairs. “Reserved for District Seventy-Three. Take a seat Madam Representative.”
Leslie lets out a long breath. Runs her fingertips along the scarred grain of the wood, the cracked leather of the chair, memorizing it. Savoring it. Finally she closes her eyes and lowers herself into the seat. Her seat.
For next two years she will sit here and do her best to represent her people because she asked them to trust her and they said yes. And she can’t think of anything better in the entire world.
And she realizes what she’s thinking, how she’s thinking. About herself, about her future, all the things she had before her father’s death. They’re still here. She still has them. She still wants to do them all.
She looks up at Ben perched on the corner of the next desk over gazing down at her with so much pride and joy and something that maybe, just maybe, could be love.
“Thank you. For this. For everything really.”
He smiles. “You’re welcome. Always.”
Maybe it’s the fact she’s sitting here and thinking about how she was just elected two-weeks ago and it seems like a lifetime. Or maybe it’s the way he says ‘always’ when she’s still not sure that’s true. Or maybe it’s the fact she really wants to kiss him and she doesn’t know if she’s allowed. Whatever it is, she’s suddenly very conscious of the fact she’s three days past the deadline.
And she’s barely thought about any of it. Barely had a chance to catch her breath.
For a moment she considers not saying anything. Ben doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to bring it up, and she thinks he’d probably let them continue in this strange half-relationship indefinitely if that was what she wanted.
The problem is she wants more.
And the problem is she hasn’t had half a second to think about what she wants.
But with every second she’s with him, every grand gesture and ordinary moment, she can feel herself falling harder, sinking deeper until it might scar her forever if she decides she can’t give him what he wants, but it is absolutely going to kill if she goes on like this only to discover he doesn’t want her at all.
“Hey where’d you’d go?”
She drops her head, not certain she can do this if she’s looking at him. “We’re past our deadline.”
Ben sighs, and shakes his head. “Leslie, don’t- don’t worry about that right now.”
“I don’t have an answer for you.”
“I know. I don’t want you to.” He reaches out and takes her hand, runs his thumb along the inside of her wrist, tracing the edge of his watch. “I think you need to get your feet back under you right now, and I think you need to be able to lean on people without feeling like you owe them anything. And I want you to keep feeling like you can lean on me. I don’t want you to promise me something because you can’t take another loss right now. And I don’t want to ever have to wonder about why you gave me the answer you did. So I’m just- I’m here. No expectations, no strings attached. Okay?”
Leslie groans and drops her forehead to the back of his hand. It’s the most wonderfully selfless thing anyone’s ever done for her and she’s about to ruin it by being horribly selfish.
Ben moves from the table to crouch down in front of her. “Leslie it’s okay. I’m serious. You don’t owe me anything.”
She shakes her head, “It’s not that. That’s wonderful. You’re wonderful.” She groans again, “Too wonderful. And I’m an awful person.”
“Okay I’m lost.”
Leslie sits up, extracting her hands from his grasp so she can press the heels of her palms to her eyes. “I need to um, I need to ask you if you’ve made a decision.”
That makes him go still for a moment, and looks down at where his hand is now resting against her knee for balance. “Ah.”
Still he doesn’t immediately break off physical contact, and that gives her hope.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this to you. Really I didn’t. Not after- I wanted to be the one who asked you to say yes this time. But- I just- I think I want you come back to Terra-Haute with me for Thanksgiving and eat pancakes instead of Turkey and watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and help me put up a tree in my father’s house one last time. And if you think there’s a chance that even if my answer’s yes, yours is still going to be no. I need to know that now. I need to get some distance now or I won’t-” She breaks off and sighs, “I’m so sorry, Ben.”
He doesn’t say anything for what feels like hours, but really might only be a few seconds. Finally without looking up, he murmurs, “It’s not no.”
“It’s not?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not even really a maybe.”
She swallows, and hopes the process of elimination hasn’t steered her wrong. “Does that mean it’s a ‘yes’?”
Ben wobbles his hand back and forth. “It’s a potential yes. A qualified yes. Let’s call it ‘yes’ with a caveat.”
She didn’t know it was possible to fly and fall all at the same time. “What’s the caveat?”
He reaches out and takes both her hands with a sigh, runs his thumbs along her knuckles. “You’re not the only one who didn’t want to do it this way. I know what I did last time scared you. I know you felt like I was putting all the responsibility on you. And probably I was wrong to do it the way I did, but the fact was, still is, I can’t commit to this without knowing you’re committed in the same way. So the caveat is this-I can’t be a convenient thing. I can’t be the bonus prize that’s nice to have but only if it works with everything else. I get a say in your life, your decisions, just the same way I’ll give you a say in mine. And two-years from now when you sit down to decide if you’re going to run again or seek different office or quit politics entirely and go climb Everest, you’ll do it with me, we’ll talk about what makes sense for us and we’ll make that decision together. But this, us-” He looks up at her and puts a hand on her cheek, “We have to be the non-negotiable point. That’s my caveat.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s kind of a big caveat.” he whispers with a smile. Then gets serious again. “But I meant what I said earlier. I don’t want you making any decisions about that right now. For the moment I’d still like it if you’d let me be here for you, however you need. And I don’t want you to feel obligated or like you owe me anything, I just-” he brings his other hand up to her hair, tangling his fingers in the strands, and looks up at her, “Leslie, I’ll do whatever you want right now, but let me take care of you, please?”
She smiles at him, swallowing back her tears, because she’s cried too much this past week, and she’s absolutely too happy to do it right now.
“What if I wanted was to kiss you right now? Just once?”
He blinks, splutters, “On the House Floor?! Isn’t that kind-of-”
But there’s just the hint of a smile in his eyes, and his protests might not be a yes, but they’re definitely not a ‘no,’ and she’s sitting on the floor of the Indiana State House and she feels like she can do anything.
So Leslie leans over in her chair and does it anyway. Presses her lips to his like a promise, like a vow. Soft and swift and sweet.
Ben lets her.
---
( Part 4e)
Word Count: ~9,900
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: Up through 3x08 "Camping"
Author's Note: I don't even know anymore. I think it's just one more, but I thought that two parts ago.
Previous
There’s about three seconds after she processes what the man on the phone is saying when she doesn’t believe it, when she’s convinced there’s been some kind of horrible mistake, some awful mix-up. That he’s talking about some other Robert Knope. That her father’s not dead.
