Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.

“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.

“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.

“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.

“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.

Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.

“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”

Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”

“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”

“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”

“I see. Good book?”

“I liked it.”

Jimmy nodded. “Well.”

Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.

“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”

She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.

“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”

Cassie cleared her throat again—she’d start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.

“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”

Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle’s papers and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.

“I can see I’m not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.

“How dare you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”

“Five,” Cassie said.

“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”

“Mom,” Belle said.

“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”

“I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.

“Oh, oh, that’s rich, too, your daughters,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy’s face with every word.

“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.

Cassie jumped up and ran past him, grabbing her sandals off the porch as she went. She leaped down the porch steps and landed on some sharp rocks, had to make her way down the driveway to where he’d parked, pulled open his passenger door. It was hot inside, it was shocking . Jimmy drove a 1971 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and red leather interior, and if they were starving to death or would die without penicillin and the only way to save them would be to Sell The Car, then good-bye Cassie, good-bye Belle. This according to Laura. Poppy reluctantly agreed.

A minute passed. Jimmy had undoubtedly gone upstairs to collect his things, and would come sailing out the front door any minute. He favored a dress shirt that allowed room for an entrance, or an exit, in its graceful folds. He sailed out the door. Laura was right behind him, speaking quickly but not loudly, and she threw something but Cassie couldn’t see what it was. Conditions were not ideal, Cassie realized this right away.

Jimmy walked down the driveway, his walk a kind of glide, and pulled his door open. “Get out, Cassie,” he said, starting the engine. Boiling air blew from the vents. “Sweet creeping Jesus, it’s hot in here.”

Sweat poured down her face and in a stream down her chest. “Get out, Cassie, right this minute.”

Laura still stood on the porch but she was hard to see behind the screen.

“Right this goddamn minute, Cassie, I’m not playing.”

She turned and looked at him. His long black eyelashes had never worked to his advantage when he was angry, but she could see he really was. Angry.

“GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

Another minute or two and he’d see what her point was.

“Fine,” he said, his teeth grinding. He pulled the gearshift into reverse as if he wanted to pull it off the column, then backed out so fast stones flew up and hit the bottom of the car, and obviously this wasn’t something Jimmy would wish to happen to the Lincoln. He was beyond himself. His tires screeched against the King’s Crossing as he moved the transmission into drive, and then Cassie was thrown against the red leather seat, and the compass bobbing around in liquid on the dashboard swung around, up and down.

“Do you see what you do to me, all of you, every last blasted one of you? You make me hate my life , Cassie, how does that feel?” Jimmy slammed the lighter into the dash, flipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking you out at the zoo. I honestly do not know.”

Cassie rolled down her window, stuck out her head, let the wind fill her mouth and nose. When she leaned back, Jimmy was smoking, driving slowly, listening to his favorite radio station, Frank Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” Jimmy hummed along with him, Jimmy’s beautiful voice.

They drove the four miles into Roseville, a town famous for two things: a small candy factory called April and May’s, after the unmarried sisters who’d run it out of their kitchen; and a restaurant, Holzinger’s, which boasted a large, expensive buffet. Cassie had been there only once, on her parents’ anniversary a few years before, and buffet was probably not the correct word. She and Belle had been stunned into silence when they entered. The restaurant occupied four floors: the first was appetizers, the second was breads, the third was entrées, and the fourth was desserts. Cassie had stopped in the appetizer room—the mountain of cold pink shrimp on ice in the middle of a table, the cold silver platter underneath it beaded with condensation, had made her want to run.

Now they passed the Granger School, which was beautiful and looked as if it might fall down, and then the gas station and a flower shop. The main street was tree-lined and shady.

“High suicide rate in Roseville, you know that, Cass?”

Cassie shook her head.

“Oh yeah. I coulda told anybody who asked, and for free, but they hired an expert instead.”

She doubted it would have been for free.

“County coroner—you know him? Robbie Ballenger?—he suggested it to the county council. Read some article about national suicide rates, saw that ours are as high as an Indian reservation. Don’t want that, do we.” An old rocking horse and a birdcage were sitting on the sidewalk outside the antique shop. “The Christians are calling for Robbie’s resignation. An in-erad-i-cable rule of life, Cassie,” he waved his cigarette at her like a stem finger, “do not piss off the Christians, they will throw their stones at you every time.”