Lily King - Father of the Rain

“Gracie! My God. I asked you to wait on the rocks until I caught up.”

I only need to see the long O’s of her knees above me on the rocks to recognize Mallory. She climbs down carefully, a baby in a plaid pouch on her chest, beach bags in both arms.

“Which ones you got,” I say, “your mom’s Larks or your dad’s Winstons?”

She lets out one of her big laughs, deeper now. “Can you believe what delinquents we were? That one is starting to read now so I’m thinking I have to throw out all my old diaries so she doesn’t get any ideas. I was just telling her this morning about how we used to argue about whose dog was better.”

I hug her sideways, not wanting to squish the baby, who is so small and sound asleep. In grade school Mallory towered over me and was the kind of girl people called “big-boned.” But now she feels small in my arms, with bones no bigger than mine. Her hair is shorter, but her face is just the same.

“Mine was,” I call to Gracie. “Hers was boring.”

“That’s exactly what you said! I was so mad I didn’t speak to you for days. Her white dog was always filthy, Gracie.”

“Gray. The dog was a gray dog.”

“He needed a bath.”

“You’ve reproduced.”

She laughs again. She has a great laugh, like it comes all the way up from her feet. “I’m a factory. I’ve got a two-year-old boy back with my mother.” She scrunches up her face. “The challenging middle child.”

We laugh because that’s what Mallory is.

“I cannot believe it.” I’m about to add that I didn’t know she’d gotten married but then I have a flash of a memory of an invitation that most likely arrived after being forwarded a few times and right in the middle of some crisis: an overdue paper, 200 exams to be graded. Had I even responded? I can’t remember. Is it possible that I didn’t even RSVP to Mallory’s wedding? A small parade of wedding invitations flashes by: Ginny, Stacy, Pauline. I’m not sure I responded to any of them, certainly never sent a gift. It made no sense to me, why people wanted to get married.

She glances over at where I’ve been sitting in the sand with the notebook. “Can we join you?” she asks, and then she sees the dogs panting in the shade behind us. “What’s this? More dirty dogs?”

“You be nice. You’re a role model now.”

“God help us.” She spreads out two enormous beach towels and erects a little tent for the baby when it wakes up. She attaches a toy to its ceiling. “He blisses out on this hanging chicken thing.” From her cooler, she offers me a selection of juices in small bright boxes and a box of animal crackers.

“Those are mine!” Gracie calls as she drops what looks like a small lobster in the pail. “But you can have them.”

“She’s pretty fearless, isn’t she?”

“She’s obsessed with crustaceans. Whenever we come to Ashing we spend all our time at the water’s edge.”

“How far away are you?” On the phone she said she lives in New Hampshire now.

“About an hour and a quarter. We’re near Nashua.”

Nashua. It was the kind of name we would have made fun of when we were kids, the kind of place whose racetrack was advertised on channel 56. Nashua , we would have said in our pretend Boston nasal accents. Naaashua, New Hampsha . I expected Mallory to be living somewhere glamorous.

“The rumors are flying around town about you.” She laughs hard. “I even heard you were dating Neal Caffrey.”

“No dates, but he is my only friend here.”

“So you really are living in Ashing?”

“My father had a bit of a breakdown when Catherine left.”

“I heard she left. In June, right? Just like your mom.”

“Spring with him must be hell, I guess.”

Gracie howls and Mallory leaps up. Something pinched her finger. Mallory holds the baby’s head as she bends over Gracie in the water, but the baby wakes up anyway. By the time she returns to the towel he’s red and bleating and kicking. She unfastens a series of snaps and pulls out from the cup of her bathing suit an enormous veined udder with a wide brown center and an inch-long nipple which the child seizes in his mouth, sucking the skin up into pleats around his pumping lips. Jesus.

“I was always a little scared of your dad,” she says, then asks if I remember the time we missed the train and he and Catherine came to get us in Allencaster. I didn’t. She says she has a long diary entry about it, how I calmly told them there was a mistake in the schedule but they didn’t believe us. “I cried when they kept yelling at us, but you were so cool and controlled and never cracked.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Really? I swear, once you have kids — Gracie!” She jumps up again, baby still attached and sucking, and sprints to the water. She splashes in and plunges her left arm to the bottom while the right keeps the baby in position, and hauls up Gracie, whose face has momentarily lost its confidence.

“Breathe,” Mallory shouts, and whacks her on the back. And I watch as the color comes back into the child’s face. Then she looks down at the sandy bottom and up at her mother and bursts into tears. “It’s all right. You’re fine.” Mallory tries to wipe her wet hair out of her eyes but Gracie swats her away.

“I almost had an eel and you scared it away!”

Mallory smiles. “There are no eels here, honey. There’s never been an eel.” Which makes Gracie even more furious.

When Mallory comes back I want to compliment her on her patience but I feel like that might be insulting Gracie. The baby’s meal has gone on uninterrupted. His legs and most of the blue pouch are soaking wet but his eyes press tighter shut each time he sucks.

“You’re thinking, and that’s not even the complicated child.”

I laugh.

“She has no interest in learning how to swim. And she wants to be in the water all day long.”

I’m curious to know what she’d been about to say about having kids. “So, you’ve been reading your old diaries recently?”

“Yeah, I have. It’s funny—” she winces, then yanks her nipple out of the baby’s mouth. It doesn’t look easy. The skin stretches an inch before he releases it. He wails as she lifts him up and out of the wet pouch, and he keeps wailing until she slides him in the tent with the hanging chicken and he stops short. “He starts to bite when he’s done. Drives me crazy.” She pushes her boob back in her suit. I see the long nipple fold in half to fit. Mallory got breasts before me, like everyone else, but they had been normal, not these pale raw tubers. She doesn’t seem to remember, again, what she was about to say.

We watch Gracie dredge the bottom of the pool with both hands, occasionally taking in water and croaking it out. She has elements of Mallory at that age, the straight dark-blonde hair, the strong thighs, but her square slightly squished face is someone else’s. Her focus, her fixation on a thing, is from her mother, too. And yet that seems to be gone from Mallory now. She can’t follow through on a thought. Her snacks are neatly packed, though. She brings out thinly sliced apples laid carefully in a plastic container with a lime green top. Gracie grabs a few and then hurries back to the water.

“Plumber’s butt,” Mallory says, and Gracie pulls up the droopy back of her suit. “Remember the hours we spent in your mother’s closet? All her fancy clothes. And that wall of shoes! Oh, she was like a real live princess to me.”

The words are familiar. She was at the funeral, I’m remembering now. I sobbed in her arms. And she sobbed too. And then I didn’t see her again until this moment.

Gracie totters slowly toward us with her bucket. Water sloshes at the sides. “I’m thirsty and hungry and thirsty,” she says. She puts the bucket down and takes a little box of juice from her mother. She puts the straw in her mouth and it turns purple. She sucks it all down without stopping, her breathing growing louder and her belly pushing out, then hands the shrunken box back to her mother. “More,” she gasps. But the baby has started fussing in the tent and Mallory is on her knees changing his diaper.