The Meteorologist’s Makeup
by Greg Hill
The sun was setting by the time Courtney finally got to the exit and pulled off the highway. The difference in traffic reminded her of summer downpours that appeared out of nowhere, blocked out the sun with their torrents, and then vanished suddenly, leaving the neighborhood stray dogs soaked but too stunned to shake the water from their furs.
All afternoon, the highway had been a slow-moving din of sirens and horns, drivers leaning out of windows looking at containers tied down to roofs of vehicles creeping for miles in both directions. But there was not a single car here, off the highway, none on the road in either direction, not even parked on the side streets.
Courtney drove straight to the overgrown yard at the corner of Fourteenth and Lincoln, and pulled into the driveway. Her father’s Chrysler was thinly dusted with yellow pollen, and the splattering of white on both windshields was evidence that the dogwood tree must have hosted birds, though now not even the telephone lines along Lincoln Street showed any signs of them.
Predictably, the front door was open and the screen door was unlocked. Courtney tossed her keys into the green-glass bowl on the shelf below the television where they clinked loudly with the loose coins at the bottom of the bowl.
“Yuuup!” her father yelled from the backyard, as if the sound of keys hitting coins and glass bowl were Courtney’s way of asking if her father were here.
She took a deep breath, all the smells of the house flooding back to her. “Hey-ya,” Courtney replied to her father, in shorthand he would know meant, Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to use the bathroom and come out and join you in a minute.
“Alright,” her father’s voice answered. “Beer’s in the fridge.”
In front of the bathroom mirror, Courtney leaned over the sink and examined her own face with a mix of curiosity and disgust, as if some part of her expected her to look as youthful as she did when she had lived here. Courtney pulled her fingertips down on her cheeks as if stretching her skin could erase the bags under her eyes.
The thought occurred to her that she hadn’t seen her own face in this particular mirror in over a decade. And until this morning’s phone call, she and her father hadn’t spoken to each other in almost that long.
“Maybe you should stop here,” her father had suggested over the phone. She told him, “Okay.” Then both had hung up.
She also realized she looked like she had been crying. She hadn’t been crying. It just looked like she had been.
The faucet still leaked. She splashed cold water on her face and scrubbed off the on-camera makeup she was still wearing. “Meteorology makeup,” her father had called it when he had driven over to the studio for lunch her first week on the job. She had told him not to come. But she knew how it would look to her new co-workers if she left her father waiting in the reception on the ground floor.
Still focused on the bags under her eyes, she dried her hands on a towel she was sure was even older than she was. She tucked loose locks of brown hair behind her ears, turned and walked to the kitchen.
The photograph was still there, above the little kitchen table, taken when Courtney was in elementary school. Back when her parents were together. When her father’s arms around her shoulders and tugging at her mother’s waist suggested signs of his love for them. When his knuckles were used only for tapping melodies that would play on the radio, and he and Courtney would go back and forth guessing each other’s songs until dinner was ready. It was the only photograph in the house.
Besides the beer — and there were both cans and glass bottles — the fridge was bachelor-bare: a single can of orange soda with the six-pack ring still on it, a bag of baby carrots, two opened ketchups, take-out containers from what looked to be two different restaurants, and one of those yellow boxes of baking soda, ripped open. Otherwise, there was no food. Not that it mattered. Not that the grocery store, or even the gas station over on Tenth, would have anything left. Courtney grabbed two of the bottles.
She walked to the backyard and sat down in a lawn chair next to her father. Both chairs were half-reclined. Normally at this time in the evening, the bugs would be biting like crazy. But the whole yard was still, like a painting.
This was the first time in more than ten years that they were in the same place. He still looked surprisingly healthy for someone his age. His eyes were still deceptively bright. And his hair didn’t appear to have any gray. Like he’s going to live to a hundred, she thought, echoing what her mother had always said on his birthday. Then she shivered and pushed from her mind that mawkish sentimentality, that terrible threat.
She held out both bottles in one hand.
“Makes no difference,” he said to her. She took one bottle back in her other hand. Her father grabbed the remaining bottle, twisted off the cap and threw it across the yard. It landed on a patch of dirt, but kicked up no dust. He took a swig, swallowed, took another, and scratched at his chin.
Courtney stared deep into the fence and trees, then threw her own bottle cap, as if to see if she could move the canvas of the painting they were sitting in. The projectile struck down, somewhere in the patch where there was still grass, and disappeared in it, as if it had never existed at all.
The evening was getting darker now, the clouds on the horizon becoming indistinguishable from sky. Normally, she would have expected the familiar sounds of crickets this time of year, this time of evening. But the only sound was the generator growling around the far side of the house.
Even the low buzz of streetlights were dead silent, the electricity in the entire neighborhood having been out since midday, maybe even morning, Courtney guessed. Nobody would be coming to fix the blackouts. The station had its own backup power generator and she seemed to recall it had kicked on, automatically, some time in the late morning.
She picked at a wet corner of the label on her beer. She could have counted the long seconds of silence. Makes no difference, she thought. She swirled the bottle in little circles, her eyes now focused on Venus sinking in the west and the night’s earliest stars, popping like the first drops of a spring rain shower.
“She called,” her father said, finally.
Courtney put the bottle to her lips.
“Married,” he added. “Up Rhode Island, apparently.”
Courtney’s mother had married again. Not that this should have surprised her. Her father wasn’t her mother’s first husband. Nor her second. Nor third, even. Though he had been her longest marriage. By quite a bit.
“She said so? Rhode Island?” Courtney asked, as if her mother’s location were the most interesting new revelation.
“She said.”
She said. Courtney let that sit in the air between them. Her mother hadn’t said anything to either of them in twenty-two years. No letter, no phone call. One day she was picking the red onions off Courtney’s plate of stir-fry because she knew her daughter wouldn’t want them. The next day all the shoes were gone from the front closet.
