Father of the Rain (28 page)

My father gets in the car and lets out a long breath.

I start the engine and pull out into the street.

“I tell you, no one’s got it easy, that’s for sure.”

I look at him. There is pain on his face, pain for someone else. My father is feeling compassion.

The dashboard starts beeping.

“What the fuck is that?”

“It wants you to put on your seatbelt, Dad.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Is it going to tell me when to piss, too?”

He leans toward me to snap in the buckle—it’s tricky, you have to go in at just the right angle. He groans, then gets it, then says, “What’s that smell?”

“I don’t know.” The Datsun is old and has lots of smells.

“Food or candy or something.”

“Fried dough?”

“Disgusting. You’re eating that crap before dinner?”

“Two fat slabs of it.”

“Just like your mother,” he says. He’s right. I’d forgotten that. It’s just like her.

We pass Neal’s lit windows, then the carnival. The Ferris wheel makes its big turns. A feeling is pooling inside me, flooding my chest and up into my throat and down the backs of my calves. It’s a minute or so before I recognize it. Happiness.

My father
plings
across the linoleum in his golf spikes. He can’t find his five-iron.

“That goddamn Frank musta swiped it.”

He goes to look in the mudroom again.

“That kid was never any good. I don’t care what kind of snazzy job he has now or how many zeros he gets in his paycheck. He stole my fucking golf club!” He clenches his fists. His face is bright red. The dogs dance around him, misunderstanding his excitement.

I know I’ve seen the striped rubber handle of a golf club somewhere. Then I remember. “It’s in the poolhouse.”

“What?” he says, but he’s remembering it, too.

He marches across the grass and returns with it. I can tell he wishes he hadn’t found it. It makes him madder. “Now I’m late. Now I’m really late.” But in fact he’ll still be early to the club. Tee off isn’t till nine.

When the dogs have returned from chasing his car down the driveway, they clamber around me while I unload the dishwasher, waiting for our walk. Just as I’m about to fasten on their leashes, the front doorbell rings. The dogs jerk away from me, howling and scrambling as fast as they can toward the sound, barking even louder once they get there. No one but the mailman ever comes to the front door, and he rarely has reason to knock. The dogs are going crazy. It’s someone very unfamiliar to them. Neal Caffrey? I go to the door.

But it’s not Neal through the windows. It’s Jonathan.

For him to be standing right here now, he’s been driving since he hung up the phone yesterday morning. He’s wearing one of his
better shirts, the striped one he defended his dissertation in. I quickly drag the dogs by their collars back into the kitchen and shut them in, then run back to yank the sticky front door open.

I am ashamed about the barking, ashamed that he looks different to me here on the front terrace of this house. “You’ve gone in the wrong direction, Mr. Magoo.” It comes out funny, like I have a frog in my throat, because I’m already crying.

“I know it,” he says, and he wraps his arms around me. He smells like coffee and Doritos and, when I press my nose into the side of his neck, our life in Michigan. I try not to shake.

When I trust my voice, I say, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I called from Des Moines, kept going as far as Omaha, and turned around.”

I feel weak, as if I haven’t eaten for a while, though I just had cereal. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to have to say anything more. I kiss him and he kisses back. I feel him growing hard against me and I press into him, but he pulls back. And then he drops his arms and we are separate again.

I’m still holding the dogs’ leashes. He stares at them in my hand. His eyes are red and his mouth doesn’t seem to be able to hold a shape. I’ve never seen him not in full possession of himself.

“Come in.” I step toward the door.

He shakes his head.

“My father’s not here.”

“I’m not afraid of him. Do you think I’m afraid of him?”

“No.” I feel very small, very young. I want to say something that will return him to me. I flail for the first thing that comes to mind. “I saw this raccoon the other day. It had knocked over our trash can, torn into the bag, and was sitting on top of the barrel eating a piece of Swiss cheese, just holding it in two hands like a newspaper and nibbling at the top.”

