Father of the Rain (7 page)

I get up and go down the hallway to my room. The door is shut. Patrick whispers something to me, but he’s too far away to hear and I really don’t want to listen to him anymore. I open the door. My beds have been replaced by a double bed I don’t recognize, and in the bed is a little girl. I’m not sure how I forgot that Patrick had a little sister, but I did. She lies on her side in a deep sleep, a short pigtail sticking up above her ear, two hands curled under her chin.

“Mom will kill me if she wakes up,” Patrick says behind me, so I shut the door.

It is afternoon in somebody else’s house. I don’t know what to do now.

“We’re not living here,” he says. “I mean, not really.”

We just stand there in the dark hallway.

“We thought you were coming back next week. School doesn’t start until a week from Wednesday, you know. Why are you shaking?”

I hold my hand out flat. I’m shaking like I have a disease. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s get out in the sun.”

We go down the back stairs and out onto the porch.

“He’s back,” Patrick says, pointing.

My father is in his chair at the pool in his bathing trunks. He’s sitting sideways to us, talking to Mrs. Tabor. She glances over but he doesn’t. I walk all the way across the grass to the concrete squares around the pool before he looks up. He fakes surprise. “Well, hello there!” He fakes friendliness. I know it’s fake because I’ve heard that voice when he talks to the neighbors he hates. He hates Mr. Seeley for building his garage so close to our property line, and he hates the Fitzpatricks for having so many children. He hates the old Vance
sisters down the hill for feeding our dogs and Mr. Pratt across the street for playing taps at sunset. He grumbles about them, swears about them, and makes fun of the way they walk or talk or laugh. But whenever he sees one of them, at the post office or the gas station, he always says, “Well, hello there!” in that same fake friendly voice.

I hug him tight but his arms are loose around me.

“You come up for a swim? The pool’s nice today.” He reaches for his drink and I notice his hand is shaking like mine.

“No, I didn’t bring a suit. I just—”

“Why not? The pool’s nice today,” he says again, just before sipping.

“I don’t know. I haven’t unpacked yet,” I say, then regret mentioning anything about being away. At the same time I want him to know that I came up here first thing. “We just got back an hour ago.” I realize this isn’t true. It’s been more like three hours by now.

“Oh, really? I thought I saw the convertible downtown this morning.”

Now
he’s
lying. We drove in well past noon. I shake my head, but I don’t have it in me to fight.

He’s glaring at Mrs. Tabor. I know that look, too. It means,
Can you believe this little shit?
Sweat has popped out on his nose.

“I missed you,” I say.

“Oh yeah?”

“Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says.

“I missed you, too.”

Our eyes catch briefly. His are a yellowy green. My throat aches from not crying.

“Why don’t you go help your dad finish unloading the car?” Mrs. Tabor says.

We walk across the stiff healthy grass together. He lights a cigarette with his lighter, a heavy silver rectangle that makes a wonderful
shlink
when he flips it closed. The familiarity of that sound, of everything about him, hurts. The driveway is hot, the way-back of the station wagon hotter. I have to get on my knees inside to reach the last two bags. The smell of the dogs reminds me that I haven’t seen the puppy.

“Where’s the puppy?”

“What?” my father says over his shoulder. I hurry to catch up.

“Scratch. Where is he?”

“Ran away.”

“Ran away?”

“Summer for running away.”

“Have you looked for him?”

“I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“He’s with the old biddies. They’ve been trying to steal my dogs for years. I decided to let them have this one. You didn’t want it.”

“I couldn’t take him. I asked, but I couldn’t.”

He flicks a look of raw disgust at me. He’s putting it together, my refusal of the Newfoundland, my secret with my mother. “Ugliest goddamned dog I ever saw.”

I help him put away the batteries and the rest of his purchases. He leaves a pack of lightbulbs out, saying there are some that need replacing, and when he leaves the room to do that I follow him. I have the idea that if I stay with him long enough he’ll remember me, like an amnesiac who needs time for the memories to filter back in. We change a bulb in the den, then one in the upstairs hallway. He doesn’t comment on any of the missing furniture or the strange new items or the fact that Elyse Tabor is sleeping behind the closed door of my room. We move around the house in silence, with only the sound of his breath squeaking loudly through his hairy nostrils.

