Lily King - Father of the Rain

The phone rings beneath her hand and we jump and crack up but don’t dare answer it. It rings five, then six times. Finally I realize it could be about my mother: Car accident. Hospital. I pick it up. There is a long pause at the other end; then a woman asks for Mrs. Tabor. “I wouldn’t have called here,” she adds, “but it’s important.” I recognize the voice but can’t place it.

“Who is it?” Patrick and Mallory whisper as I set down the receiver.

I shrug. “Where’s your mom?”

He points to the den. But the rest of the downstairs is empty. I call up the stairs and think I hear something. I go up. My father’s door is slightly ajar and I can hear the TV.

I knock and no one answers. “Mrs. Tabor?” I say as I poke my head through.

I can’t make sense of what I see except their faces, which turn toward the door in shock and then fury.

“Get the fuck out!” my father hollers at me, and when I don’t move instantly Mrs. Tabor echoes him: “Get the fuck out of this room, Day- lee !”

I’m down the stairs and back in the kitchen before I even know I’ve moved away from their door, before I even register what I saw: my father naked on his hands and knees on the bed, his shoulders between Mrs. Tabor’s spread legs, licking her red vagina like a beast bent over its kill.

“She’s busy right now,” I hear myself say into the mouthpiece.

The woman lets out a sigh. “Will you just tell her to call me about the orange slices for the game on Wednesday?”

“Okay.” My voice wobbles. Patrick and Mallory are staring at me. I don’t want to get off the phone and have to explain.

“Daley, I’m so sorry about your parents. It must be very hard for you.”

“Yeah.” It’s more a breath than a word.

“You can always come talk to me if you want. Anytime. My door is open.”

I still have no idea who she is.

My father, bent over, head low between his shoulders, nothing more than an animal. I didn’t know about that, I want to tell her. I never knew about that.

That night my father and I begin a ritual that will last until I get my driver’s license. After Mrs. Tabor feeds us, I put my book bag and my suitcase by the back door. My father makes a drink. I wait. He makes another. He snaps at Patrick to turn down the radio. He tells Frank a joke about a black couple going to a costume ball. The punch line is the word fudgsicle. I’ve heard it before. He glances at the clock. I glance at the clock. I play solitaire on the kitchen floor. Elyse kicks all my cards and I tell her to put them back and Mrs. Tabor tells me to pick on someone my own size. Mr. Seeley calls to say the dogs are barking so loud he can’t hear himself think. My father is polite on the phone, then slams it down and marches around the room swearing. My cards get kicked again. He makes another drink. I need to go home and start my homework. The cuckoo clock chirps eight times.

“I’m putting the steaks on now,” Mrs. Tabor says to him, which is his cue.

He puts down his drink and moves slowly to the drawer across the room where he keeps his checkbook. It’s a blue binder and he turns the pages slowly. With the ballpoint pen he keeps in it, he writes out the check for my mother. He folds it in half and hands it to me. He looks at me like I’m draining the blood from his veins.

He doesn’t speak much on the short ride to Water Street. We pull into the farthest spot from my mother’s car. He bought that car for her birthday last year. He doesn’t cut the engine or walk me to the door. He will never once in seven years get out of the car, as if the pavement around my mother’s apartment is radioactive. He keeps his fists clenched on the steering wheel as I kiss him. I get my suitcase out of the back, call out a last goodbye, and walk away. He has driven off before I reach the door.

My mother has put big pots of plants on the doorstep, and there is a window box outside my bedroom. All the lights are on, even in my room. The door is unlocked, the air in the apartment warm and moist. I find my mother in the kitchen, boiling up a packet of chipped beef. She is in a new bathrobe, her hair wet from a shower. The bathrobe is white with a striped sash tied tight to one side. Her waist is tiny. There’s an ashtray drying on the dishrack, though my mother doesn’t smoke.

She hugs me and she feels small in my arms. Her kiss on my cheek is greasy. “How was it?”

The demolished rose garden, Elyse at the bottom of the pool, Dad feeding between Mrs. Tabor’s legs — it all blurs into a feeling that seems to have no name. “I’m tired.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes.”

“Homework?”

“Tons.”

“It’s nearly eight-thirty.”

“I know.”

“Daley, you’re going to have to—”

“I can’t do homework over there.”

“Then come home earlier.”

“I can’t.”

“Then call me and I’ll come get you.”

“No!” The idea of my mother driving that car into the driveway of my father’s house, where she lived for nineteen years, horrifies me.

She smooths out my forehead. “Don’t make that face. You’ll get wrinkles.”

I hand her the check and she unfolds it, then chucks it on the counter.

“It’s fifty less than he owes me.” Her mouth presses into a straight line.

She goes to her desk, writes a short note that begins Gardiner —in her big round letters. When she is done, she rereads and underlines several words, including the word lawyer . Then she slides it into an envelope, puts a stamp on it, and shoves it into her purse on a chair by the door. I don’t need to know all the words now — I’ll hear all about it next weekend. Next weekend my father will be waving it around like a flag.

“Come sit with me while I eat. Then you can start your homework.”

We sit at the shiny dining room table. I hate chipped beef and the smell of chipped beef. It looks like dog food mixed with phlegm. Bulbs of steam rise from her plate but she doesn’t blow on the food and doesn’t seem to get scalded as she eats. Her mood has shifted since the check. My mood is the same — a burnt-out flatness that I know bothers her. My answers to her questions are short and unimaginative. I don’t want to be sitting there watching the chipped beef go into her mouth but I don’t want to do my homework or go to sleep or watch TV. There’s nothing I want to do.

“I saw A Chorus Line this weekend. I really want to take you.”

“You saw it already? With who?”

“My friend Martin and his son.”

Martin. There it was, just like my brother said.

“You said you’d take me.”

“I want to. I just said that.”

“No, you said you’d just seen it.”

“And that I’d like to take you.”

“But you already saw it. And plays are expensive. You’re always telling me that.”

“Daley.”

“I can’t believe you saw it with somebody else’s kid.”

I sit back in the chair and cross my arms over my chest.

My mother laughs. “You’re acting a little bit like a two-year-old right now.”

Before I know it, the chipped beef smashes against the wall. My mother is still holding her fork and knife. Her voice is very very quiet. “Leave this room right now. I do not want to see you until morning. Any privileges you had are gone.”

I stand up and start down the hallway.

“I swear, Daley Amory, you are like a wild animal every time you come home from your father’s,” she says, before I slam my door on her.

On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, Garvey comes home from college. A friend drops him off. I hear him shut a car door and shout something. Then he is there in our apartment for the first time, his long lanky body making everything — the sideboard, the desk, the walls — seem smaller. He is growing a sparse rust-colored beard, nothing like the hair on his head, which is thick and dirty blond. His eyes are small chips of blue in murky water. He smells like the sleeping bags in the shed on Myrtle Street. I breathe him in. I cannot get enough of it. I have missed him so much more than I knew. He has to peel me off of him to introduce himself to Pauline, my babysitter. He makes a point of shaking her hand, even though she’s across the room and has to take off the oven mitt for the macaroni she’s just about to take out of the oven.