Because he can’t be dead. He can’t be dead because she was just going to call him. Because just a few days ago she was sitting on a jungle gym and thinking about all the questions she still needed to ask him.
He can’t be dead because she hasn’t asked them yet.
Because she was supposed to have more time.
There’s a pause on the end of the line and then a gentle, “Ms. Knope?”
It pulls her back, and drags her down, plunges her into the ice-water reality. Her father is dead. Her dad, her daddy. He’s gone, and she’s drowning.
She takes a shuddering, gasping breath, scrambling for air. “Yes, yes I’m here.”
“I’m sorry for this, but there are a few questions I need to ask you.”
Leslie listens as the man starts going through questions she doesn’t know the answers to-“Did you know if your father had any specific wishes about how his body would be handled?” (She doesn’t. Why would she?) “Would you like us to give you the name of some funeral homes?” (Yes? What other answer is there?) “Is there anyone you’d like us to call?” (Oh god, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know her father’s friends or who he worked with or if he had a lady friend. How is she supposed to find that out? Oh god, how is she going to tell her mother?).
And she can feel everything start to rise to overwhelm her, and then just as quickly it’s like her mind’s pulled an emergency brake, hit a panic button. Like her brain has willfully disconnected itself from her body, and shoved everything back, locked it down so she can function, so she can work.
“There is some paperwork you’ll have to come fill out here. Your contact information indicates you live out of town. When do you think you’ll be able to make arrangements to come in? We can make an appointment.”
That one she at least can answer or try to answer. She presses the heels of her palms against her closed eyelids and tries to think. Let’s see an hour to pack up and call Madison, call Ann. She’ll have to track her mother down and somehow tell her. She can’t do that over the phone, can she? No. No, of course not. Where is Marlene usually on Saturday mornings? Is that the literacy group or the woman’s caucus? God, she doesn’t want to do this in a public setting. Why can’t her mother be like normal retired people and take up gardening? And then inexplicably she has a flash of Marlene Griggs-Knope on her hands and knees complete with power-suit and broach pulling weeds, and she can’t help the tiny hiccup of inappropriate laughter that escapes her like a sob.
“Miss?”
No right, refocus, she pushes that down. An hour to talk to her mother, on the road by say noon? Is noon realistic? Does she have gas in her car? Say noon. Then it’s what, almost a three hour drive to her father’s house?
Only she’s not going to her father’s house, is she?
“I’m sorry, um, which hospital did you say you were calling from?”
“Terre Haute Regional.”
“Oh. Is that- Is that north or south of the city?”
“We’re right near the interstate.”
Okay closer than her father’s house, then.
“Um, two-thirty? Three o’clock? I can be there by then.”
“I’ll make the appointment. Forgive me for asking this, but do you have anyone who can accompany you? Maybe a spouse or a friend? Someone who can look out for you at this time. We find it’s often helpful to the families to have an extra set of ears when making these arrangements.”
She thinks of Ann. Ann who’s been sleep-deprived for a week tending to her sick daughter and she can’t call with this. But who will, of course, be the first person she calls with this. She thinks of Madison, who is many things, efficient and capable, but comforting is not one of them. She thinks of Ben, who she’s not supposed to be calling at all, and immediately shoves that thought aside.
“Yeah, I’ve, um, I’ll find someone.”
---
It’s Ann.
Of course, it’s Ann.
Ann who barely lets Leslie get the words ‘my father’s died,’ out of her mouth before she’s over at her house with a file folder of internet research on Terre Haute funeral homes, and packing an overnight bag, while Leslie tries to track down her mother.
Marlene sends her to voicemail twice and then turns off her phone, obviously in the middle of something she doesn’t think can be interrupted. And even though there’s absolutely no reason for her mom to know what’s going on, Leslie finds herself growing more and more frustrated with every wall and roadblock she hits. Until for the first time in recent memory, she is actually truly angry with her mother. Because she’s supposed to be retired, because it’s just work and Leslie’s her daughter, and why can’t she just once, just one damned time step out of whatever meeting she’s in and pick up her fucking phone because her daughter needs to talk to her.
By the time she does get her mother on the restaurant phone, when she finally remembers where the women’s caucus was meeting for brunch this month, she’s wound coil-spring tight. And everything goes horribly wrong.
Marlene answers with an abrupt, “Really Leslie, Marcia Langdon is trying to get everyone to support a petition to revisit the banning ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as promoting witchcraft and debauchery. You know how long and hard I worked to get that ban lifted the first time round. What’s so important that it couldn’t wait?”
“Dad’s dead.”
Silence.
Leslie bends forward on the couch and buries her face in her hands. God she can’t believe she just did that. Why did she just do that? She was supposed to ask her mother to come over. Supposed to sit her down and break the news gently, not pack it with all her own anger and regret and pain and fire it at her mom like a bullet.
Only Marlene’s still not saying anything, not even a muffled sob, and it doesn’t matter that she hasn’t cried yet either, Leslie can feel it all start to build again.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Finally Marlene finds her voice and it’s as business like and professional as always, “When?”
“This morning.”
“What happened?”
“Heart attack.”
There’s a sigh. “He never ate correctly. Man had a sweet tooth the size of Texas. And the eggs. Oh dear god the eggs.”
“Mom-”
“I’m sorry sweetheart but it’s true. Nothing but red meat and breakfast food, and he would hide chocolate all over the house. I tried to get him to at least cut back on the eggs, but-”
“Stop it. Mom, just stop it!”
That seems to snap her back. “No, right, of course- So you’ll- I suppose you’ll go up and make the funeral arrangements?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to call you before I left.”
“Would you like me to come with you?”
The question throws her for a loop, because she’d never expected her mother to make the offer because when all is said and done this is still her ex-husband, the man who left over twenty-years ago. And it’s horrible but at the moment, Leslie can’t think of anything she wants less than to sit in a car for three hours watching her mother successfully hold it together. “No, I’ve, um, I’ve got it. Ann’s going to come with me. She’s a nurse so she knows her way around the hospital paperwork anyway.”
“Oh. Yes. It’s always a good idea to have someone with expertise in the system. Well then, you’ll take care of calling everyone?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll need to let the papers know when the service is. People will want to come pay their respects since he was your father. Particularly so soon after the election.”
She hadn’t even thought about it, but the next thing she knows she’s making a decision all the same. “No. No. Put a notice in the paper if you want, but I’m going to have the service up in Terre Haute. Where he lived. Where his friends were.”