He smiles at my effort. He takes both my hands. He’s about to
say something serious, then changes his mind. “What’s an elk? I might have seen an elk. Right beside the highway. In the median strip. It had these antlers.” He drops my hands and spreads out his arms. There are huge round sweat stains under each one. “They went out to here. It was absurd. I don’t know why he didn’t just fall over.”

I try to laugh.

“You need to come with me now.”

“Jon.”

He looks up at the house, which seems its largest from this spot on the front terrace, fanning out with rows of old windows and shutters on both sides and up three stories, and then the dormer windows on a very tiny fourth floor that’s just storage but makes it seem absurdly tall. “I don’t understand one thing that has happened in the last two weeks.”

“I need to stay a little bit longer.”

“No, you don’t. You need to leave now.”

“I can’t be the next person who gives up on him.”

“You would not be giving up on him. Daley, you’re his grown daughter. He knows you need to live your life.”

“He’d feel abandoned. And he’s already come so far. He likes AA. He likes those meetings.”

“Why are we talking about AA? What does AA have to do with our life? Daley—” He steps away and presses his lips between his teeth.

“He won’t go if I leave. I know he won’t.”

“Then he’s not really doing it for himself, is he?”

“Not yet, not entirely. But he will, when he gets stronger.”

“How can he grow stronger when you’re here letting him be weak? That’s not how people grow stronger. He needs to do it on his own.”

“He needs something to lean on right now. I’m like a splint for his broken leg.”

“At what cost, Daley? The splint eventually goes in the trash. Has it occurred to you that your mother and your stepmother tried for years and years to be splints, too?”

“But they wanted more from him than I do.”

“Oh, Daley, you want so much more than they ever did. You want the daddy you never got. You want him to make your whole childhood okay.”

“This isn’t about me. It’s about him.”

“I know it doesn’t look like it’s about you. You’ve got it nicely cloaked in a gesture of great sacrifice.”

“Jon,
we
would be stronger if I had a better relationship with my father.”

“This is what I mean.”

“I’m just saying it has its advantages.”

“Daley.” He takes me by both shoulders. His eyes are bloodshot and sad. “You
can’t
stay here. Everything is at stake for you. Don’t you get that? You lose this job and—”

“And I lose a job. That’s all. I will be a person who lost a job.” Across the street Mr. Emery has come out of his house and is standing in his driveway looking at us. Jonathan doesn’t notice. I shake off his grip on my shoulders. “I have this window of time, right here, right now, to help my father. It’s the only window I’ll ever get. And I’m the only one who can do it.”

“It must feel good to play God.”

Why do people keep saying this? “He has been sober for eleven days.”

“I know a lot of people I could try and save, and it would be futile for me to try. You know that.”

“This is my
father
, Jonathan.”

“Why was having a father never important to you until right now, right when we’re about to move in together?”

“Please don’t make this about us. It’s not about us.”

“What the hell is it about then? A week ago it was you and me and California, and now it’s this creepy town and a house built by the goddamn pilgrims and the bigot in residence.” He moves toward the steps, to his truck parked in the semicircle below. And then comes back. “Have you already called Oliver Raskin?”

“Yes.”

“And this is fine with him?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s giving the position to someone else.”

Somehow this is the thing that makes it real for him. I watch his eyes fill up. “Why are you sabotaging your life like this?”

Julie cried for my joy, and now he is crying for my loss. But I feel very little. All these words feel like mashed-up cardboard in my mouth. Mr. Emery, I see, has gone back inside.

He pinches the tears off the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. Then he laughs. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Jonathan.” He is on the other side of the terrace now. “Nothing has changed. I want to be with you. I want a life with you.”

“Not enough. You don’t want it enough.”

Can he not understand that this is not my
choice
? Wouldn’t he do the same in my position? “What is wrong with you?” Anger snakes its way up. I don’t care what Mr. Emery hears. “Why can’t you get this? Why can’t you see that I don’t
want
to do this but that I
have
to do it? Yes, we had a plan. And now I’ve changed the plan slightly. Why can’t you adjust to that?”

