Laundry
Tim Watkins sent Mom love letters from prison. On average, it looked like, about once a month. His last one, sent the day before Ohio zapped him, said, “Well, I’m up to die tomorrow, babe. They’re finally going to plug me in. I love you, goodbye.” We’ll never know if she ever wrote him back, even once, but she sure kept the letters he sent. Every single one, evidently. Jenny and I found them in the basement when we were cleaning out Mom’s place. Way in the back of the utility room, in a set of banker boxes marked, “Laundry.” Laundry I, Laundry II, Laundry III, and so forth.
“Who the hell is Tim Watkins?” I said.
Jenny didn’t know.
I looked at the dates on the envelopes. Once, twice, three times. Then I sat the first several letters out on the utility room floor, in order by date.
“Shit,” I said, “Is Tim Watkins our dad?”
“Daddy was our dad,” Jenny said. She was going through another box, one that had jewelry in it. There must’ve been a million Tim Watkins letters.
“This is all costume stuff.” Jenny held six or seven bracelets in each hand. And she’d draped six or seven big necklaces around her own neck. One had these green polished stones on a thick, silvery rope. Another had hematite crosses.
“Do you remember Mom wearing any of this stuff ever?” she said.
“Jenny.”
“What?”
“Who is Tim Watkins?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted the bracelets. “Where’d all this shit come from?”
There were other things: Photos of her with people we’d never seen, didn’t recognize. On horseback, by the ocean, in front of the Washington Monument. Embossed certificates that said she was an official member of this club, that club, the other. Sermons she wrote. Sermons? Sermons. Compiled in a notebook. What the fuck? We ordered a pizza and the sun went down and by the time we were through, it had basically come back up. The cold sky was rosy in the east.
We locked the door and went outside and hugged in the driveway.
“Mom,” Jenny rolled her eyes. There were tears, and she wiped them off with the backs of her mittens.
“Mom,” I said, and then, “Call me when you get home. Tell Dave and the kids I said hi.”
When I got home, I did a little internet sleuthing on our pal Tim Watkins. He was a wannabe cult leader, some small-time end of the world shit, way out on a farm halfway between Columbus and Cincinnati. He’d stabbed a man and his wife and their three little kids and cut the head off a dog. They fried him before I was born. His picture was in all the papers back then, but he didn’t look a thing like me, thank God.
Paul Luikart is the author of the The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024 and re-leased from Walnut Street Press in 2026), and Nothing Is Haunted Everything Is (Roadside Press, forthcoming in 2027.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He lives with his family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
