Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

But Clotelia only jerked a thumb toward the living room. Downstairs, Drum Casey was sitting on the couch with his boots on the coffee table. His head lolled to one side, as if he were asleep. Evie stopped short in the doorway and stared at him. She felt separated from him by a wall of glass, protected by the thick new bangs on her forehead and the days she had spent removing him from her mind in bits and crumbs. His eyes were closed; she could look at his face without feeling he might blind her by looking back. His mouth was relaxed, almost open. He needed a shave. His hands, with their nails cut short for the guitar strings, lay loosely curled on his legs. When she saw his hands she made a small movement, only enough to smooth her bangs down, but Drum rolled his head toward her and looked from beneath lowered lids. “Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” said Evie.

He sat up and moved his feet off the coffee table. The silence grew to the point where it would be hard to break. “I didn’t know it was you,” Evie said finally. “Clotelia didn’t say. Do you want a lemonade? You’re hot, I bet—”

Behind her, Clotelia said, “Your father be home any minute, Evie.”

“Oh. Yes, my father’s coming,” Evie said.

But that didn’t seem to mean anything to Drum. He sat forward and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I ain’t slept since Saturday,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I got fired.”

“What?”

“Fired, I said.”

“Oh, well, they don’t know,” said Evie, thinking of the reviews. “It’s the weather. In this heat they can’t tell good music from bad.”

“Music, hell. That was just an excuse. I was getting on good with the manager’s daughter and he didn’t like it, that’s all. Said I hadn’t worked out well. ‘Goddam man that hires these people—’ he said. I said, ‘Nobody does that to me.’ End of it all was a fight.”

“A fight? With fists?”

“What else. Fists and the police station and the works. He was just peeved over his daughter is all.”

Evie blinked, cutting off the daughter forever with a single movement. “That’s illegal,” she said. “You can hold him to his contract.”

“Contract , what do you think I am? A movie star?”

“Well, he can’t just fire you.”

“Guess again.” Drum took a comb from his shirt pocket. “Now they got my name on the books, down at the police station. Just what I needed. You ever seen those movies where the mother tells the cops, ‘He’s a good boy?’ That’s what my mother did. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says. Then she paid the damages and yanked me outdoors and said she might’ve known this would happen. Said I had disgraced them all, what would my daddy say, if she had had any sense she would have put me to work like everyone told her to. Now, I ask you. Won’t my own family even stand by me? When I got home my daddy wouldn’t let me in the house. ‘I am just too pissed off to look at you right now,’ he says. ‘Sleep down in the car. I’ll talk with you in the morning.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ I said, and walked right off. I don’t care if I never see the place again.”

“Where is David?” Evie asked.

“David. Home, I reckon. He didn’t get in no fight, not him. I would’ve gone and spent the night at his house but you know his mother, she hates my guts.”

“What for?”

“No reason I know of. I never did a thing to her.”

Out in the hallway, Clotelia gave a sudden sharp sigh. “Go fix some lemonade,” Evie told her.

“Evie, your father going to hit the roof if he find him here.”

“Never mind, fix some lemonade.”

Clotelia pivoted on one heel and left. Drum seemed not to have noticed her. He combed his hair, ran one hand across it, and put the comb back in his pocket. “I spent the night on someone’s porch,” he said, “but didn’t sleep none. Now my eyelids feel scratchy. I don’t know what my daddy has against me, but he never will listen to reason, not for one second. Never asks my side of nothing. Oh, well, him I’m used to. But Mom? ‘Bertram, you have just killed my soul,’ she told me. ‘I ain’t got no more faith in you.’ Mom! What would you say to that? I went by home this morning after I saw his service truck pull out and, ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘could I just have some biscuits and a little side meat for my breakfast?’ She said, ‘Yes, here, I done saved you some, but you better not come by no more, Bertram, until you set it right. Meaning make up the money and apologize and get you a steady job.’ Well, I never thought I would live to hear her talk that way. ‘Now you know it wunt my fault,’ I told her. ‘That man is just real possessive over his daughter and for no good reason either, since she is right wild and always has been. But he just won’t see it,’ I said, ‘and up and fired me on some manufactured cause.’ Mom says, ‘Oh, Bertram, where are you going to end up? Sometimes I feel you won’t even amount to a hill of beans,’ she says, and then she pushed a little brown bag of food on me. Well, it was like I had just heard something crack, the final floorboard I was resting on. I won’t be going back now.”

He stood and began walking around the edges of the room. Every now and then he took a hand from his back pocket to pick up a figurine or a photograph. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“My mother.”

“She dead? Who’s this?”

“My uncle.”

“You got a real nice place here. You reckon your father might let me sleep on the couch?”

“Well, no, I doubt it.”

“How about your porch?”

“Not there either, I’m sure of it.”

“He’d never know.”

“He might,” said Evie. “If a neighbor saw you, or he went out on the porch some night.”

“I’d be real careful.”

“But I was just getting all straight,” said Evie. “How can you ask me a thing like that?”

All Drum did was pick up a china goose girl and lay it against his cheek, as if it cooled him.

“Oh, go ahead, then,” said Evie. “I don’t care.”

So he slept on the porch, on the heavy, flattened cushions in the wooden swing. Not just one night, but all week. Evie would lie awake until midnight or so, when she heard through her open window the rusty sound of boots on the floorboards and then the creaking of the swing as he settled himself. The creaking died away immediately, with nothing following. He seemed not even to turn in his sleep. He would be one of those people who lay down without a fuss and lost consciousness until morning, frustrating whoever was with them, the way Violet did when she spent the night. It was Evie who stayed awake. She listened to crickets and breaths of music and other people’s parties, and she thought of a hundred different things that could happen if her father came upon Drum. Would he shout? Call the police? Or only apologize for disturbing Drum’s sleep and tiptoe back to bed? She expected to have nightmares about it, but when she finally slept her dreams were of struggling in water as thick as gelatin, running from a fire on boneless legs, climbing a ladder which swooped backwards under her weight but never quite fell over. When she awoke in the mornings, Drum was always gone.

After the first night she came out on the porch in her bathrobe and stared at the swing, whose cushions were not even dented. She was still there when Clotelia came. “He gone?” Clotelia asked. No one had told her Drum was staying there, but she seemed to know anyway. Evie nodded.

“Well, go on get dressed. Nothing attractive about sitting out here in your bathrobe.”

At ten o’clock, her father went off for an errand. As soon as his car was out of sight Drum opened the front screen door a few inches and slid into the hallway. “I wonder if I could have breakfast?” he said. Evie was at the foot of the stairs, sorting out the mail. It was the first time all morning that Drum had not been in the center of her mind, and she raised her head and stared at him a minute. Then Clotelia called, “Come on out, it’s on the table.” She had set a place, even — a dinner plate heaped with ham and biscuits, which Evie and her father never ate. When Drum walked in, Clotelia looked up from the sink to say, “It’s waiting on you, over there. I know you.” Then she emptied the dishwater and walked out, peeling off pink rubber gloves. Drum shrugged and sat down.