Lily King - Father of the Rain

“Oh yeah?” he says, but he hasn’t heard me. His attention has moved on. “You missed another spot right there.” He takes the vacuum from me and finishes the rest of the pool. We do the chemical tests but he won’t let me hold the little vials or squeeze in the drops. Then Patrick comes out and he and my father start talking about grub control and some sort of seeder or feeder. My father wants to show Patrick something in the machine room. It’s hot and electric-feeling in that room and they stay in there for a long time, my father wanting to know if Patrick thinks the pressure on the something-or-other is too low. I go to the minifridge and pull out a tiny can of V8 juice. Then I go into my mother’s rose garden.

The regular flower beds — daffodils in early spring, then tulips and peonies, daisies and lilies — begin outside the living room’s French doors, where they curl around a stone terrace, drop alongside a set of stone steps, spread along the edges of another, smaller terrace, then drop again to fan out along the stone walls that are the border of the main body of the garden, an English garden with a floor of grass and two long, squat hedges whose ends are scrolled toward each other. On either side of these sculpted center hedges, in long dense prickly rows, are the beds of roses. At the far end of the garden is a small fountain painted robin’s-egg blue with a centerpiece of two pudgy children holding a large fish that spurts out water. Behind the fountain are two sets of moss-covered steps that lead to a black wrought-iron door, which opens onto that patch of woods on the inside of the curve of the back driveway. The garden and the door seem to belong to something much more ancient than the house and the driveway.

On a summer day, in full sun beneath a dark blue sky, this garden is magical. My mother is normally in it somewhere, crouched down beside a rosebush with her gardening basket, a kerchief holding back her hair, her gloved hands digging deep into the dirt. She has many varieties of roses and knows all their names: Southern Belle, Black Magic, April in Paris, Mister Lincoln. If I don’t understand the name, she’ll explain it to me. A full pale pink rose with a tiny yellow center is called Christopher Marlowe, and she tells me all about his plays, the one about the doctor who exchanged his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magical powers, and the one about the queen and the sailor who fall in love in a cave during a storm. Her roses are different colors and shapes, some thin and delicate like a teardrop, others thick and fluffy with a million petals. They are pale yellow, dark pink, deep red, salmon, lavender, and white. The white ones are the puffiest. They look like they’re made of meringue. I used to play around the fountain, trying to catch the eyes of the smiling children wrestling their fish, running up one set of steps to the black door and down the other, around and around, until I got so hot I’d fling off my clothes and slip into the cold, ice cold, fountain water.

But now everything in the garden is dead or dying. The heads of the roses, if they have not already fallen off, are dry and drained of color, their leaves hole-punched by insects. Every plant is encircled by a wreath of its own debris. The grass is burnt, the shrubs white with aphids. The fountain water is olive green. A black sludge covers the bottom. Nothing trickles out of the fish’s mouth. This whole spectacular place, the most spectacular thing about the property, is being punished for having been my mother’s.

While my father and Patrick move from poolhouse to shed, drive off someplace and come back, and operate many machines all at once, I try to resuscitate the garden. I drain the fountain, scrape out the slimy leaves and dirt, and refill it. I spray the shrubs and rake up all the death. And then I water. I press my thumb down on the lip of the hose to create a spray like my mother always did. I can feel the leaves and roots of the plants thanking me as they gulp the water down.

“Well, you’ve been a busy little bee this morning,” Mrs. Tabor says when she brings lunch out to the pool.

“It will perish if no one tends it.” I’ve been reenacting scenes from The Secret Garden as I work and haven’t completely stepped out of character.

My father puts the back of his hand to his forehead and tips his head to one side. He’s taken my accent for southern and become Scarlett O’Hara instead. “Oh, my. It will simply perish. Whatever shall we do?”

“I could think of a thing or two,” Mrs. Tabor says in her regular voice, smiling at my father as she sips her drink.

She drinks vodka like my father but mixes it with orange juice during the day. My father used to have a rule about waiting until five o’clock on the dot before having a drink (sometimes we’d watch the clock on the stove and count down the last minute together), but now I wonder if that had been my mother’s rule. Today he drinks two martinis with lunch.

After he’s finished his sandwich, he pushes his plate away, sits back, and sighs. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Mrs. Tabor chortles.

Then he stands up. “Well, I think it’s time for a swim.” He pulls down his swimming trunks in one fast motion.

Patrick and Elyse erupt in laughter at the sight of his bare bum and floppy brown penis.

“Well,” Mrs. Tabor says, and stands up unsteadily, “I guess I will too.” Off comes the top and then the bottom to her bikini. Her breasts hang square and low, and her pubic hair is not black but salt and pepper, like Mallory’s grandmother’s old schnauzer.

Patrick and Elyse, howling, struggle to inch off their own wet bathing suits, the struggle only increasing their laughter.

The four of them splash around together at first, then Patrick and Elyse go to the diving board to do naked jumping and screaming, and my father and Mrs. Tabor hang onto each other in the shallow end.

“Look at the old prude in her chair,” Mrs. Tabor cackles.

My father doesn’t look. He’s touching Mrs. Tabor’s breasts.

“Watch out, Gardiner,” Elyse says, looking down from the diving board, wearing only a life jacket because she can’t swim yet. “You’re gonna get a boner.”

Everyone but me bursts out laughing.

“What’s a boner?” I ask, and that puts them over the edge. Even if it’s at my own expense, I like making my father laugh. He has a lot of pretend and halfhearted laughs, but his real one makes a clicking sound in the back of his throat that I love to hear.

I cannot seem to get on my bike and return to Water Street, even though it feels like I have come onstage too late to be anything but the straight man to their summer antics.

In the early evening, without my father knowing, I call my mother.

“Can I stay another night?”

“Of course. I’m glad it’s going so well. All summer I worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“I just worried, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“You two were so close.”

After a while she says, “Daley?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you want to stay?”

“Yeah,” I say, but my throat is tight.

“Oh, honey. Maybe you should come back here. You’ll see him on the weekend. You’ll see him every weekend. And things will fall back into place with him.”

“Mrs. Tabor is here a lot.”

“Mmm,” she says, which means she already knew that. “Patrick’s one of your best friends.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Isn’t he?” She’s doing something, painting her nails maybe. The phone keeps slipping away from her mouth.

Patrick follows my father around like one of his dogs. It isn’t the same. Nothing is the same. “How’d your interviews go?”

“Pretty well. One in particular.”