When we’re done, he says, “Lemme show you something.”

I figure he means the panic button or some other new gadget, but he takes me into the laundry room. He opens the cabinet that holds the safe, a heavy lead-colored box with a combination lock.

“Open it.”

We all know the combination: 8-29-31, my father’s birthday. As a special treat my mother will sometimes let me bring the silk bags of jewels to her room and lay out every piece on the bedspread. It feels strange to be opening the safe without her in the bedroom.

It is empty.

“Did you know?”

I shake my head

“She took it all. She just took it and ran.” He slams the heavy safe door, but it bounces back and swings hard against the cabinet, making a dent in the wood. He points to the dark empty inside of the box. “She took it all, all of my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry.” His voice cracks and his face is purple. He pounds his fist on the top of the washing machine and shouts, “Bitch bitch bitch!” His voice is high, like a small boy’s. Then he stoops over and little wordless gasps came out of his mouth.

He straightens up and looks at me. “Come here.”

I do and he hugs me, hard this time, my ear pressed into the coarse hair on his chest, and says, “But you’re mine. You’re mine. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I whisper to his chest hair.

When we come downstairs, Mrs. Tabor is making dinner, and Patrick and Elyse are playing cards on the floor where the kitchen table used to be.

“Can Daley stay for dinner?” Patrick asks.

Mrs. Tabor looks at my father, who nods.

“I’ll have to call.”

“Stay the night,” my father says.

“All right. I’ll just go to the bathroom, then call.” I don’t want to use the kitchen phone—I don’t want to be in the same room with both my parents’ voices.

There is a little telephone room off the den, next to the bathroom. I sit down on the swivel stool. One of my mother’s pads with the thick white paper and the words
DON’T FORGET
in red at the top is on the phone table. It makes me miss her and I’m glad to hear her voice when she picks up.

“I’m at Dad’s still.”

“Oh, good. It’s going well then.”

“Mostly. They want me to stay for dinner and the night.”

“All right,” my mother says, and as she is speaking I hear a little click. “I have to go into town in the morning. Bob’s lined me up a few interviews, bless him.”

The click is probably my father listening in on the extension in the sunroom. I wish she hadn’t mentioned Bob Wuzzy.

“Okay. I’ll see you in the afternoon then.”

“We’ll have to get you some back-to-school clothes. When do you want to do that, Thursday?”

I just want to get us all off the phone. “Sure. Sleep tight.”

“Sleep tight, baby.”

I wait. Mom hangs up loudly. Dad’s is the tiniest
tic
.

We come into the kitchen at the same time. He goes to the bar to make a drink and drops the jar of onions. It doesn’t shatter but he shouts, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” in a kind of wild strangled voice as if the bottle had sliced him open. Elyse, holding out a fan of cards, scoots closer to her brother.

“Oh, knock it off, Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says, spooning tuna noodle casserole onto three plates.

Frank comes in then, tossing a tennis racquet toward but not in the coat closet.

“Pick that goddamn thing up and put it where it belongs,” his mother says, much more sharply than she’d spoken to my father.

“Hello, Frank. How are you, Frank?” Frank mutters from the closet. It’s my brother’s Davis Classic he’s been playing with.

“Why hello, Master Frank,” my father says, bowing. “How kind of you to grace us with your presence this fine evening.”

Frank smirks, about the nicest response you can get from him.

“And what, pray tell, has become of your opponent?”

Surprising me, Frank plays along. “He has entered an insane asylum, so profound was the psychological blow of losing to me.”

“You beat him?” my father says, no longer in character.

“Six–three, six–O.” Frank looks like a little boy then, waiting for my father’s reaction. Their father, Mr. Tabor, hasn’t been around in a long time. He moved to Nevada even before Elyse was born.

My father’s face lights up. I remember that face. I remember what it feels like to receive the full glow of that face. “Six–three, six–O. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You clocked him. You really got his number. He couldn’t get a game off of you, could he, once you figured him out.”

Frank shakes his head and then takes his enormous smile out of the room before too many people see it.

