Secret Words

Andrea Firth

Word Count 1352

I get my first secret at age five. A gift from my father. Two invented words, three nonsensical syllables in each—secret words all my own to use whenever and however I choose, he says. My father had created one of the secret words for my brother, but at fourteen, he has no interest in our made-up language and passes his word along to me.

Sitting on my dad’s lap that night, my tiny frame tucked into the space between his protruding belly and the edge of his knee, we practice saying the new words between fits of giggles. He drinks a large martini from his favorite tumbler, the one etched with the face of Hawaiian pop singer Don Ho, and we share a pre-dinner snack of the six pimento-filled, green olives from the bottom of his drink. We alternate between speaking in low and high-pitched voices and putting the emphasis on different syllables. When my mother wanders into the living room, my father covers his mouth and mine tightly with his hands, our laughter slipping out between his fingers. She grudgingly plays along and goes back to the kitchen. As she leaves, he whispers, “I don't think she heard us. Whew. That was a close one.” He winks at me. I smile back.

Even now, decades later, my father long gone, I can’t bring myself to share those words on this page. This is our secret.

*

My father is a great idea guy, but money runs through his fingers. With no college education, he builds and loses a newspaper business on his own. Always a positive thinker, he has an unwavering faith that things will be all right in the end. He likes to read motivational self-help books, especially the ones about how to make millions the easy way, which he doesn’t. In contrast, my mother is a planner, a saver, and a realist. She balances her checkbook to the penny each month. Our family’s fragile finances are an impossible course for my mother to navigate. Her screaming and tears can’t fix the trajectory he’s on, and the stress almost leads to the marriage’s demise. Instead, they find a way to live financially separate lives. He keeps his unpaid bills and overdue taxes out of sight, and she looks the other way. The debts pile on. His secrets.

*

When my nephews, my older brother’s boys, reach school age, my father introduces his grandsons to secret words. I’m twenty-seven and home for a visit. The boys, five and seven years old, stand in the living room of my parents’ house, all eyes on their grandfather as he reviews the options. The three of them whisper back and forth, laughing. My brother and I sit on the couch nearby. “These are great words,” my father says, then lowering his voice, “But remember, you have to keep them secret.” He pauses. “Don’t tell your mother.” The boys nod. Like my mother before, my sister-in-law is to be kept in the dark when it comes to secret words. For my father, access requires a blood connection to him. My brother is not in the habit of keeping secrets from his wife. He and I look at each other and shrug. The boys get their secrets.

*

Years later, on a visit home, my mother tasks my husband and me with cleaning out the attic of the house I grew up in. We trudge up and down the creaking wooden stairs carrying boxes filled with family memorabilia and cast-offs. The air is hot and humid and thick with dust from the insulation that hangs loose in the rafters. On my last trip, I notice a green metal box tucked on the side of the stairs. There is no lock on it, and I feel a sense of anticipation as I flick the metal clasps. Nothing but a few folded up pages: a homeowner’s policy and two documents with blue paper backers—my parents’ wills.

I open my mother’s will first. There are pen marks in a few places on the front page, and I recognize her Catholic school script. I read through the first paragraph and stop on the last sentence: “All the residue of my estate including all my tangible real and personal property, including silver, jewelry, clothing, automobiles, collections, furniture, furnishings and any insurance policies thereon, I leave to my spouse if he survives me by 30 days.” My mother has crossed out the word spouse and inserted my name and my brother’s name, added her initials, and dated it June, 1976. Twenty-five years into their marriage, she wrote my father out of her will. I imagine it was done in a fit of anger (not that there would be much to leave). Maybe it gave her a feeling of control in the moment. My mother’s secret.

*

When my twins reach age five, my father is in his early seventies. His hair has turned white, and he’s lost his big belly. Home for another visit, we are gathered in the living room. My father talks quietly to his grandchildren, and I quickly realize what is happening.

“My word is,” says my son, then he cups his little hands around my father’s ear and whispers the rest.

My daughter, who does nothing with restraint, shouts her word out loud. “Sssshhh,” says my father covering her mouth gently. “These are secret words. Remember, you can’t tell...”

But before he can finish, my husband calls the kids over. He’s been listening and is charmed by the idea that their grandfather has created this game of secret words for the kids. “Let’s write down your new words on a piece of paper that I’ll keep so you don’t forget them,” says my husband. The kids whisper the new words in his ear, and he jots them down. He’s trying to be helpful, but he misses the look of frustration on my father’s face. I had never told my husband about my secret words and how secrets worked in my family. My kids get their secrets.

*

My brother and I sit next to each other at the round table in the air-conditioned conference room with a parent on either side, my father to his left, my mother to my right. My father looks pale and frail, worn down by a decade of illness. My mother at 75 is in remarkably good shape. The estate lawyer and paralegal sit across from us and pass papers back and forth for my parents to sign. We’d organized to have their wills updated, the new documents to replace the ones with the blue-paper backing kept in the green metal box. Given their ages, his health, and his debts (my mother still unaware of the details of his financial situation), the lawyer advises that my mother’s will should bypass my father and go directly to my brother and me. My mother’s secret kept safe.

*

After my father’s funeral, we reminisce about the quirky things that made my father, my father. How he could remember the license plate numbers of all the cars he had ever owned, how he could memorize long lists of things, into the hundreds—a great party trick, and how he could draw anything.

My father used to play a game called scribble art with us, our cousins, our kids. He’d have a large pad of paper and a thin black marker. He’d let each kid draw a single line in any configuration on the page. “Here make a scribble,” he’d say. Then he’d turn the scribble into a lion with a curly mane, or an archer with a bow in flight, or a hippopotamus emerging from the water, or a pitcher tossing a ball from the mound. Like a magician he’d make something from nothing.

Years later, my husband comes across that scrap of paper with two faded words written on it tucked away in his wallet. I text my kids, now 22, and my nephews, 34 and 32. “Do you remember your secret words from Grandfather? Can you send them?” My phone pings back almost instantly and again three more times. Family secrets.

Andrea is a writer and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an Editor at Brevity Blog and cofounder of Diablo Writers’ Workshop. Andrea was a finalist for The Missouri Review's 2021 Perkoff Prize in nonfiction. You can read her work at her website and find her on Instagram.