Lily King - Father of the Rain

“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.