Lily King - Father of the Rain

“Tons of times.” He’s lying. He can’t bear to believe my father has a flaw. But he’s crying. “That guy Murphy who sits in the corner of the sub shop. He’s an alcoholic, Daley.”

“I’m just saying that they drink a lot and they don’t mean half of what they say to each other. It will all be forgotten tomorrow morning.”

Elyse crawls into my lap and I stroke her arms and the bandages on her arms. Patrick sucks his thumb hard. I watch them both fall asleep, and after a while I carry Elyse into our room. I hear her fall back asleep immediately. I don’t go to sleep for a long time. My heart is throbbing and I find myself worrying that they are right, that they are going to get a divorce. As much as Catherine annoys me, I don’t want to be home alone with my father. I don’t want to be the only one left for him to yell at.

When I wake up, Elyse is not in the bed beside me. I hear laughter in the kitchenette, the coffeepot gurgling. No divorce. I put on my bathing suit and a pair of shorts. Frank is on the couch, just waking up, and when he sees me he shakes his head and tsk-tsks me with his finger. Why would I be in trouble and not him? The chatter has stopped in the kitchenette. They’re all there, my father, Catherine, and Patrick, all standing in the narrow space between the fridge and the counter, and Elyse on a stool, eating her sugar-coated cereal. Catherine whispers something to her children and they leave the room. Even Frank slips out the sliding glass door.

My father and Catherine look at each other and sip their coffee. There is some charge in the air I can’t identify. Maybe they are going to get a divorce. And they’re telling me first, so I can break it to Patrick and Elyse. I’ll be unemotional, I decide. I’ll say that it’s for the best.

“Daley,” Catherine begins. The V in her bathrobe has widened, and I can see the long nipples of her breasts.

“Sit down,” my father says to me, in a sudden guttural voice.

I move toward a counter stool.

“I said sit down.”

“I am,” I say, and my voice breaks. So much for unemotional.

“Daley, your father and I—”

My father breaks in. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I will not have you come down here with all the lies your mother has fed you. I’m sorry.” There is nothing sorry about him and the taut purple tendons running up his neck. “I’m sorry that you have to live with her, see her, listen to her, see those god-awful friends of hers. But if you start believing what she tells you, then you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

“Do you really think we’re alcoholics, Daley?”

I can’t find my voice. The stool feels so small beneath me.

“Do you really think this”—she points to the water through the glass door—”is the lifestyle of alcoholics? Are we passed out every night on the floor? Do we have bottles in our closets? Are we asking for money on street corners?”

I answer no to each of her questions.

“So what’s an alcoholic, in your opinion?”

“Someone who gets drunk all the time.”

“Do we get drunk all the time? Are we drunk right now?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s eight o’clock in the morning and we’re drinking coffee. Are we drunk right now?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’re drunk right now,” my father says. “Maybe you were drunk last night when you had your little talk with Patrick and Elyse.”

Catherine pats his leg to shush him.

“Maybe you and your fucking mother were drunk when you left my house with all my mother’s goddamn jewelry. If I’m an alcoholic, she’s a goddamn criminal.” He makes like he’s going to hit me and I almost want him to, want to have some mark my mother will see when I get back. But he just walks out of the cottage, muttering fucking bitch a few times and shaking his clenched hands around before careening down the path out of view.

Catherine finally notices that her boobs are hanging out of her robe and pulls it tighter. “We leave tomorrow, Daley. Could you just keep your trap shut until we drop you off at Water Street?”

The blond boy is at the pool, hanging his feet in at the deep end, talking to three sisters from Wisconsin who arrived yesterday. They all look at me as I go down the shallow end steps, then he says something and they all burst out laughing. I go under quickly. They are still laughing when I come back up. The youngest girl swims toward me.

“Is your name Prudence?” she asks, and the others behind her crack up again.

“Go to hell,” I say, before I register how young she is, not much older than Elyse. Her eyes widen and fill with tears. She didn’t know what she was asking, and I feel terrible.

I skip lunch and spend the afternoon in the cottage alone. I don’t care if my heart starts to pound. I’m not scared of that anymore. I look at the phone and think about calling my mother at work, but there’s the disapproving Jean to get past and I know I won’t be able to speak anyway. I’ll just cry when I hear her voice and she’ll get worried that something is really wrong. Or I’ll yell at her for telling me he was an alcoholic in the first place.

Frank leans in the doorway of my room, clucking. “Namin’ the names.”

“What?”

“Callin’ spades spades.”

He’s wasted. I’ve seen him high, but not like this.

“Puttin’ on the labels. Big white and red Campbell’s soup labels. Splat . Right on the ‘rents. You should have seen them wriggling under the pin. Fucking eels. Someday we’ll cut off their heads and their tails and see if anything grows back.” He undoes the button on his jeans and starts unzipping his fly and I’m just about to slam the door on him when he rolls around the doorjamb and heads for the bathroom.

In the taxi we watch the sun seep up over the water. It is still dark on the roads, but the water and the sky just above it are starting to glow. My father is up front, talking to the driver, who is a black man about his age. My father is turned toward him, fully awake. “Holy smokes, you can’t beat that!” he’s saying, and the driver is laughing. My father is wearing bright red cotton pants, a white oxford shirt, and blue blazer. His smell of Barbasol, Right Guard, and Old Spice fills the van. It is his morning smell, the smell that obliterates the A-1-cigarette-vodka smell of the night before. He is close-shaven, squeaky clean. We all admire him. We cannot help it.

The airport doesn’t have walls, just a long red roof and palm trees on all sides. The driver unloads our bags onto a long cart. My father hands him a thick wad of money and the driver smiles and pats my father on the arm. My father pats him back and tells him to take care of himself and his family. The man cannot seem to take his eyes off my father and stands there by the side of his car long after my father has moved away.

Beneath the roof it is chaotic, with one check-in counter open and about fifty families trying to leave the island. We stand in the same place for a long time. We are hungry and it is starting to get hot. Our sunburns begin to throb beneath the stiff New England clothes we have not worn in thirteen days.

Patrick goes to sit on Frank’s duffel bag and Frank swats him hard.

“Sit on your own fucking suitcase,” he says.

Catherine’s head snaps around and she fixes her meanest stare on Frank. “Chh,” she says, spraying my arm with spit.

There are several boys my age in line but I do not look at them. I worry the blond boy is here somewhere or is about to arrive. I look down at my suitcase. It’s my mother’s old blue suitcase. I remember her taking it when she went on trips with my father, and then, when they returned, there would be presents nestled in it for me: an enameled ring from Venice, a cloth doll from Acapulco. I drape my parka over it, just as I did on the way down, hoping my father will not recognize it.