Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

“Well, Puss!—your dad has to leave, too.” Awkwardly Daddy leaned over me and kissed me on the forehead, a wet embarrassed swipe of a kiss at my hairline. “See, I’m going out to a construction site—I just dropped back here to change my shirt. Well—O.K.! See you later, Krissie.”

If it seemed strange that Zoe Kruller and my father scarcely acknowledged each other—scarcely glanced at each other—somehow it didn’t register on me, at the time. Strange too that Zoe left the kitchen carrying her shoulder bag slung over her shoulder by a strap, with an airy growl “G’bye, you two”—and almost immediately afterward Daddy left the kitchen by the same door; within seconds there came the sound of the Willys Jeep pulling out of the driveway, and surely Zoe Kruller had to be riding with Daddy, in the passenger’s seat—but already by that time I was distracted peering into the refrigerator for a snack, leftover tapioca pudding from the previous evening’s dessert neatly covered in Saran Wrap.

Never did it occur to me to think at that time Mrs. Kruller was here with Daddy! Mrs. Kruller came to visit Daddy.

Still less would I have thought Daddy brought Mrs. Kruller here, to be alone with her. While Mommy was away.

“Mrs. Kruller was here,” I told Ben. “Last year. When the teachers had their meeting, and we were let out of school at noon.”

“We weren’t! That never happened.”

“ You weren’t. It wasn’t your school.”

“Bullshit Mrs. Kruller was here. She wasn’t any friend of Mom’s.”

“She dropped by to see Mom, she said. She called Mom ‘Lucy.’ But Mom wasn’t home so she went away again.”

Ben said doubtfully, “Why’d she come here? Mom and Mrs. Kruller were not friends.”

There was something sad and flat in the way Ben spoke the words Mom and Mrs. Kruller were not friends.

“Daddy was here, too. At the same time.”

“He was not! You’re making this up.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Zoe Kruller wouldn’t have come here, Krista. That is such bullshit.”

“Will you stop saying that! She was, too. And Daddy was here, too.”

“Krista, he was not. ”

“They went away in Daddy’s Jeep. I had a half-day at school and came home early and they were here.”

“Bullshit.”

“They did. ”

Ben struck me in the shoulder, hard. “That never happened, you’re a God-damned liar. You tell anyone about that, I’ll break your scrawny neck.”

Ben pushed past me and out of the room. I felt a flame of pure hatred ripple over me for my brother who was so crude, and so cruel. Scrawny neck! —I would never forget these words.

Later, I would come to wonder; maybe Ben was right, and I was wrong. That might be better to think, than the other.

Had Zoe Kruller really been in our kitchen, rinsing coffee mugs at the sink? Had Zoe Kruller really been here, whistling? And Daddy had come into the kitchen combing his hair back from his face, his left arm bent and part-cradling his head, his right hand gripping the black plastic comb he carried in his rear pants pocket, and Daddy had been limping just slightly, you would have to know that Daddy had a bad knee to register this limp. Maybe I was remembering all of this wrongly?—the way I hadn’t been hearing Mrs. Bender at school, or hadn’t been able to see the smaller chalk markings on the blackboard at school.

Here was another possibility: Zoe Kruller had come to our house and Mommy had been waiting for her. Maybe it hadn’t been the half-day at my school but another day. Mommy had invited Zoe Kruller to the house because Lucille Diehl and Zoe Kruller were friends, and it wasn’t Daddy who was Zoe Kruller’s friend after all.

Which would mean: Daddy had not been here. Daddy had not driven Mrs. Kruller away in the black Willys Jeep.

Daddy hadn’t been here at all. Not at that time.

BUT I CAN LOVE YOU BEST, Daddy! I can forgive you.

That would be my secret, not even Daddy would know.

In the County Line Tavern, in our booth in a farther corner of the barroom Daddy tossed change onto the sticky tabletop—quarters, dimes, wild rolling pennies.

“Here’s change for the phone, Krista. Call your mother and let her know where you are. Let her know that you are safe ”—Daddy twisted his mouth into a sneer of a smile—“and you’re having dinner with me and why doesn’t she come join us?—we’d like that.”

Would we like that? I wasn’t so sure.

Daddy winked at me as obediently I slid out of the booth. I laughed uncertain what Daddy’s wink meant.

As if my mother would want to meet us —in all places, the noisy County Line Tavern which was a country place on the highway five miles north of Sparta and about that far from my home, in another direction. Here the air was dense with men’s uplifted voices, laughter. Loud rock music, country-and-western, blaring from a jukebox. That smell that is so poignant to me—that smell that indicates my father, my father’s world —of beer, tobacco smoke, a just barely perceptible odor of male sweat, maybe male anxiety, anguish. There were a few women in the County Line—young women—some very young-looking girls who had to be at least twenty-one to be served alcohol, seated together in a festive knot at the bar—but predominantly the place was men: local working men, farmers, truckers who left the motors of their enormous rigs running in the parking lot—why, I never knew—wouldn’t they be burning up gasoline, needlessly?—causing the fresh chill air outside to burn blue with exhaust.

At this hour of early-evening, nearing 6:00 P.M., past dusk and dark as night, the County Line was very popular. Men in no hurry to get to their homes, or men like Eddy Diehl somehow lacking a home, invisibly disfigured and yet determined to be festive, hearty. In my Sparta High jacket which was made of a synthetic fabric that resembled silk, eye-catching deep-purple glancingly-glamorous silk, in my much-laundered jeans and with my luminous-blond ponytail flaring at the back of my head and halfway down my back, I caught the eye of men the way an upright flame drifting through murky shadow would catch the eye. In a gesture of vague paternal protectiveness my father had led me to a booth in the “family” section of the tavern when we’d first entered—he’d seated me with my back to the bar—but seemed heedless now, that to call my mother on the pay phone I would have to make my way through the bustle of the barroom, by myself.

In my flurry of excitement—the daughter-enchantment of being with the forbidden Daddy—it would not have occurred to me to think Why would Daddy bring me to such a place! Nor was I willing to think Is it to show me off—Eddy Diehl’s daughter, who still adores him?—has faith in him?

In the cramped corridor outside the restrooms a thick-bodied man with bristling hair stood at the pay phone cursing into the receiver—“Expect me to b’lieve that, fuck you. ” It was a furious and yet intimate exchange, I had to wonder at the person—a woman, surely—at the other end: wife? Ex-wife? Girlfriend? Already at fifteen I seemed to know that there would not be, in my life, anything like this sort of blunt matter-of-fact intimacy; anything like such vulnerability.

The heavyset man fumbled to hang up the receiver, turned and blundered into me, muttered Hey sor-ry! His breath stank like diesel fuel. In exaggerated surprise his bloodshot eyes blinked at me. “Debbie, is it? Debbie Hansen? You lookin for company, Deb-bie?”

I told him no. I wasn’t Debbie and I wasn’t looking for company.