And her voice must be a little harsher than she intends because Marlene pauses, nonplussed, then says, “Well, it sounds like you have everything under control. I should- I should get back in there before Marcia Langdon wins this simply because no one wants to stand up to her.”
“God, Mom, just-”
Her mother cuts her off, with a brittle snap. “It was your father’s favorite play, Leslie. It was his favorite play.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It made him laugh,” Marlene murmurs half to herself.
Yeah it did. Leslie remembers now. “Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Don’t let her win.”
---
The next few days feel like they go by in an absolute blur. Like she’s holding herself together with paper and pen-ink and important details that feel totally inconsequential. But she’s always been good at this, at organization and logistics, at putting together events and making them special, making them memorable.
Her father’s funeral can’t be the one time her talent fails her.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t lose it. She does. The first time happens when she gets to the hospital and goes to identify herself to the front desk only to have a heavyset man about her father’s age get up from a chair in the waiting-room to come introduce himself with a soft, “You must be Leslie. I’m John. I was out birding with Robert when it happened.”
And she’s so grateful to find out her father didn’t die alone, that he wasn’t simply discovered in his house by a delivery man or a cleaning lady that he died doing something he loved, something that made him happy, that she throws her arms around this man. Around this stranger she’s never met who knows her on sight, and finally, finally cries.
John turns out to be a friend from work. The head of the high-school’s science department. Widowed at a forty. As the only two single middle-aged men in a land ruled by women, he and her dad apparently forged a bond that lasted through school transfers and a late remarriage on John’s part.
It is immediately apparent that John is her father’s Ann (was her father’s Ann. God she’s never going to get the tense right). He’s soft-spoken, but loquacious, telling her how Robert always talked about her, about his daughter with her brilliant ideas and her big heart.
“Of course, that’s no surprise given who your father was.”
Except it is a surprise. Because as much as she loved her father, for all the good and wonderful things she saw in him, Leslie never saw herself.
“Tell me.”
It’s all the invitation John needs to talk about his friend. It’s an odd thing to sit in a hospital waiting room and meet her father through a stranger. To have something as simple and basic as the fact Robert Knope taught high-school math for almost forty-years brought vibrantly alive, transformed into a quiet epic in the mirror of someone else’s admiration.
Her father developed the school’s first advanced calculus curriculum.
Her father ran a contest math team that dominated the state tournaments for ten years.
Her father could teach geometry through art and algebra with architecture.
Her father was still changing his lesson plans up until the very last year. Never settled. Never got complacent.
Her father was passionate. Her father was committed. Her father loved his work and the community he served. Her father believed what he did mattered, and he did it better than anyone.
Her father was all the things Leslie ever tried to be.
And she never knew.
When John’s done, she doesn’t quite know what to say. How to put the gift he’s just given her into words. But she tries all the same.
“Will you give his eulogy?”
John looks taken aback. “I don’t know what I’d say.”
“You already said it.”
---
The funeral happens on a sunny, but cold Wednesday morning.
It’s not a large service. She hadn’t expected it to be. (Her dad comes from a small family, just him and a much older sister who moved to South Carolina to be close to her grandchildren and is now too sick to travel.) But it’s by no means an empty one either.
In his own way. In his own, quiet, unassuming way Robert Knope apparently had just as much impact on his small corner of the community as her mother ever had on Pawnee. There are old teachers her father worked with, and new teachers he mentored. Former students he inspired, and current students he tutored for free. There are three men from his bowling team, and a number of couples from his church.
There’s Greg who brings Abigail and comes to join his poor, tired wife who hasn’t left Leslie’s side in three days.
There’s her mother, who comes into the church and stands there almost at a loss, almost small, until Leslie gets up and goes to hug her, brings her to sit beside her in the front row.
And there’s Ben.
Ben who slips in the back and tries to get lost in the crowd. Ben who she doesn’t see until the service is over. Until people are starting to file out, to make their way to the cemetery, and suddenly there he is, sitting in the far corner unmoving, looking to her for some indication, some sign or signal.
When she pauses in the aisle, he gets up and slowly comes over, still a little hesitant, a little tentative. Stops a foot away, and lifts his hand almost as if to touch her, then drops it, unsure whether he’s allowed.
“Ann called me,” he offers apparently thinking she needs an explanation for his presence. Thinking he needs to apologize for it. “I wanted to come sooner, but I knew she was with you and I didn’t-”
He breaks off, still uncertain, obviously half-convinced he’s done exactly the wrong thing, that he’s somehow made everything worse by being here, upended her equilibrium in some way.
She wants to tell him she doesn’t have an equilibrium to upend right now.
Still maybe he has. Maybe tomorrow or the next day or the day after that Leslie will wake up and wish he hadn’t come, wish he hadn’t made himself so available to lean on when their entire relationship is in question, when he might not be around at all a month from now.
But today she’s burying her father, and telling her mother what to do, and everything’s wrong and backwards and nothing’s like it’s supposed to be. And Ben’s here and she just wants to be held, wants it to be him that holds her, and she doesn’t care about much of anything beyond that.
She takes a stuttering half step forward.
It’s all the permission he needs.
Ben wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her to him with a quiet, “Leslie, I’m so sorry.”
And even though she’s heard those same words a hundred times since Saturday, over and over until they feel like the only thing anyone knows how to say anymore, until she thought she’d go crazy if she ever had to hear them again. Out of his mouth, in this moment, they’re exactly right.
---
They don’t say much else, but he stays close after that. Stepping into Ann’s role like a relief pitcher, giving the other woman a chance to breath, to rest, to tend to her own family again.
He leaves his car at the church and rides with them to the cemetery. Stands there beside her as her father’s casket is lowered into the ground. And it’s only when he’s walked back over to the car to leave Leslie alone at the graveside with her mother, and she feels the absence of his palm against hers that she realizes she never asked him to come, never said anything at all.
She simply never let go of his hand.
Marlene looks out over the cemetery to where Ben is standing by the car waiting for them.
“Didn’t he used to work for the city?”
Of all the times to have this conversation.
Still, Leslie has no idea how to start any other conversation, and maybe they both just need to focus on something else for the moment. “Yeah he did, about five years ago.”
“He was part of that state auditing team that came in, wasn’t he?”
Really her mother’s memory for faces never ceases to astonish her. She nods. “That’s what brought him to Pawnee. Then he stayed on for awhile when Chris Traeger became City Manager.”
“I didn’t realize you’d kept in touch.”
