Lily King - Father of the Rain

I think I fall asleep in the grass. The next thing I hear is the snap of the screen door. I look up and my father is crossing the lawn again, showered, in another new pair of pants, drink in hand. Martini number five? Six?

“Ahhh,” he says loudly, for my benefit, as he sits down. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Twelve hours. Or I can leave at five in the morning, not six. Eleven more hours, then.

“I’m going to start cooking.”

“It’s barely six.”

“Early supper tonight.” Again like my mother, speaking cheerfully while fleeing the place he was, her words shot through with a lightness she did not feel but needed for protection.

I try to cook slowly. Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, lima beans. More foods of my childhood. I wonder what he’d do if I served him a tofu curry or bi bim bap and laugh out loud, imagining his over-reaction. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of him through the window, sitting and staring at the pool. He makes his trips to the bar in the poolhouse; he switches from the chaise to a chair. The dogs follow him, resettle against his feet. When a neighborhood dog barks, all four of them lift their heads and tilt their ears, Maybelle rising to her feet. My father speaks to them. Settle down, fellas, settle down, he’s saying.

Before I call him in, I drag the old glass-top table from the pantry back into the kitchen where it belongs. I set it with some old linens Catherine never used that I find in the dining room. They are perfectly pressed — my mother would have sent them to the dry cleaners — and smell of the pine of the sideboard drawer they have sat in for the past two decades. I remember the pattern, small white daisies on cornflower blue. The creases in the tablecloth stand firm no matter how many times I smooth it. The napkins are slightly frayed at the corners, but when I stand back everything looks as lovely as it used to be.

I don’t know how he’ll react. The table in this position is where my mother left her note before we left. But my father, when he comes in, seems not to notice at all. He is breathing in his heavy, drunk way. He puts his glass above the knife and sits in his old seat, the seat facing the stove, as if that intervening score of years never happened.

He eats the meat first. It disgusts me, the thin bone, the dead baby flesh, but I can’t help watching him eat. I feel like I’m seven years old again. The sound of his breathing, the sweat on his brow and nose, the vodka and onions and tobacco create a sort of dis-orienting fog that obscures the present for long moments at a time.

“Dad, will you promise me right now you will take care of yourself?” I say, to shake off the spell.

“I will.” He looks up from his plate. “This is good, by the way.”

“And you’ll make yourself vegetables?”

“Yup.” He scoops three lima beans onto his fork unconvincingly.

I want to ask him what on earth he plans to do with himself for the rest of his life. He’s only sixty.

He eats a few bites of the mashed potato, pushes the lima beans around a bit, and sits back. I see how drunk he is then, just before he begins speaking. “And you’ll take care of yourself, too, Daley?” I don’t like the way he says my name. He says it like Catherine used to say it, Day- lee .

“I will.”

“You’ll go shut yourself up in another Commie college and get even more asinine ideas in your head about the way the world should be and how everyone who ever lived before you got it all wrong?”

“I guess so.”

“Let me ask you something,” he says, pointing his fork tines at my chest. “Let me ask you. Did they ever make you study the Second World War? Did they ever teach you about this country and what it did for the world? The sacrifices that were made to save all those goddamn people who now just want to stick it up our asses? I’ll tell you what’s fucked up. What’s fucked up is everything that happened after 1955. That’s what they should be teaching you. Everything— everything —they are teaching you is a crock of shit, and you people are all so far gone you don’t even know it. You don’t have a clue.”

He leans forward and hoists himself up. He takes a few steps to the bar and then realizes he didn’t bring his glass and comes back for it. I see how it will be when I leave, and an image of him on the floor of his bathroom comes to me.

Ten hours. I can do this. I can say something. “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to drink yourself to death.”

He slams the glass on the counter of the bar. “You know what, Day- lee . Just go off to college — again. For the third decade. Spend your whole life in college. Don’t grow up. And take all your faux concern for me with you.”

“It’s not faux, Dad.” I’m surprised he has that word in his vocabulary.

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, going through his rites at the bar and returning with an exceptionally full glass, “you know why I drink? You know why? I drink because of people like you, people who think they are so perfect, who think they have all the ans—”

“I do not think I am perfect. By any means.”

“Good, because you are not perfect. You’re a disaster. You’re an embarrassment. You and your brother.” He puts his hands on his head as if they can stop his thoughts of us. And then he looks right at me with his yellow eyes. “You two are everything I’m ashamed of.”

I put down my knife and fork. I’m done taking this shit. “And you should be ashamed. You should be dying of shame. Because your two children didn’t get a father. They got a monster. They got a drunk, ignorant bigot who poisoned them with pure bile .” My argument begins to form itself. I have so much proof. I’m going to shove all my memories in his face.

He laughs. No, he doesn’t laugh, but there is no word for the noise my father makes when he is surprised and furious at the same time. “You know something. You turned out worse than your mother, you little bitch.”

The mention of my mother, his first since she died nine years ago, slits my vocal cords clean through. All I can do is get myself out of the room and up the stairs.

I cry on my bed with the despair of a child. I keep telling myself to get up and drive away. But I can’t. I feel pinned down by the weight of all the years and insults. I can hear him downstairs, doing the dishes, letting the dogs out, letting them back in. It’s a normal night for him. A quart of vodka, a vicious argument. He probably feels damn good, like he’s just played two sets of tennis. I worry he might even try to say good night to me, so I hoist myself up long enough to lock the bedroom door. The feel of the lock in my fingers is so familiar to me. It’s a little silver macaroni-shaped thing with a deep solid thunk when the thick tongue falls into place. I can practically feel my mother on the other side of the door, pleading with me to come down and say hello to Cousin Grace who’s come up from Westport. But I don’t want to. I’ve just gotten out the big wicker picnic basket of Barbies and their camper from the closet and am settling in for the afternoon. I do not want to have tea with Cousin Grace.

Back on the bed, I think of Paul and how respectful and patient he always was with me, how he did edify me after all, and how now I’m certain I didn’t write him back after he bought the house. I’m the closest thing to a child he ever had. I cry for him and how his grief at losing my mother was too much for me at the time, and how we couldn’t help each other and how it was easier for me to just close the door on him and all his evocations of her, my mother, who loved me but did not protect me, who let me go off every weekend for years and years to my father’s even though I returned a wild animal and she never asked why.