Lily King - Father of the Rain

“What?”

“This child advocacy lawyer needs an assistant. He’s a good guy. He helps children.”

“When will you know if you got the job?’

“Within a week, he said. But I’ve got two more interviews tomorrow. I’ll be home by four. Come home for dinner, okay? I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

I hang up and nearly pick it up again to ask her to come get me. Then Patrick calls for me, saying we’re going to Peking Garden for dinner.

I’ve come here a lot with my parents. We always got a booth along the wall and had a waiter named Roy, the owner’s son. My father would order the moo goo gai pan just because he loved to say it to Roy in a funny voice. My mother would get a drink with a bright paper parasol so I could play with it. I liked to pretend it belonged to my spoon and that the fork was in love with her, though he could never see her face behind the parasol. I never suspected we all weren’t having a good time.

There are six of us now — Frank showed up again right at dinnertime — so they put us at a round table in the middle. Mrs. Tabor is wearing a shimmery green dress that falls to her ankles and has wide sleeves that droop onto her plate and into the small bowls of sauces without her noticing. She and my father order a new drink every time Roy comes to the table. Roy winks at me but he acts like he doesn’t know my father, who is quiet tonight, his head hung low over his plate, his eyes casting around, seeing little. I wonder if he misses sitting in our booth, the three of us on a Sunday night.

Patrick and I order spareribs. We slather on the sweet-and-sour sauce and compete to see who can gnaw down to a clear bone quicker.

“You two are revolting,” Frank says.

My father looks at me hard. “You ever see your mother eat a piece of chicken?”

“No,” I lie.

He breaks into a fake smile and chuckles. I can tell there is nothing funny about how my mother eats chicken. “She’d eat everything — tendons, cartilage, the works. Then she’d crack open the bone and suck it dry. I’m not kidding.” He shakes his head. “She was a beauty.”

“Now you’re the chicken bone,” Mrs. Tabor says, pleased with her analogy.

My father isn’t pleased. He mutters something I can’t hear and tries to gesture to Roy, who turns and goes into the kitchen without acknowledging him.

Elyse, reaching for a different crayon, knocks her water straight into my father’s lap.

He leaps up and screams “Goddammit!” as loud as he’s able, as if he’s forgotten we’re in a restaurant. “Goddammit! Goddammit!” His yellow eyes in his purple face flash from Elyse to Mrs. Tabor. The restaurant is silent. Roy stands stunned by the fish tank.

Mrs. Tabor starts laughing.

“Fuck you, you little bitch. Fuck you!” He picks up a chair like he’s going to throw it at her, but it just shakes in his hands until Roy’s father comes and puts it back down and wipes up the spill. Mrs. Tabor never quite wipes the smirk off her face.

My father sometimes irritated my mother by complaining too much about Hugh Stewart, his boss at the brokerage firm. She’d tell him to hush and sometimes he might say Hush yourself , but that’s about as heated as they ever got in front of me. He yelled, but it was never at her; it was always about someone else. And when she was mad at him, she squeezed her lips together and looked away. I wonder what Roy and his father think has happened to my father, who used to chat easily with them up at the counter while he was paying the bill.

Elyse continues to color in her place mat and Frank looks blankly at the wall ahead of him, but Patrick is crying. I take slow breaths and count backward from a thousand in my head. Roy slips a blue parasol beside my spoon. It has a thin band of paper around it, keeping it shut.

On the way home, Elyse asks my father to sing her favorite song. He seems to know what she means because he starts singing: “Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit, your ears are mighty…” He pauses and she fills in— blue —and he continues: “Yes, my Lord, I’ve been pooping in my shoe.” Elyse tries to join in but she’s laughing too hard, so my father sings the chorus alone:

“Every little creature’s gotta shine shine shine.

Every little creature’s gotta shine.”

It’s hard to leave the next afternoon. I want to go, but it feels awful, like I’m leaving my father all over again. I keep putting it off, letting Elyse talk me into a game of Candyland, making water balloons with Patrick.

They’re in the sunroom when I go to say goodbye.

“I’m going to hit the road now.”

“All right,” my father says, looking at Mrs. Tabor. “See ya.”

I go over and kiss him on the cheek. He keeps his eyes fixed on Mrs. Tabor and does not kiss back. “I’ll be back Friday.”

“When school starts, come with Patrick in the car pool. I think it’s Mrs. Utley on Fridays,” Mrs. Tabor says.

I don’t know if I should kiss her. “Okay. Thanks for everything.”

“You’re welcome.”

As soon as I cross the threshold, my father begins his hoarse whisper and Mrs. Tabor shushes him and then begins whispering, too.

At the end of the driveway I almost turn my bike around. I picture going back in the sunroom, asking if I can stay just one more night. But once I’m out on the main road, my legs start pumping the pedals hard and I don’t even look at the front of the house as I whiz past.

I feel light and free as my bike drops down the long hill into town. I flip it into the hardest gear and pedal the whole way down, moving faster than I ever have on my bike, not bothering to look around for cars turning in or out of side streets and driveways. A few hippies hanging out on a bench in the park shout something to me but I’m going too fast to hear. I rise up from the seat going over the train tracks. The bike bucks and twists but I stay on. I pass the gas station and the sub shop, the kids on the steps of Bruce’s (who make no comment today), the gift shop, the library, the Congregational church, and the chowder restaurant. This is still my town. I’m still home.

I remember Neal. I forgot to ask Patrick about him. How did I forget? It’s like I had static in my ears up there on Myrtle Street and I couldn’t think about the other parts of my life. I feel like calling him up when I get to the apartment, then remember where he is and that my father might answer and how weird that would be.

I turn left down Water Street. I pass our apartment building to see what’s at the end of the street. It dead-ends at the harbor. There’s a tiny patch of dirty sand and a bench. Two teenagers are sitting on it, making out. My bike makes a tic-tic-tic sound as I make a wide U-turn, but it doesn’t bother them.

The apartment is nicer than I remember it. The carpet is clean and soft, the ceilings are high, and there’s a picture window looking out onto the make-out bench and the harbor beyond that lets in two huge squares of light. My mother is in her bathrobe, straightening chairs at a new table.

She hugs me hard. She smells of lemon furniture polish. It seems at that moment like the best smell on earth. I remember I need to ask her a lot of questions about taking care of her garden.

“How was it?” She pulls away just far enough to see me clearly. She pushes hair from either side of my face. Her skin is shiny from lotion.

“Good.”

I feel her eyes raking across my face, as if I’ve hidden something there really well.

It’s the moment I could tell her about the whispering, the drinking, the word boner , but the moment passes.

“I’m so glad.” She takes her eyes off me and points to the table and the high-backed chairs that surround it. “What do you think?”