There’s something sharp and a little hurt in Marlene’s voice, like she can’t believe Leslie didn’t tell her this. And maybe that’s justified. Her mother’s met every other serious boyfriend Leslie’s ever had. She’s a gauntlet they have to run and not a lot get through (in fact if she thinks about it an astonishing number of breakups came shortly after meeting her mother). Maybe she should apologize for keeping the one man who might have been more important than any other a secret.
She doesn’t. Instead she says. “We just recently got back in touch, but you’ve met him before. He was at my birthday in August.”
Marlene nods like she’s placed him now, then returns to her scrutiny. And Leslie waits for the inevitable list. The bullet-point discussion of his flaws, his failings. He’s too thin, too short, too tall. His handshake is weak, he obviously lacks confidence. His handshake’s too strong, what is he compensating for? He’s too soft with her. He’s not soft enough. And it doesn’t matter that Ben hasn’t said more than ten words to her mother. Marlene Griggs-Knope has judged people and found them wanting based on far less. So when her mother finally opens her mouth what actually comes out blindsides Leslie with the force of a freight train.
“He’s in love with you, isn’t he?”
She’s not actually asking of course, just seeking for confirmation, evaluating the impact. And Leslie’s sure that whatever her mother’s looking for, it’s written all over her face. Because it’s one thing to know Ben’s attracted to her, know he cares for her deeply, but the idea that he might actually be in love with her, might already as far gone as she is? She’s never let herself consider it, never come close to allowing herself to even touch that thought.
Her eyes fly back over to where he’s standing, and she finds herself scouring his face looking for whatever it is her mom sees.
But she doesn’t see anything. No miraculous change or new light. Just Ben. Steady, dependable, constant Ben, waiting for her. Looking at her exactly the way he always has.
Leslie drops her gaze, uncomfortable with that idea for some reason. “I um- I don’t know- maybe. But we’re not- It’s not-” she shakes her head with a sigh, “It’s just not that simple, mom.”
At that her mother looks down at her the freshly turned earth at their feet and sighs, “No, it rarely is.”
That makes her think of all the things she’ll never be able to ask her father, all the questions she left too late. And this has never been a comfortable subject for either of them, and Marlene’s usually such a force of nature, that Leslie doesn’t fight it. But it’s been a long time since she’s seen her mother this vulnerable, and she just- she needs to ask someone.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“You and dad? You loved each other when you got married, didn’t you?”
Marlene nods, her face softening into something that’s almost girlish. “Oh yes. Very much.”
“What happened?”
Her mother shakes her head starts to recall herself, box herself back up. “Leslie, this really isn’t the time.”
“It’s never the right time,” she sighs. It’s the same rationalization they’ve both been using for over twenty years. When one of them is ready the other isn’t interested. They just keep missing each other, keep waiting for a better moment. But she’s done waiting.
She grabs her mother’s hand. “I was going to call dad.” Marlene looks over at her in shock, and Leslie continues, “You know we never talked about it either. I never let him. Then Thursday before he died I was going to call him, and I didn’t. I lost my nerve again. Mom, please?”
Because at the end of the day for all her legendary toughness, for all her barb-wire and steel-plating, her mother is still her mother and Leslie’s still her little girl, it’s the ‘Mom, please’ that does it. Marlene relents with a sigh.
“It wasn’t any one thing, sweetheart. It almost never is.”
“But it started when you got promoted. I remember that. I remember going out to celebrate, and all of us being so happy. And then everything changed. It was like dad hated your job. Hated that you were so successful.”
Marlene purses her lips considering the idea, her hand moving from Leslie’s grasp to tug at the cuffs of her gloves. Then she nods, “He probably did hate my job, eventually.” She takes a long pause and Leslie can see her stealing herself to say what she’s about to. “To be honest I don’t think your father liked who I became after that very much.”
No, he didn’t. Leslie can hear the doors closing and the hushed voices and bitter note in his voice when he told her mommy had to work late. And these aren’t at all the memories she wants right now, but they’re the memories she has. She turns her head away and whispers. “So he just left us?”
“Oh Leslie, no. No, we left each other. Your father may have been the one to move, but we both left. In some ways you could even argue I left first.”
And she doesn’t know what to do with that, so she doesn’t do anything, just stands there and waits for her mom to continue. Eventually Marlene does. “Back then we were both naïve about what it took to succeed at that level, let alone for a woman to do it. Your father even moreso than me. He didn’t have any political ambitions, all he’d ever wanted to do was teach math and be married to the woman down the hall who read Shakespeare out loud to her class.”
“You?”
“Me.” Her mother smiles and Leslie can see the start of tears in her eyes. “I was the one with all the ambition. And I was willing to do whatever it took to fulfill that ambition. I wanted it so much, but I suppose you could say it didn’t always bring out my best side. At least not side your father fell in love with. And of course your father was so set in his ways he refused to change at all. He could be so stubborn that way. Eventually it was like we’d forgotten how to live with each other.”
“But still. He shouldn’t have expected you not to change. Just to stay an English teacher all your life.”
“Probably not. And I probably shouldn’t have expected him to change quite so much. We got married young and I didn’t have the first clue who I wanted to be and your father thought he knew exactly who he wanted to be. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. It worked for plenty of our friends. They grew into themselves together. But I think with any marriage that every once in awhile there’s comes a point where you have to choose that other person again. At some point your father and I simply stopped choosing each other.”
Leslie stares down at the ground at her feet and tries to process her mother’s words. Tries to come to grips with the idea that she had gotten it all right and all wrong at the same time. She’d always known her father hadn’t been happy after her mom was promoted to the school district’s administration, but she’d thought it was because he resented her mother’s success while he just remained a teacher, because he’d given up something for her mother’s dreams.
But It had never occurred to her that the something Robert Knope gave up was the woman he married.
“Why did you do it? If it made dad so unhappy, if you cared about him, why didn’t you quit or change less or try to do something to stop it?”
Marlene shakes her head like Leslie should know better. “Griggs women barrel full speed ahead. Quitting isn’t really in our nature.”
It feels like a life sentence, like a prophecy, and even though she knows it's true, knows she's never going to be the type of person who would be able to walk away from a job half-finished any more than her mother is, knows she doesn't really want to be, instinctively Leslie bristles against it all the same, mutters half to herself. “Maybe it should be.”
Her mother tilts her head and looks over at her with an assessing eye, raises one eloquent eyebrow in inquiry. “This has something to do with that man over there, doesn’t it?”
