Lily King - Father of the Rain

“Dionysius,” Paul says loudly, then he looks at me. “One and Two.”

He reminds me of a younger, more playful Grindy. “How on earth did you know that?” he asks her.

“My classics teacher at Miss Pratt’s School for Girls wrote a book on Greek history. She branded every name and date on our hide.”

After my mother puts the encyclopedia away, she asks about the Delaurio boy, but Paul puts up his hand and says, “We’re not going to inflict our work on Daley.”

We eat a little more and then he asks, “So who are your friends and enemies, Daley?”

Even my mother looks surprised by this one. I look across at her and she shrugs.

“‘You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends,’” he explains to us.

“Who was that?” my mother asks.

“You promise not to correct me?”

“No.”

“Joseph Conrad, I believe.”

“Plausible,” my mother says.

He bows his head briefly to her. And to me he says, “So tell me.”

“I don’t know. My best friend is Mallory. I’ve known her since nursery school.”

“What do you like about her?”

There’s something about the sound of his voice that pulls more words from me than I mean to give. “She’s kind of unpredictable. I’ll go over to her house to make chocolate chip cookies and we’ll end up wearing wigs and pretending we have our own cooking show. And then we pee our pants because we’re laughing so hard. Who is your best friend?”

He smiles. He wasn’t expecting the question back at him. “That’s a tricky one. There’s Eddie, who was my Mallory growing up, but he lives in Chicago so I don’t see him much. Here I have some good buddies from law school, and this new friend who appeared in my office last fall, but I probably can’t tell you anything about her that you don’t already know.”

They smile at each other. It’s weird. The whole thing is strange, but not awful. He has barely touched the glass of wine my mother poured him.

“Any other friends you want to mention?”

“Not really. There’s Gina and Darcie, but I only call them when Mallory’s busy.”

“And there’s Patrick,” my mother says.

It’s funny to hear her say Patrick’s name. It reminds me that there was a day last spring when she took us to the Mug for donuts and Patrick asked my mother if he could drink the extra creamers beside her cup of coffee and the cream left a tiny crescent of white above his lip and my mother wiped it off for him with her napkin. He told me that afternoon that he thought my mother was the most beautiful mother he’d ever seen. He said she looked like a prettier Jackie Onassis. Now he doesn’t dare say her name.

“And Patrick,” I say. But that’s weird now, too.

“And your enemies?” Paul says.

All I can think of is Catherine Tabor. But my mother wouldn’t like me to say that. “With a family like mine, who needs enemies?”

“What’d she say?” my mother says, but Paul is laughing a loud hiccuppy laugh. I feel all warm inside, making him laugh like that. It’s almost as good as when I can get my father going. But that’s becoming harder and harder.

My mother serves dessert in the living room area. Paul takes a seat on one side of the sofa and my mother folds her legs up beneath her on the other side so I sit on the middle cushion. I catch them smiling at each other.

“What?” I say, but they won’t tell me.

“No homework tonight?” my mother asks.

“I did it in study hall.” The ice cream is coffee and I swirl it around until it’s soup. Paul has big shoes, dark brown leather with laces, and thin socks that show the boniness of his ankles. He jiggles his leg a bit, like Garvey. Everyone seems to have run out of things to say.

When he stands to leave, Paul puts out his hand and we shake. “You are everything your mother said you were, only more so.”

“You too.”

I don’t know why he thinks I’m so funny, but it’s nice.

My mother has a huge grin on her face when he says, “Adieu, m’lady,” and doffs a pretend hat.

“Not quite so fast,” she says. “I’ll walk you out.”

They put on their coats and shut the door behind them. I race to my room. The lights are off and I have a perfect view of the parking lot where they stop beside his car.

I know they’re talking about me. He’s pointing back toward the door and she’s laughing. I hope I’ve made a good impression. They talk for a long time, leaning against the door of his car, looking down, looking up, looking at each other. He takes her hand and then the other hand and when he tells her something she nods and says something and they laugh at the same time. He bends down and they kiss on the mouth, not for a long time, not any longer than my last kiss with Neal. They end up in a long hug. She pulls away to look at him and says something and I wonder if she’s telling him she feels like she’s in a novel. I do, just watching them.

“Oh my God, it’s not possible,” Catherine says. “Gardiner, look at this. She’s got another one.”

My father looks up from where he’s spreading the large hotel towel on the chaise. “Oh Christ. What’s that called, Out to the Out-house by Willie Makit? Overpopulation in China by Wee Fuckem Young?”

I’d heard these jokes so many times. “ It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume.”

“Blume,” he says and shakes his head. “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.”

He has no clue about Paul yet.

“What’s it about?” Catherine says.

“A kid whose parents get divorced.”

She snorts. “What would you want to read about that for?”

She doesn’t like all the reading I do. Neither does my father. They say it’s rude. They make fun of the titles, the covers, and the way I chew on the skin of my lower lip when I get deep in a book.

But I have nothing else to do. We’re in St. Thomas for spring vacation, and Patrick has made friends with the golf pro and now drives his own little cart, picking up elderly players at their cottages and driving them around the eighteen holes. He gets paid for this in snack bar tickets, so every afternoon when he gets off work we go have peanuts and papaya juice by the pool. Elyse has attached herself to another family for the ten days, a couple from Salt Lake City and their one-year-old son. Elyse loves babies. The mother from Salt Lake sensed her usefulness immediately, and now Elyse spends her days under their cabana on the beach. No one knows where Frank goes. He leaves after breakfast and comes back before dinner with a secretive smirk and half-shut eyes that scare me.

Almost everything scares me these days. I have been on planes before, but this time I was terrified of the distance from earth, the smallness of the plane, and the flimsiness of its metal walls. When we actually landed, my gratitude didn’t last long. There are lizards on the floor, red jellyfish at the shore, and shark fins farther out. I don’t want to snorkel or water-ski or windsurf. And it isn’t just the outside world I’m scared of. I’m scared of inside of me, too. On the second day I ran back to our cottage to go to the bathroom, and as I stood there on the tiles pulling down my suit, a feeling wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. The dead star feeling, out of nowhere. I struggled to breathe. I knew I was alone in the cottage and yet the bathroom felt crowded. My heart began to pound and made me so scared it pounded harder and harder until I thought there was no way my body could withstand the force of its beating. I’m just going to the bathroom, I kept telling myself, but my body felt something completely different, as if it were having a whole other invisible experience. Back on the beach, I felt weak and shivery and wrapped myself in a towel. I’ve been in the cottage alone since then, but at night the feeling edges in and I have a hard time falling asleep. Reading is the only thing that calms me down.