“How long didja talk?”
They each took another swig. Courtney counted more stars. “Long enough...” His voice trailed off.
Courtney cleared her throat. “Long enough for what?” she prodded.
Her father drew a long breath, surveyed the sky and scratched his chin again. “To apologize. There’s one.” He was pointing at the sky, finding the first shooting star of the evening.
Even in middle school, Courtney had been old enough to realize her mother eventually would leave her and her father no matter what. Leaving was inevitable. She’d pieced together her mother’s habit of leaving husbands, though she knew nothing of the men themselves, not even their names. No one had ever named them for her.
Courtney knew only the cities her mother had lived in and roughly how long she’d been married before she left each one. Fort Collins: just over three years. Then Bemidji: a year and a half. Then Huntsville: five months, almost. As far as she knew, the cities might as well have been the men’s names. If she’d ever asked, she’d never learned anything else.
Maybe her mother was just flighty. Or fickle. Maybe she bored easily. Maybe she couldn’t settle into patterns. Aside from the pattern of leaving, anyway.
Maybe the men had abused or beaten her. That, at least, would have been a good reason to leave. But as far as Courtney could tell, her father had never beaten her mother. He was violent, she knew. She still had several scars and residual chronic pain on her own back that would have spilled that secret.
Early on, Courtney had decided the beatings were the reason her mother was still around, that she wouldn’t leave if her daughter were still in danger. That’s how she rationalized it, anyway. Not that her mother ever did anything to stop the corporeal assaults she had to know her own daughter endured.
It wasn’t that Courtney sought out conflict, exactly. But she knew how to get the storm brewing inside her father. She knew that low grades at school, or saying anything bad about the Navy or the president, would be met with his rage. As if her father abided some peculiar code, he never touched her face, nor anywhere it would show at school. If a hand did miss its mark, she could always touch up the bruises with makeup. But she never wore a crop top when those were popular in high school. And she never wore a bikini or any two-piece at a beach or pool, even after her mother left, which is when the beatings abruptly stopped.
“Who apologized? You?” Courtney asked, in a tone more biting than she’d intended.
“What? No.” Another meteor streaked across the sky, but neither acknowledged it. “Your mother.” He raised his bottle back to his lips.
“For leaving you?” Courtney caught herself becoming disgusted. “Took more than twenty years. And now? Now?” A third meteor streaked above them. One that felt slower as it broke across the atmosphere.
“You.”
Courtney stopped looking at the sky and turned to her father. “What?” she asked.
“For leaving you.”
Courtney stared at her father, whose gaze continued skyward.
“For, you know...”
No, I do not know.
He shifted in his chair. “Leaving you with me.” He turned his head to face her. For the length of a breath, her brown eyes locked with his. Then they both faced forward again.
“So she called you.” Courtney looked down at the bottle in her hand. She picked at the label again.
“This house still has the same number.”
With no one bothering to repair the grid, or even show up to work, the cell towers and all the phones, including landlines, had stopped working today, around the same time the electricity shut off. She must have called before then. Courtney wondered how much time her father had let pass between getting that call and calling her to suggest she come here.
“She didn’t even know your last name,” her father added.
Courtney had eloped the year after high school. The worst part of her own marriage was that it didn’t even last as long as Fort Collins. Or Bemidji. Or Huntsville. But she wasn’t going to change her last name back to match her father’s. Besides, it was already the name she used on camera and at the station.
The stars appeared to flicker off briefly as a sheet of rain clouds rolled between the stars and the stargazers, then flicked on as the sky cleared again.
That was the end of that conversation. If he had more information, like how long she’d been in Rhode Island, or if she’d lived anywhere else in between, he would, more than likely, swallow it with his beer. Courtney knew the futility of pushing for answers. Makes no difference, she thought again.
Two more shooting stars, one after the other, traced scars across the sky. They started at the same place but fell in different directions.
He wouldn’t say more, Courtney knew, even if she returned to the topic. He had relayed that her mother acknowledged leaving her with him was something worth an apology. This was as close to an apology as he himself was likely to give.
Not that she’d expected one. Nor wanted it. Not since long before that lunch at the food truck her first week on the job. He hadn’t exactly broached apologies or forgiveness in between bites of tacos, but he had hinted, in his own way, that he was proud of her. Maybe even despite how he had treated her.
His comments about the huge glass windows in the lobby and his fawning over the popularity of the action news team co-anchors were his way of acknowledging her new success. But he never outright used words like “proud” or “congratulations” or “sorry.”
And when they were finished eating and were throwing dirty napkins in the trash can tied to the bumper of the taco truck, she had outright told him she hoped he wouldn’t show up at her work ever again. She didn’t look him in the eye. She stared at his belt, then turned and walked back toward the building and its giant glass windows.
Makes no difference. They had stopped being a father and a daughter. At least in what she guessed was a normal way of being a father and a daughter, with inside jokes and pet names, maybe. And laughs and fond memories and sharing fears and hopes. They weren’t that kind of father and daughter. They were a father. And a daughter. That was it.
From the lawn chairs in the backyard, they watched the rate of meteors increase. More every hour. “How long is this shower gonna last?” He kept his gaze up at the stars.
Courtney turned her head back again. She could just about still make out the profile of his face in the dark. “At the station, they said three days. Then comes the big one. It’s gonna hit the Pacific, they say.”
“The Pacific,” her father repeated. For a long moment, he didn’t move or shift his gaze. Finally, he inhaled audibly, held it a briefly, then let out a long, slow breath. “Makes no difference,” he said and wiped away a tear.
Copyright © 2026 by Greg Hill