Leslie doesn’t say anything. Right now she doesn’t want to hear what her mother thinks she should do.
But to her surprise, for once Marlene doesn’t offer any advice or opinions, just looks over at Ben for a very long time and then finally says, “Your father would have liked him. He would have liked the way he looks at you.”
---
Ben takes her back to her hotel after they leave the cemetery. There’s an impromptu wake happening at the bowling alley where her father played his league matches and Leslie pulls out a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt in bright green color she thinks her father would have liked more than black, intending to get changed and go over.
Only she’s so tired.
She toes off her shoes and slumps down on the bed. Hands braced on either side of her, staring straight ahead into nothingness.
It’s over. It’s done.
She’s planned a funeral.
She’s buried her father.
She feels like she should feel something. Should feel more. More grief, more loss, more completion or resolution or sadness or anger or anything really.
And instead all she feels is bone-achingly, soul-crushingly tired and completely at sea.
“Hey,” Ben whispers, coming over to sit beside her on the bed.
Instinctively Leslie slips her hand into his, and drops her head to his shoulder. “Hey.”
They don’t say anything else. Just sit there. Then Leslie closes her eyes, and turns her head to press her face into the curve of his neck, breathing him in on a shuddering inhale. Just taking in the fact that he’s here with her right now, reveling in the closeness the physical connection to someone.
Ben brings his free hand up and combs it through her hair, carding his fingers through the strands until he meets the pins holding up her chignon. One by one he starts to slip them free, undoing her, messing her up. And with every pin he removes, every curl that comes loose, it like he’s taking away little of the rigid control she’s been using to hold herself together for the last few days. Until her hair is unbound, and her composure is gone and quietly, silently she starts to cry.
There’s a shift on the mattress as Ben moves a little, and she can feel his body start to draw away, instinctively clutches at him harder.
“Shhh, it’s okay, I’m not going anywhere, just- just here-” and then he’s scooting behind her on the bed and pulling her to him, letting her curl around him like a small child-arms looped around his neck, face buried in his shoulder, legs tangled together with his, until she feels like she doesn’t know where she stops and he begins.
It’s a nice feeling, and for the first time since her phone rang on Saturday she doesn’t feel quite so lost, quite so untethered. She lowers her hand and undoes two of the buttons on his shirt, slipping her hand underneath it to press her palm over his heart. The steady beat, the warm life of him makes her think about her father again, about how impermanent everything can suddenly become. About time she didn’t have and things she never said and how she’d give anything to change that.
“I love you.”
She says it quietly, softly, but loud enough that she knows Ben can hear it, feels it in the hop-step of his heartbeat under her fingers, the way the muscles of his throat shift as he swallows. And she knows he’s trying to figure out how to respond, what to say to the grief-stricken, crazy woman curled around him, continues before he can. “Don’t- Don’t say anything please. I just- I love you. I don’t think I ever actually stopped. And I know that maybe it’s not fair to tell you right now. That it doesn’t really change anything. It’s all right, I don’t expect it to. But I just, whatever happens, I needed you to know that.”
Ben doesn’t say anything for a beat, just lays there with her, his fingers trailing through her hair. Finally, he says, “I have a lot of vacation stored up. If you wanted, I could, I mean I’d like to-” he tilts her head up a little and brushes a kiss along her hairline, “Leslie, let me be here for you, okay?”
Maybe it’s not an ‘I love you, too,’ but that’s all right. She doesn’t need it to be.
Not right now.
Right now she just needs him.
---
The thing about losing a loved one that no one tells you. The part movies don’t show and people don’t usually write about. The dirty little secret of death in the modern world is that when someone close to you goes, when they’ve left you, they don’t leave a void, they don’t leave a hole or a gaping open space into which you can pour your grief.
They leave paperwork.
They leave releases you have to sign, and to-do lists you have to cross off, and hundred different decisions you have to make at the absolute last time anyone should expect you to make a decision about anything.
People die and they leave a mess behind.
And it’s that mess, that wreckage, that grief comes. You sort through it. You catalog it. You stumble over a joy that had been misplaced. You uncover a hurt that had been left to rot. You go through piles upon piles of meaningless garbage and think it’s all getting better and easier, until suddenly the stack shifts and you cut your heart on the hidden razor blade of some unanticipated memory and you’re bleeding all over again.
People die and their stuff stays.
And someone has to clean it up.
---
In the end the funeral turns out to be the easy part. The hard part comes after.
But that’s the thing isn’t it? The hard part always comes after.
All the rituals, all moments you think of as important, that you build up to-graduations and weddings and baby showers and funerals-they’re just the signage, the landmarks that denote the beginning of the next leg, the start of something new. It’s the hundreds of days that come after, the ordinary, everyday mess of traveling that new path that’s difficult.
It’s not winning the election, but being worthy of the vote.
Not saying ‘I love you’ for the first time, but figuring out what you’ll give to say it thirty years from now.
Not burying your father, but learning to carry his memory without breaking under the weight.
---
Ben goes with her to start packing up her father’s house, and she knows putting her dad’s affairs in order isn’t going to be as simple as she’d hoped when it takes them half a day just to find the key to the safe deposit box.
Robert Knope lived in a small two-bedroom track home from the fifties located within walking distance of the high-school. It’s crammed full of paper and books and old tools he never used and metal signs for places that closed down long ago. The kitchen has a hodge-podge of mismatched plates and plastic cups from the bowling alley, and more pans than one man could possibly need, particularly since there’s almost nothing but takeout containers in the refrigerator and frozen dinners in the freezer.
But that was her father. He liked things, liked stuff. Liked garage sales, and trading posts, and the turkey pan he inherited from his mother even though he wouldn’t know how to cook a turkey if his life depended on it. He has a box of math-team t-shirts dating back to 1979 in one closet and three boxes of college t-shirts from all over the country in another (and she doesn’t understand those until she stumbles across a photo album over a week later filled with group photos of graduating seniors posed in a patchwork of colors and mascots. Almost gets arrested when she tries to get the boxes back from the Goodwill and can’t).
He has financial papers going back ten years shoved into shoeboxes, and desk drawers and in one inexplicable instance an antique safe that doesn’t lock. He has five full bookshelves lined up against a wall in the den, and another three in the spare bedroom (at least she thinks it might still be the bedroom, she can’t actually see a bed).
Leslie pulls one down at random and turns it over to find a bar-code for the Vigo County Public Library on the back, a collection notice shoved into its pages.