We are all handed our portions of the casserole and some sliced cucumbers on pink plastic plates. We eat in the pantry; the plates clash with the tablecloth. My father and Mrs. Tabor take their drinks into the sunroom. You can see the backs of their heads through a window in the kitchen. They’re watching the news. It’s weird to see my father and all the dogs in there. It was always my mother’s room because there was no TV in it.

“So, Daley,” Frank says. “Here you are, after—what—three months?”

“Two.”

Frank and Patrick are over three years apart in age but, because they’re nearly the same height and have the same straight brown hair, people always get them confused. I never do; Frank is mean, and his meanness is the only thing I ever see.

“And now you’re here, back in your old house. Looks pretty different, doesn’t it?”

“Never ate in this room before.” I scrape another forkful of noodles together and hope he’s done with me.

“You like my mother’s taste?”

My heart begins to thud. “It’s different.”

“You think your mother is classier, don’t you?”

“Leave her alone, Frank,” Patrick says.

“Protecting your girlfriend, Weasel?”

“Shut up.”

“Well, she can’t be your girlfriend now, can she? Pretty soon she’ll be your—”

“Shut the fuck fuck up!”

Frank laughs at the two fucks.

I’ve never heard Patrick swear before.

Elyse eats. She finishes her casserole and moves on to the cucumbers. Her mouth does not reach the table so all her food has to be brought down to it unsteadily. She’s spilled all over the place. I ask her if she wants a cushion but she shakes her head without looking at me.

After dinner Frank goes outside to shoot things with a BB gun, and Patrick and I play the game Life in the living room. Elyse comes through every now and then, dragging a little beagle on wheels by a string. Sometimes she drags it right through our money piles to get our attention, but we don’t give it to her. Through the swinging door I can hear Mrs. Tabor making her and my father’s dinner, and Dad mixing more drinks at the bar on the other side of the door. Their voices rise, as if drinking made them deaf.

“Oh, that ass. I can’t believe she said that to you!”

“I was just minding my own business. Standing in line at the drugstore, for chrissake.” My father is enjoying himself. “But I set her straight.”

“I bet you did, pet.”

A while later his voice drops to a scratching sound, his attempt at a whisper. All I can hear is something like alcar over and over again.

“What’s alcar?” I ask Patrick.

“You don’t know who Al Carr is?”

“No, obviously.”

“He’s your mother’s lawyer, and he’s trying to take Gardiner to the cleaners.” Patrick says this wearily, without accusation, as if he’s tired of the sentence.

My father’s voice scrapes on. It sounds like he’s choking on his sirloin.

Mrs. Tabor doesn’t bother to lower her voice. She just says mm-hmm and of course and you’re right about that.

Outside you can hear BBs slicing through the leaves in the trees.

If you play all the way to retirement, Life is a long game. My car is full of babies. I’ve had two sets of twin girls and a boy I have to lay down the middle.

Mrs. Tabor comes into the living room and asks us where Elyse is. We don’t know.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? I thought she was in here playing with the two of you.” She is speaking with her eyes shut, but when she starts to tip forward she opens them and catches hold of the back of a sofa.

“Nope,” Patrick says.

“Nope,” she mocks, badly. “Get off your ass and find her!”

Her words are so slurred I can’t take her anger seriously. I want her to leave so Patrick and I can laugh about it, but he gets up and leaves the room.

“There are responsibilities, Daley, if you want to stay here.” Her eyes are shut again. She pronounces my name Day-
lee
.

I almost say Fuck you. It almost flies out of my mouth.

“Catherine,” my father calls. “He’s got her.”

I get up and follow her in. Patrick is holding Elyse, who is sound asleep.

“She was under the dining room table.”

“Let me have her, pet,” Mrs. Tabor says.

“No, I’ll take her up.”

“I’ll take her.”

“You’ll just wake her up.” Patrick moves quickly to the back stairs. “Or drop her,” he mutters.

“C’mere,” I hear my father say. I turn—I thought he was talking to me—just as he is wrapping his arms around Mrs. Tabor. He puts his face close to hers and waits for her to kiss him. Her lips separate and I watch her tongue go into my father’s mouth. He grabs her by the butt with two hands and shoves her into him. “I love this ass,” he says, not even trying to be quiet. “I love this fucking ass.”