Lily King - Father of the Rain

“So you’re taking care of the pipsqueak.”

“We take care of each other.” She smiles at me. I hear her accent— each otha —more distinctly with Garvey in the room. She comes every day after school until my mother gets home at seven-thirty, and we laugh a lot. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have Nora. She’d moved in with her sister in Lynn and came sometimes to take me out to Friendly’s and didn’t seem to be working at all, but my mother thought I should have someone younger, and less expensive. Pauline is in tenth grade and her boobs are growing so fast they pop the buttons off her shirt. We’re always finding buttons and cracking up. I see my brother taking all this in.

We eat the macaroni on the sofa. Garvey drills Pauline with questions: where does she live, what’s that neighborhood like, does she have siblings, did her parents grow up here, has she done much traveling, where would she like to go most? Maybe we’ll all take a trip there, to California, one day, he concludes.

And then Mom comes home and Pauline leaves.

“Wow,” my brother says, smoothing down the back of his hair. “Va va voom.”

“She’s barely fifteen,” my mother says.

“She’s not going to be able to balance on two feet if she grows any bigger.”

“She’ll manage just fine.” My mother hangs up her coat and gives my brother another hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” she says through gritted teeth. She always grits her teeth when she’s feeling affection.

“It’s good to be here. Nice pad, Ma.” He swings his head around. “You got some serious loot from the big house.”

My mother eats the rest of my macaroni standing up. We’re all still standing up. I’m not sure why.

“How’s it going there?” she asks him.

“Oh, fair to middling.”

“Yeah?” Meaning she wants to hear more.

“I’ve been in school so long.”

“Garvey.”

“I’m just saying. I was in boarding school for four years before this. Everyone else runs around like they’ve been let out of a cage, and I feel like it’s just another cage. A less interesting cage, actually.”

“Three and a half more years. That’s all. Then it’s over forever.”

“Yeah.” He slumps to the sofa and puts his boots up on the coffee table. Mom doesn’t tell him to take them off. He pulls out a new pack of cigarettes, smashes both ends into his palm a couple of times, unwraps the cellophane, then slides one out and lights it. “Then I get to go out and find my perfect career that will swallow up the rest of my promising life.” He blows out a long stream of smoke. “It all may be quite moot. I wasn’t able to register this week for next semester’s classes. Dad’s a little late on the payments, it turns out.”

My mother sits down on the couch beside him. “You’re joking, right?”

“I am not joking.”

“You need to talk to him about that. Tomorrow.”

Garvey taps the ashes onto his jeans and rubs them in. My mother brings him an ashtray but he doesn’t use it. “I don’t need his money.”

“Garvey, you need this degree.”

“I can pay for it myself. Brian Foley pays his own way. He works in the library I think. I visited him a few weeks ago.”

“UMass only costs three hundred dollars a year. Of course he can work it off. Harvard is several thousand.”

“So I’ll go to UMass. Harvard is a bunch of self-inflated morons. They all walk around in tuxes on the weekend. I’m not kidding. I met this bartender last weekend and he’s starting a moving company, furniture and crap, and he asked me to do some jobs for him. Might have to miss a few classes, but it’s good money.”

“Please talk to your father.”

“No.”

“I’m worried now.”

“I’m worried too.”

My mother gets up and rinses off the plate in the kitchen. She takes her time. Eventually the dishwasher squeaks open and the plate is slotted in. I know there’s nothing else for her to do in there but she stays in there, thinking.

I watch Garvey smoke.

“Dad and Mrs. — I mean Catherine —are married now,” I say.

“I heard. A little Nassau combo platter: divorce, wedding, and a nice golden tan for the holidays.”

“Frank’s got your room.”

Garvey snorts. “I’ll have to show him my Playboy stash.”

“He already found it.”

“Really? Cagey bugger.”

“He’s weird. “

“With a mother like that.”

“How’s Heidi?”

“Who?”

I give him a look.

“She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s very dependable.” He says the word dependable with nunlike primness, tilting his head, pursing his lips.

I laugh and that eggs him on.

“He shows up at precisely the right time, he says precisely the right things, and he always, always has a condom.”

Frank has condoms. When we’re really bored, Patrick and I sneak them out of his room and fill them with water and lob them at Elyse. She calls them greasy balloons and shrieks whenever she sees one.

“Do you have a new girlfriend?”

“Not really.”

“What about Deena?”

“Who?” This time he really doesn’t know who I’m talking about.

“That girl in your apartment in Somerville.”

A grimace, as brief as a gust of wind, passes across his face. “I never had anything to do with her.” He’s a bad liar. He keeps talking to cover it up. “She’s a very fucked-up young woman.”

That’s what she said about you, I want to say but I don’t. I don’t want to push him any lower than he already is.

“And you, my little hermitoid. What is going on in your sixth-grade world?”

I knew he’d ask this and I know just the kinds of thing he likes to hear so I prepared just the right story. “Funny you should ask,” I say, warming up. He smiles and I continue. “There’s this new boy, Kevin.”

“Kevin what?”

“Kevin Mackerel.”

“Mackerel? Like the fish?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Oh, Kevin Mackerel,” he begins to sing. “Is he a fish or a man? I can’t tell and nobody can!”

My mother comes in then, all fired up with new reasons why Garvey has to stay in college and how she will talk to Al about how to proceed, and I never get to tell my story about how Kevin Mackerel got suspended for farting so much.

No way, my brother would have said.

Yes, way, I would have said, he did so. He just kept doing it really loudly and really stinkily and wouldn’t stop. He got warnings, demerits, a note home but nothing stopped him. So now he’s out of school until December first.

No way! I can hear him, his hands pulling at his hair, his face full of real laughter.

The next morning we get ready to go up to Dad and Catherine’s. We’ll have lunch there and dinner with Mom. I wear a black velvet dress. It has white lace cuffs and a white lace collar.

“Oh look, it’s the first pilgrim!” Garvey says.

He’s wearing the same jeans and a faded flannel shirt with a ripped pocket that flaps around. His hair is matted in the back. Because we’re going to see Dad, I notice these things. So does my mother. “The shower’s free,” she says.

“Oh goodie,” he says, and lights another cigarette.

We drive up in Mom’s car. I know this is a mistake. We should have left earlier and walked.

My father comes out on the back porch. He’s laughing and shaking his head.

“I thought,” he begins, fake chuckling, waiting to make sure we’re in earshot, “I thought your mother had decided to come for Thanksgiving dinner!”

They shake hands. I haven’t seen them together since the beginning of last summer. I’ve never noticed their similarity before, the sloping backs, the narrow eyes.