It’s twelve years overdue.
The realization makes her laugh, and then it hits her. All the stuff, all the things, all the paper and clutter and mess that made her feel safe when she never understood why.
It’s was her dad’s mess, her dad’s memory. It was his desk that always spilled over and drove her mother insane, his stacks of books on the coffee table and his piles of newspapers in the garage.
God she is so Robert Knope’s daughter.
Still holding the book, she sits down on the floor, drops her head to her knees. And even though she’s never thought of herself as particularly religious, she feels like if there’s a chance he can hear her, it would be here. It would be now. Among his books and his stuff, holding this small rebellion in her hands.
And there’s so much she wants to say. So many things she never said or didn’t say enough or said all the time, but she just needs to say again, that she can’t seem to find the words for any of them. So eventually she stops trying, stops worrying about the language and the tense and the syntax, and just thinks about him.
Thinks about riding on her dad’s shoulders at the Harvest Fesitval. Getting sick on too much cotton candy and kettle corn, and begging to do it all over again tomorrow. (‘I love you’)
Thinks about sitting at the kitchen table as her father reads the comic strips out loud complete with voices, and her mother laughs in way Leslie had almost forgotten she could. (‘We miss you’).
Thinks about standing at the top of the stairs the night before her high-school graduation listening to her parents talk through books and tuition and how they’re going to split the cost of the surprise trip to D.C. they’ll give her the next day and never once hearing ‘it’s too expensive’ or ‘I’m not paying for that’. (‘Thank you’)
Thinks about going with him to her cousin’s wedding in South Carolina seven years ago and watching him toast his godson with words too eloquent for someone who left his wife, and resolving if she ever got married she’d walk down the aisle alone. (‘I’m sorry’).
Listens to Ben rummaging around in the spare bedroom, trying to make sense of her father’s financial recordkeeping or lack thereof, and thinks about phone-calls she never made. (‘Daddy I’m in love with a boy. I think you would have liked him.’)
---
She’s still sitting there when Ben emerges an hour later, shirt-sleeves rolled up, shoebox in hand. What had been one book has grown in to stacks. Paper-back mysteries and hardback biographies. There’s old dime-store westerns and beaten-up, leather-bound classics like ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’. He’s kept a copy of every text-book he’s ever taught from, and she gets lost in the tiny chicken scratch of his handwritten notes about terms she’s long since forgotten.
Ben comes over and sits down on the floor across from her using the side of the couch as a backrest. He nudges one of her feet with his own and she shifts her legs a little so his knee can slip between hers and hers between his, locking them together like puzzle pieces.
“How you doing?”
She hands him one of the biographies of Truman with a smile, “Read that.”
Ben takes it and traces his finger until he finds the underlined quote, reads aloud “I learned that a great leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do and like it.” Turns the book a little and reads her father’s margin note, “Send this one to Leslie.”
He looks up. “Did he?”
She shakes her head. “No, but there were others. There are at least ten in that book alone. I remember getting some of them.”
“You should keep the ones that have writing in them.”
“I think they all do. At least I haven’t found one yet that doesn’t. It’s as if he used whatever he was reading like an appointment book. There’s a telephone number in Treasure Island and a grocery list on the back-page of an Agatha Christie novel.”
He laughs and turns to set the Truman biography up on the couch. “Well, keep this one at least. We’ll have to sort through the others.”
That makes her sigh and she leans her head back against the shelves to look up at her father’s books. “I didn’t think it would be this hard. Figuring out what to keep and what not to. It feels like I’m trying to decide what pieces of him are important.”
“I know. But-” he leans forward to take one of her hands, “Try to think about it this way. You’re not really keeping things. You’re keeping memories. So you just need to choose whatever holds those memories for you.”
“Like a pensieve.”
Ben tilts his head in confusion then places the ‘Harry Potter’ reference and smiles. “Like a pensieve.”
---
Sunday morning rolls around without her realizing what day it is (everything’s started to blur together). They’re nowhere near anything resembling packed up, but Ben had the bright idea on Saturday to start fresh with the kitchen, which turns out to have far fewer memories and less difficult decisions. And there’s something cathartic about scrubbing the refrigerator clean and dropping off boxes of canned goods at the food pantry, so it’s all starting to feel a little less impossible.
She can’t bring herself to sleep in her father’s house yet, so they’re still leaving every night to go back to the hotel. And every evening Ben walks her to her room and puts a different Jimmy Stewart movie from her father’s dvd collection into his laptop and lets her fall asleep in his arms. And every morning they pretend it was an accident and he gets up to go shower and change in a room he hasn’t slept-in in four days.
Except Sunday morning he doesn’t get up so quickly, just lies there wrapping a strand of her hair idly around one finger, thinking. Leslie shifts a little, rolling onto her stomach so she can look up at him, and her hipbone scrapes one of the belt loops of his now thoroughly rumpled khakis. She frowns, “You need to stop sleeping in those, and you need to do laundry.”
He quirks his lips. “About that-”
That grabs her attention, and for a second she thinks he’s going to tell her this thing they’re doing, this pretense has to stop, and she panics because she’s not ready for it to, not yet. But his eyes aren’t quite that serious and his hand is still playing absently with her hair, and she somehow manages not to assume the worst.
“Yeah?”
“I need to go back to Indy for a day or two. There are some meetings I couldn’t reschedule because of the holiday.”
That takes her a second and then she realizes Thanksgiving is this Thursday.
Thanksgiving when she drives up and back to Terra Haute in one day and eats omelets and pancakes on tv trays while watching ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ and ‘A Christmas Story’. Thanksgiving when she helps her father put up a twenty-year-old fake tree that looks every second of its age and puts on reindeer antlers and opens badly wrapped Christmas presents a month early.
Her dad’s stupid, haphazard, perfectly, imperfect Thanksgiving that she’ll never have again.
It’s like a knife in her gut, and just that fast she’s bleeding out.
Ben picks up on it immediately, sits up a little. “Leslie? Leslie, what is it? What did I say?”
She can’t catch her breath enough to tell him.
“Okay, okay.” He runs a hand up and down along her back, and brings them both to a sitting position so she can get more air, calm down a little. “This isn’t about me leaving is it? Cause I was going to ask if you wanted to come or at least suggest you go back to Pawnee so you’re not here by yourself.”
Leslie shakes her head, takes a shuddering breath and then another. Finally finds her voice, “It’s Thanksgiving on Thursday.”
