Lily King - Father of the Rain

I walk around to the living room windows. The current tenants have a sofa where we had one, a large dining table where our small one was. I’d been in my dorm room when Paul called. I was a sophomore in college. My roommate was dating a hockey player who’d just gotten back from a game. His shoulder pads were leaning against the wall by the phone. Paul was crying. The inside of the pads were streaked with filth. I just talked to her last night . I think I told this to Paul many times. It might have been the only thing I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was the only thing that made sense. Garvey came and got me a few hours later.

I often try to remember my mother’s funeral. It was at the little Episcopalian church she used to take me to before she left my father. I can remember those Sundays: my blue velvet coat, the white gloves, and my mother’s long prayers on her knees on needlepoint cushions. I don’t think she went to church after she left him. I don’t think she needed to. But I can’t recall the funeral. I don’t know what was said. All I remember about that day, that whole week, was my father’s absence.

Garvey thought my expectations were ridiculous. “You’re going to make yourself sick your whole life if you think he’s ever going to behave like a father to you,” he told me as we lay on the twin beds in my room after the funeral. “We’re basically orphans now. Get used to it.” But I could not.

I think I believed that with my mother dead the barrier between me and my father would fall magically away. I spent the second half of my sophomore year of college waiting for him to call me. I took a job that summer in a restaurant in Rhode Island and sent him my new number on a postcard, and he never called it. I didn’t visit him before I went back to school. I spent Christmas with a friend’s family. And then, spring break of my junior year, I took a bus to Boston and a train to Ashing and appeared at the kitchen door where he was feeding the dogs. “Well, well,” he said. “You pregnant or broke or both?” I stayed the night. It was just the three of us. Catherine made a roast. As they got drunk, then drunker, I waited for them to slip and make a jab about my mother, the way they always did. I waited to catch them. I was going to make a scene. A huge hair-pulling scene. For God’s sake, she’s dead. Can’t you leave her alone now? But they never mentioned her. He hugged me goodbye at the train the next day. “You’s a good kid for visiting,” he said. I spent the rest of the break off campus, in a friend’s empty apartment, alone, sobbing. I had held off the grief with anger towards my father, but now I was blindsided by it, terrified by the sudden gaping hole of my mother’s absence. She was my ballast, my counterweight to the downward pull of Myrtle Street, and she was gone.

I take one last look at the apartment. My mother’s toes used to snap when she walked barefoot. Alone in the bathroom she talked out loud and made herself laugh. I was unhappy when we lived here together. I ricocheted from this apartment to my father’s house for seven years, until I went to college. I was never able to please either household. At my father’s I was too bookish, too liberal, too much like my mother; at my mother’s I was moody, mercurial, and under-achieving in school. I’m sorry she can’t know me now. My daughter is a tenured professor at Berkeley , she might have been able to say in a few years. She would have liked that. She would have liked Jonathan.

I continue on toward Myrtle Street. The BMW in the bank parking lot might be Catherine’s. She’ll go back to him. I feel sure of it. She just needs a few days to cool off. I cross the railroad tracks and head up the hill. The houses are larger on this side of town, big clapboard Capes and Colonials with wraparound porches and pots of daisies on the wide steps before their front doors. There are hammocks and swing sets and lacrosse goals in the long green yards. The harbor glitters behind them. I can smell the salt in the air. It’s heavy, humid air. I need sleep. Garvey will have to let me have some when I get there.

I park next to Garvey’s van. It’s one of the small ones. He has his own moving company now, a fleet of six trucks with flying refrigerators painted all over them. The dogs go berserk at the sight of my car, the three of them, a tan one, a black one, and an auburn one, chasing it and then positioning themselves in front of the car door, their legs and chests motionless as statues, their mouths and throats furious at the foreign invasion. They make a ridiculous racket. The older I get, the more my father’s dogs exhaust me.

“Calm down,” I tell them coldly as they triple-team me all the way up the path. They are big dogs, retrievers of some kind. Something stirs on the porch. A little white and brown thing. A bunny? Then it bounds down the steps, or it tries to bound, but it ends up moving sideways, its hind legs stronger and braver than those in front. It runs right at me with no barking, then scrapes all its little paws at my jeans as if trying to climb straight up. The other dogs stop barking to watch.

“You’re a little hairball,” I say, laughing at its smashed-in face, its wet black nose. I scoop it up and it snorts a tiny spray at me. The tag on its collar says Maybelle. “Hello, little Maybelle,” I say. And she buries her funny little face in my neck. I leave my suitcase on the lawn and carry the dog in instead.

I see them through the screen door. They are both on the floor, in that wide open space where the kitchen table used to be. My father is lying down, bleeding from somewhere on his face. Garvey is sitting up but bent over, rocking.

“Is he dead?” I hear myself scream. “Is he dead?” I don’t know what I do with Maybelle. I’m on the floor between them, wiping the blood with my sleeve. It’s coming from just below my father’s eyebrow, not quickly. His skin is a green gray. “I think he’s dead!”

“He’s not dead,” Garvey says quietly.

It’s true. I can feel breath coming out his nostrils.

“I’m sorry I called you.” He stands up slowly. It hurts him to straighten up. “He’s not worth it. Just get in your car and go.”

I don’t move.

“I mean it, Daley. Leave. Go to California. I’m serious.”

“He’s unconscious and he’s bleeding.”

“He’s fine. He’s drunk and he has a scrape. C’mon, Daley. Get up and come with me.”

“You did this. You hit him.”

“All I did was defend myself. C’mon. We’ll stop at Brigham’s and I’ll buy you a lime rickey.” For the first time my brother looks old to me. Old and sad. He is growing jowly.

“You just had me drive sixteen hours in the wrong direction and now you want me to leave him passed out on the floor and drive away?”

“I said I was sorry. I was wrong, all right? Come with me. Now. Trust me on this one, Daley.”

“I can’t.”

“Fuck it then. Suit yourself.” He slides his old leather jacket off a doorknob. The screen door smacks behind him. “Call me when he’s dead,” he says, and starts down the steps.

“Garvey!” I want to run after him but I’m scared to leave my father. “You asshole!” I get up and scream through the screen at his back, moving away. “You fucking asshole! What am I supposed to do with him?”

“Walk away,” he calls without turning.

I go back to my father on the floor. The van starts up, the dogs bark, and Garvey yells at them as they chase him and his goddamn flying refrigerators down the driveway.

Maybelle has taken to her leopard-print bed in the corner but jumps up when I get a rag out of the drawer. She follows me to the sink and back to my father.

As soon as I put the wet cloth on his forehead he comes to, or maybe he’s been awake the whole time.