Lily King: Father of the Rain

The boys only ever want to kiss her, so they wait.

The air is thick and hot, but every now and then a cool gust comes off the water. You can see it coming, wrinkling the surface from far away as if it were a huge dark wing. Afterwards everything goes light and flat again. Neal’s curls have been blown around. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a crush and my heart is thrumming a little faster than normal. I can’t look at Patrick because I know he knows. He’s like that.

“Who wants to go first?” Teddy asks.

“Me.” Mallory scrapes her cigarette out against the rock and pulls her hair into a ponytail, all business.

She spins Teddy’s topsider. When it stops, the toe points at me and everyone laughs. She spins again. It points to the space between Patrick and Gina.

“If it’s between people then you can choose anyone,” Teddy says.

“Patrick,” she says, and Patrick rolls his eyes. He always pretends he hates to be kissed.

They lean in toward each other and their lips meet for a quick peck. Mallory says she likes to pick Patrick because his lips are nice and dry.

It goes clockwise from Mallory. Neal is next. He spins the old crusted topsider with two hands. It wobbles to a stop, the toe pointing undeniably at me.

He stands all the way up, walks around the outside of the circle to me, takes my hand, pulls me up, and kisses me. It’s a warm kiss, not quite as quick as Mallory and Patrick’s. He lets go of my hand last. I know my face has flamed up and I keep my head down until the burning stops.

Gina kisses Teddy. Teddy kisses Mallory. Then it’s my turn. Neal, Neal, Neal, I beg but the shoe points at Teddy.

“Hat trick,” he says, meaning he’s gotten to kiss all three of us.

I get it over with fast. His lips are wet and flaky, like soggy bread.

When it’s Neal’s turn again, it lands between Gina and Teddy.

“Your choice,” Gina says, hopeful.

“Daley.”

And this time he leads me even farther away from them, nearly to the trees.

“You got a bed in the bushes?” Teddy says.

“I don’t like an audience,” Neal says. And to me, quietly, “You mind that I chose you again?”

I shake my head. I want to say I was hoping for it, but I can’t get the words out before he kisses me, longer, opening his mouth the slightest bit.

“That was nice,” he says.

“It was.” Everything feels so strange, like I’m walking into someone else’s life.

“Teddy says you meet here every week.”

“This is only our third time.”

“You coming next week?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Hey, stop yacking. It’s my turn,” Gina says. “And Patrick has to meet his grandmother at the beach club for lunch.”

They’re all turned toward us now. “Try,” Neal says quietly.

The game breaks up soon after that. We smoke a few more cigarettes and watch the seagulls drop mussels against the rocks and then fight over the smashed pieces.

“Can you imagine that being your life?” Patrick says.

“I’d throw myself off a cliff,” Teddy says.

“But you’re a seagull so it wouldn’t work,” Gina says. “Your wings would just start flapping. Are you taking sailing this year?”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “You?”

“All three of us.” She points her thumbs to me and Mallory.

“Do you think any animal in the history of animals has ever committed suicide?” Neal asks.

“No. Their brains aren’t big enough to realize how stupid their lives are,” Teddy says.

I don’t know if it’s the cigarettes making me feel funny, but they all seem far away. If I spoke I would have to scream for them to hear me.

When we go, I let the others ride ahead, the five of them weaving around each other, taking up the whole road. I look back at the cove. I thought I had the whole summer for cigarettes and spin the shoe. A seagull lands where Teddy left a plum pit, pecks at it twice, then lifts back up into the air. The water is higher now, creeping up the barnacled sides of the rocks. Neal looks back for me through the opening between his right arm and the handlebar of his ten-speed, casually, as if he’s just looking down at his leg.

In the driveway my mother takes a wrench to my bike. I’ve never seen her use a tool from the garage before. She removes the two wheels easily and loads them along with the frame on top of our suitcases in the back of her convertible. She’s wearing a kerchief around her hair, the way she does when she gardens. Her movements are sure and studied, like a performance. She presses down on the trunk several times, and when it finally clicks a laugh bursts out of her, though nothing is funny.

Sometimes, when no one else can come get me, a teacher drives me home from school. It feels like that now, like a teacher, a stranger, is taking me somewhere.

“Hop in, sugar,” she says.

The ugly puppy is scratching at the screen door. My father will come home to his bright yellow urine and soft shit all over the newspaper I just spread across the whole kitchen. An hour ago I promised him I’d keep the puppy outside most of the day.

“You have to give him a lot of attention every time he goes to the bathroom outside,” he said. He was dressed in his summer work clothes — a tan suit and a light blue tie — his hair still wet from his shower, cleanly parted on the right. “You’ve got to go like this: good boy, good boy, good boy”—and he rubbed my belly and back at the same time, hard and fast, practically lifting me off the ground.

I laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” I held onto his arms after he stopped, dangling from him.

“You sure you can do that?”

“Yes.”

His hands were wide, tanned and bony, the nails bitten down, the veins sticking out blue-green and lumpy. He said goodbye, and I kissed his hands and let go.

In my mother’s car, the radio is always tuned to the news, WEEI. “Only five days after completing a tour of the Middle East,” a reporter is saying, “President Nixon arrived in Brussels, Belgium, today to confer with Western European leaders before going on to Moscow on Thursday.”

My mother speaks directly to the radio. “Oh, you can run, Dick. You can run, but you cannot hide.”

At the four-way stop, I look down Bay Street. Mallory’s house is the big white one on the corner, and Patrick’s is the last driveway on the left, across from the beach club. They will both call my house today, and no one will answer.

“As the president flew across the Atlantic today, his physician told reporters that he was still suffering from an inflammation of veins in his left leg. The president has known about this ailment, known as phlebitis, for some weeks now, but ordered that the condition be kept secret, his physician said.”

My mother snorts at the dashboard.

We drive through town. In the park, trailers have arrived with rides for the carnival that comes for a week every summer. Men are taking off enormous painted pieces of metal and setting them in the grass. The big round cars for the Tilt-a-Whirl, with their high backs and red leather seats, lie splayed out near what is normally first base. But once the rides, the stalls, and the vans with pizza and fried dough are set up, you can’t find the old park anymore. A few little kids look on, from the bleachers, like we used to.

Downtown is small, just one street with shops on it. Neal’s mother sometimes works at the yarn shop. Her car is outside it now, an orange Pinto with a small dent on the driver’s door. Traffic is slow coming from the opposite direction, tourists heading toward Ruby Beach. People wave to us — Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Buck — but my mother is gnawing on her lip and listening to the news and doesn’t pay attention to them. When we reach the highway she takes my hand and guns it to seventy-five.