It doesn’t take him more than a split second to put the pieces together. “And that was your Dad’s holiday?”
She nods. “It was our Christmas, too.”
“Do you want to go back to Pawnee?”
Leslie thinks about it for a few minutes trying to imagine the prototypical Thanksgiving with a turkey and all the trimmings around Ann and Greg’s table. Tries to imagine going to the spa with her mother and her girlfriends. Tries to imagine something that doesn’t include her father. Doesn’t succeed.
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Ben thinks for a few minutes, hand still running up and down her back, finally offers, “Okay, how about we do this? Come back to Indy with me for a few days. I think it would do you good to get away from all this for a little while anyways. You can hang out with Diane and play with Harrison and start looking for a sublet for when the term starts. Then if you want to go home for Thanksgiving you do that and if you want to stay with me I’ll cook you whatever you want and if you want to come back here and have your dad’s Thanksgiving we can do that too. Whatever you want, we’ll do. How does that sound?”
Leslie nods, “Yeah, that um, that sounds good.”
---
They drive to Indianapolis separately and between Ann and then Ben it’s the first time she’s been truly alone since she got the call about her father.
Leslie turns up the volume on her music and tries not to think about it too much. And the farther she gets from Terra-Haute the easier it becomes. Somewhere in the back of her head she can feel the sadness, the loss hiding there waiting to jump out at her when she least expects it, but for the moment she almost feels . . . normal.
Diane’s waiting for them at the townhouse with Harrison and takeout Thai food that gets cold when Ben’s dog demands at least an hour’s worth of solid petting as payment for having been abandoned for so long. And when they all finally crowd around the table Diane immediately starts asking about the election and her plans for when the Assembly goes into session in January and how much money she can afford to spend for a sublet, and for three whole hours Leslie doesn’t think about her father at all.
When she realizes that, it almost feels like a betrayal, but she tells herself her dad wouldn’t have wanted her to live her life in stasis, and tries to think of it as a positive step.
Still that night, when she stands in the middle of Ben’s too-silent guestroom, staring at the empty day-bed, all she can think is she’s not ready for this.
There’s the sound of water shutting off, then the sudden spill of light as Ben opens the door to the bathroom. Leslie moves to the doorway of the guestroom just as he’s stepping out into the hallway and he freezes at the sight of her.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” she whispers back. Someday maybe they’ll find a new way to start a conversation, but honestly she kind of hopes they don’t.
“Can’t sleep?”
She shakes her head, “Haven’t tried yet. It’s stupid. I know.”
“No. It’s not.” Ben glances over at his bedroom at the end of the hall and then back down at where his hand is still on the bathroom door handle. And she can see him considering the question, trying to figure out what he wants to do. And it doesn’t matter that they’ve been sleeping together for the past four nights, this is different. It’s his house, his bed, and he’s tousled and freshly showered and wearing pajamas for the first time in half a week and there’s absolutely no way they could pretend this was anything other than exactly what it is.
And she feels horribly stupid and selfish for putting him in this position. Because he’s given her so much, so willingly, she shouldn’t be looking for more. Because it’s probably time she starts to stand on her own two feet again.
So she lets him off hook and reaches out to shut her door with a quiet. “Good night, Ben Wyatt.”
He looks up at her, and she can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed or both.
“Good night, Leslie Knope.”
She closes the door. Stands there for a long time, listening for the sound of him walking back down the hall, the click of his bedroom door.
It doesn’t come.
Instead she hears him move closer, sees the shadow of his feet in the sliver of light spilling through the crack at bottom of the door, and she puts her hand to the hollow pressboard, imagines him doing the same.
Finally after a long moment, he steps away, and Leslie goes to curl up on the bed.
A few minutes go by and the silence is just starting to crawl inside her head and feel oppressive, when there’s a soft knock, and Ben’s whispering, “Leslie?”
Getting up, she walks back over and opens the door part way to find him kneeling there with Harrison.
He looks up at her. “Hi. Sorry for bothering you, but Harrison wanted to know if he can sleep with you tonight.”
God, she is so in love with this man.
---
Coming with Ben to Indy proves to be a good decision. It’s a practice run, a half-step back into the real world without the full immersion.
Leslie doesn’t sleep well, but with Harrison at her feet she does sleep, and it feels like a kind of victory. And when she gets up the next morning to find Ben standing in the kitchen fully dressed in suit-coat and tie, drinking a cup of coffee as he scrolls through emails on his phone, there’s only the smallest twinge of panic at the prospect of spending the morning alone with her thoughts.
It’s actually kind of nice. Kind of normal. She walks Harrison and does a load of laundry and reads the papers for the first time in a week. It makes her realize how much she’s missed, how far behind she is, and when Ben comes back that afternoon it’s to find her sitting at the dining table, scratching out page after page of notes.
He sits down at the other end without a word and goes back to the unenviable task of trying to sort through her dad’s financial records.
It’s dark by the time they stop, and Leslie’s so tired she feels like she’s run a marathon. But it’s not the hollowed out, empty tired that’s been plaguing her, it’s a good kind of tired, an accomplished kind. The kind she remembers from what feels like a lifetime ago.
And for the first time she thinks ‘okay,’ thinks ‘I’ll get through this.’
---
On Tuesday Ben calls her around lunch, voice tinged with an excitement that almost approaches giddy. “Hey, what are you doing this afternoon?”
The question makes her laugh, because he asks it like she could possibly have something truly important going on even though they both know Madison is under strict instructions from Ann not to put a meeting on her schedule until after the holiday. “Well I’m supposed to go play fetch with Harrison in an hour.”
“Yeah, blow him off.”
“And why would I do that?”
“I have a surprise for you.”
Idly she drags her finger through the circle of condensation her water-glass has left on the countertop, turning it into a heart, feels immediately silly and wipes it away with her hand. “With an offer like that how can I refuse?”
Ben picks her up around one and immediately drives them back downtown, parks in his office’s garage. And she’s about to tease him about being a workaholic, when he takes her hand and turns right instead of left.
And suddenly she’s standing at the steps of the Statehouse.
“You didn’t.”
Except he did.
“They’re out of session right now. I made a few calls.” he smiles that self-satisfied little boy smile at her incredulous delight, like he’s just given her the world on a platinum chain.
And in a way he has.
“Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”
He takes her through the halls, showing her the clerk’s office, legislative services, all the committee rooms. He’s only familiar with the chairs of the committees with some tax or financial authority, but he does his best to tell her what he knows. Finally he leads up to the third floor and pushes open the door to the floor of House Chamber.