“Slightly? You have not changed the plan slightly.” His voice is deep and bare. “You said you were going to work at Berkeley. I turned down Temple to be with you. And then instead of going to California, you came here. For two days, you said. And then you said, six days more. And now you’ve given up the job. Why should I trust that you will
ever
come to California?”

“I will, Jon.”

“I don’t believe you. You know, you can poke fun at me and my plans, but I have no options. If I want to eat, if I want a roof over my head, if someday I want to support a family, I
have
to have a plan. But there are no real consequences to your choices. Because you can just set a match to everything and your daddy will pay the bills. Grad school wasn’t just pretend for me.”

I’ve been on my own for eight years. I had a smaller stipend at Michigan than Jonathan. We were impoverished together. And now he’s twisting it all around. “You know what? Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.” I’ve never seen his mouth so tight, so mean.

He turns and drops down the stairs. Such a base ending. No better than an exchange between my father and Catherine.

I hear the truck start up, old and loud, and then the tires in the white gravel, and then silence as he reaches the pavement and is gone.

My father comes home from golf well after lunch. For a moment I think he is drunk. For a moment I see a mirage, a flashback to his drinking face, a slackness around the mouth, guilt in the yellow eyes. But as he gets closer and lifts his eyes and catches me watching from the kitchen, he changes back.

“We took no prisoners,” he says when he comes in. Then he looks at me closely. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Just tired.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go out to eat tonight. Anyplace you want.”

July passes.

In the mornings, if he doesn’t have a tennis or golf date, my father is full of industry around the house. He mows the grass on his tractor, cleans the pool and gives it its chemicals, or weeds the vegetable garden and goes to the dump. He likes to putter, to play with his tools in the garage, to walk back and forth from house to garage to shed to poolhouse with a purpose I can’t always discern. Occasionally he sits at his desk in the den with his reading glasses on and pays bills. He seems not to miss work in the least. I try to appear industrious too, though I am tired of industry. There is a thick caul of inertia around me. I walk the dogs to the beach, around to Littleneck Point, downtown to Neal’s store. I have begun an essay for lay readers about poverty and community in the Sierra Juarez, but I can’t find my bearings. I can’t get past the second page.

If I’m not careful, my father will have us on the tennis court most afternoons, so I have to come up with alternative activities. At the beginning of August, when my father has a yellow thirty-days-sober chip in his pocket, we drive a half-hour north to the Hook’s Island ferry, which is a glorified raft with flaking green railings and a few benches. Neither of us have ever been to Hook’s. We stand at the stern and my father looks out at the water, at the small white wake and the lobster pots and the handful of Whalers and sailboats moored close to shore, at the gulls who are squawking and diving into the same churning patch of water. The temperature drops as we pull farther from land. The ocean lies in strips
of color: pale lavender, powder blue, cobalt, navy. My father looks but he does not comment on its beauty. It may be the first time he’s seen the open ocean all summer.

“My mother rented a house on an island one summer,” he says. “Reminds me of this.”

“I thought you always went to Boothbay.”

“That was after she married Hayes. He had that house in Maine.”

“Where was the island?”

“I’m not sure. Duck Island, I think it was called. Or Buck Island. I was only five or six.”

“Just you and her?”

“And Nora.”

The ferry jerks suddenly and we turn to the bow and the island is right there, all beach at its edges, a hillock in the middle. There are no houses. The whole thing is a wildlife reserve. The boat slides into its slot. The August heat returns.

The tourists hoist their backpacks and wait for the ferryman to unhook the chain. We let a family go ahead of us, a squat man, a willowy wife, two kids with mountain bikes. They smile at us. I can see they recognize that I am a daughter on a picnic with her father. I feel a small swell of pride. I smile back.

The best beach, said the woman who sold us our ferry tickets, is on the other side of the island, and we follow the path she told us about through the woods. It is dim and cool, the ground sandy.