Lily King - Father of the Rain

I pat his leg. He takes my hand and holds it tight. If Jonathan hadn’t thrown that party for me in June, I wouldn’t have given this night to my father. I wish he knew how grateful I am.

After dinner I change the music in the poolhouse to Glenn Miller, and when I come out people are already dancing in the grass and along the edge of the pool. Eventually nearly everyone gets up and bounces around. Only a couple of my father’s old friends, men who need a few drinks in order to dance, sit on lawn chairs and watch. My father, who has never needed even music to dance, spins me around. I see Neal dancing with Patricia, Mike dancing with Mrs. Keck, William with Philomena. Every time I look I see a different combination of people. When I’m dancing with Mr. Utley, Dad cuts in on Mr. Keck for Patricia. He spins her. Then he runs into the poolhouse and comes out with a lifesaver ring around his waist. The music turns slow and my father takes her hand in one of his and puts his other in the hollow of her back. Mr. Utley does the same with me. He is so tall my arms are reaching straight up, as if I’m climbing a ladder.

“I’ve never seen your father quite like this, Daley. You’re a good influence on him.”

Particia looks uncomfortable now. She is leaning away from him, and when the song ends she leaves the dancing area. She goes directly to her purse, shoulders it, and heads for her car.

I catch up with her before she reaches the driveway. “I’m sorry, Patricia. Did my father say something that offended you?”

“No, no. That’s not it. I’m just not feeling very well.”

“Please tell me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Please. I need to know what he said to you.”

She looks down at the keys in her hand. She just wants to leave. “He’s drinking, Daley.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know my father when he’s been drinking. I know exactly what that’s like.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I let her disappear into the darkness beyond the torches. I walk slowly back to the party. My father is dancing with Philomena, perhaps even more ridiculously than he danced with Patricia, still in the white ring, strutting like a chicken, a snorkel in his mouth like a rose. I see how she could have thought he was drunk. So much of him is still a child. But he isn’t drunk. He’s just himself, and he’s happy.

“Now that was a party,” my father says as we sit on the porch steps afterward while the dogs take their last pees before bed.

“What did you think when you pulled in?”

“Fire. I thought there was a fire.”

“The torches.”

“And all the people. I swear I saw some of them carrying buckets.”

I laugh.

“You probably don’t remember, but your mother used to have these kinds of parties, just like this: round tables, white tablecloths, waitresses. But they were never for me. It was always for some Democrat. She never even wanted me there. I hope she’s watching right now. I hope she saw what you did for me tonight.”

“How did you hear that she died, Dad?”

“We were playing paddle at the Chapmans’. Herbie Parker told me just as we were walking onto the court.”

I see the Chapmans’ paddle tennis court in the woods behind their house, the heavy stumpy paddle racquets, my father’s head bent to listen. I need my father to talk about her death. The party has brought her back for me too, all night long.

“And what did you feel?”

“Oh, God, I think I probably felt everything in the book. I didn’t play very well that day. I remember that.”

“And then what’d you do?”

“Went home. Catherine already knew. It was a shock. She was the first one of us to go.”

“Did you ever think about how I was feeling? Or Garvey?” This is hard. Everything in me starts quivering. “Because you never called or came by.”

“I guess I just couldn’t acknowledge it.”

“What? Her death?”

“No.” He looks down at his hands on his knees. “Your attachment to her.”

“Because it felt like a betrayal?”

“Something like that.”

“I wish it didn’t always have to be a competition.”

“Me too. “He puts his arm around me and kisses my forehead. It reminds me of Grindy. “I’m sorry, Daley.”

He’s never said that, not once, ever, for anything.

The dogs rustle around in the woods. It’s close to two in the morning. I feel heavy and tired.

My father stands up and the dogs come racing up the steps. “Well, I’ve had a lot of surprises in my life,” he says. “Most of them bad. But this was a good one.” He puts out his hand and pulls me up. “You’s a real keeper, you know that?”

He is steady on his feet. He smells like prime rib. Patricia was wrong. He is perfectly sober.

I can’t help calling Garvey the next day.

“Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’ve met a venture capitalist from Marblehead and the wedding’s next Saturday at the Episcopal Church.”

“He’s doing well, Garve. Day sixty-one.”

“It’s creepy the way you count the days like that.”

“It works.”

“It’s all going to end in tears. Remember how Mom used to say that whenever we were having fun? It’s all going to end in tears .”

I ask him how plans for the new branch in Hartford are going and he says he’s been interviewing “cuties” for the office manager position.

“You’ve heard of sexual harassment laws, right?”

“I’m not going to harass them. I’ll leave them alone afterward. Seriously, I did meet someone. This doctor who was moving out of her place, getting a divorce. We have a little sizzle going on. She’s having a party Saturday night.”

“You going?”

“I might, if I’m not too tired.”

He had a bad breakup a few years ago and now claims love is not worth the ugly ending.

“Come visit us.”

He laughs. “Not a chance.”

“What’d he say to you that morning, Garvey?”

“Nothing new.”

“He was in a lot of pain then.”

“And now with your magical anthropology PhD wand, you’ve erased it all.”

“What if he’s still not drinking at Thanksgiving. Will you come for that?”

“No.”

And then, that same morning, I get a phone call. My father hands me the phone and my heart is racing but the voice is female. It’s Mallory.

“I hear you’re throwing big parties,” she says.

“Only for people sixty and over,” I say. “Where are you?”

“Here, but we’re leaving this afternoon. Can you meet me at Baker’s Cove in an hour?”

I hitch up the dogs and grab the little bag with my notebook in it. It’s where I keep notes for a letter to Jonathan. I have fifteen pages of them already, fragments with no structure, like a bad freshman essay. I don’t know where to send it, if I ever manage to write it. I don’t know where he is. He terminated the lease on the cottage. The landlord sent me back the first and last months’ rent but not the security deposit. And when I called the philosophy department at SFSU, the receptionist had never heard of him. She was new, she said, but there was no one on the faculty with the last name Fleury.

It’s high tide so the cove isn’t too smelly. I climb out over the rocks to a little pool of water with its own tiny beach. The dogs find shade behind me and I sit for a long time with the notebook open, writing nothing.

I hear a thud, and a child’s pail with a white braided handle appears on the top of one of the rocks. And then a little girl, not more than six, crawls up, sees me, and sits down abruptly. She has inch-long pigtails just behind each ear. She scoots down the rock, her bucket bumping behind her. When she reaches sand, she drops the bucket and goes right to the water. The pool is no deeper than her knees. She wades in then stands still, bent over, hands on chubby thighs. She is wearing only the bottom of a red bikini with white bows on either side. She remains completely still until her hand shoots into the water and stirs up a cloud on the bottom and then quickly carries something with thrashing claws to the bucket.