And even though she’s seen it a couple of times from the gallery above, it’s different walking onto floor, knowing she belongs here.
She belongs here.
Her. Leslie Knope, Deputy Director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Pawnee who eight years ago wanted nothing more than to turn a pit into a park.
Mom? Dad? Look at your little girl now.
Ben takes both her hands in his and walks slowly backwards down the aisle stopping midway up the rows, pulls out one of the chairs. “Reserved for District Seventy-Three. Take a seat Madam Representative.”
Leslie lets out a long breath. Runs her fingertips along the scarred grain of the wood, the cracked leather of the chair, memorizing it. Savoring it. Finally she closes her eyes and lowers herself into the seat. Her seat.
For next two years she will sit here and do her best to represent her people because she asked them to trust her and they said yes. And she can’t think of anything better in the entire world.
And she realizes what she’s thinking, how she’s thinking. About herself, about her future, all the things she had before her father’s death. They’re still here. She still has them. She still wants to do them all.
She looks up at Ben perched on the corner of the next desk over gazing down at her with so much pride and joy and something that maybe, just maybe, could be love.
“Thank you. For this. For everything really.”
He smiles. “You’re welcome. Always.”
Maybe it’s the fact she’s sitting here and thinking about how she was just elected two-weeks ago and it seems like a lifetime. Or maybe it’s the way he says ‘always’ when she’s still not sure that’s true. Or maybe it’s the fact she really wants to kiss him and she doesn’t know if she’s allowed. Whatever it is, she’s suddenly very conscious of the fact she’s three days past the deadline.
And she’s barely thought about any of it. Barely had a chance to catch her breath.
For a moment she considers not saying anything. Ben doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to bring it up, and she thinks he’d probably let them continue in this strange half-relationship indefinitely if that was what she wanted.
The problem is she wants more.
And the problem is she hasn’t had half a second to think about what she wants.
But with every second she’s with him, every grand gesture and ordinary moment, she can feel herself falling harder, sinking deeper until it might scar her forever if she decides she can’t give him what he wants, but it is absolutely going to kill if she goes on like this only to discover he doesn’t want her at all.
“Hey where’d you’d go?”
She drops her head, not certain she can do this if she’s looking at him. “We’re past our deadline.”
Ben sighs, and shakes his head. “Leslie, don’t- don’t worry about that right now.”
“I don’t have an answer for you.”
“I know. I don’t want you to.” He reaches out and takes her hand, runs his thumb along the inside of her wrist, tracing the edge of his watch. “I think you need to get your feet back under you right now, and I think you need to be able to lean on people without feeling like you owe them anything. And I want you to keep feeling like you can lean on me. I don’t want you to promise me something because you can’t take another loss right now. And I don’t want to ever have to wonder about why you gave me the answer you did. So I’m just- I’m here. No expectations, no strings attached. Okay?”
Leslie groans and drops her forehead to the back of his hand. It’s the most wonderfully selfless thing anyone’s ever done for her and she’s about to ruin it by being horribly selfish.
Ben moves from the table to crouch down in front of her. “Leslie it’s okay. I’m serious. You don’t owe me anything.”
She shakes her head, “It’s not that. That’s wonderful. You’re wonderful.” She groans again, “Too wonderful. And I’m an awful person.”
“Okay I’m lost.”
Leslie sits up, extracting her hands from his grasp so she can press the heels of her palms to her eyes. “I need to um, I need to ask you if you’ve made a decision.”
That makes him go still for a moment, and looks down at where his hand is now resting against her knee for balance. “Ah.”
Still he doesn’t immediately break off physical contact, and that gives her hope.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this to you. Really I didn’t. Not after- I wanted to be the one who asked you to say yes this time. But- I just- I think I want you come back to Terra-Haute with me for Thanksgiving and eat pancakes instead of Turkey and watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and help me put up a tree in my father’s house one last time. And if you think there’s a chance that even if my answer’s yes, yours is still going to be no. I need to know that now. I need to get some distance now or I won’t-” She breaks off and sighs, “I’m so sorry, Ben.”
He doesn’t say anything for what feels like hours, but really might only be a few seconds. Finally without looking up, he murmurs, “It’s not no.”
“It’s not?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not even really a maybe.”
She swallows, and hopes the process of elimination hasn’t steered her wrong. “Does that mean it’s a ‘yes’?”
Ben wobbles his hand back and forth. “It’s a potential yes. A qualified yes. Let’s call it ‘yes’ with a caveat.”
She didn’t know it was possible to fly and fall all at the same time. “What’s the caveat?”
He reaches out and takes both her hands with a sigh, runs his thumbs along her knuckles. “You’re not the only one who didn’t want to do it this way. I know what I did last time scared you. I know you felt like I was putting all the responsibility on you. And probably I was wrong to do it the way I did, but the fact was, still is, I can’t commit to this without knowing you’re committed in the same way. So the caveat is this-I can’t be a convenient thing. I can’t be the bonus prize that’s nice to have but only if it works with everything else. I get a say in your life, your decisions, just the same way I’ll give you a say in mine. And two-years from now when you sit down to decide if you’re going to run again or seek different office or quit politics entirely and go climb Everest, you’ll do it with me, we’ll talk about what makes sense for us and we’ll make that decision together. But this, us-” He looks up at her and puts a hand on her cheek, “We have to be the non-negotiable point. That’s my caveat.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s kind of a big caveat.” he whispers with a smile. Then gets serious again. “But I meant what I said earlier. I don’t want you making any decisions about that right now. For the moment I’d still like it if you’d let me be here for you, however you need. And I don’t want you to feel obligated or like you owe me anything, I just-” he brings his other hand up to her hair, tangling his fingers in the strands, and looks up at her, “Leslie, I’ll do whatever you want right now, but let me take care of you, please?”
She smiles at him, swallowing back her tears, because she’s cried too much this past week, and she’s absolutely too happy to do it right now.
“What if I wanted was to kiss you right now? Just once?”
He blinks, splutters, “On the House Floor?! Isn’t that kind-of-”
But there’s just the hint of a smile in his eyes, and his protests might not be a yes, but they’re definitely not a ‘no,’ and she’s sitting on the floor of the Indiana State House and she feels like she can do anything.
So Leslie leans over in her chair and does it anyway. Presses her lips to his like a promise, like a vow. Soft and swift and sweet.
Ben lets her.
---
( Part 4e)