Lily King: Father of the Rain

“That’s what I want. I want you and your mother to come home.” His voice is high, like he’s making fun of something, but he isn’t. He’s almost crying. I smell him, smell the steak and the A-1 sauce and the little onions in his drink.

I’m not sure what to say. After a long silence, he tells me he’s named the puppy Scratch, that he’s a good boy, and that Mallory and Patrick came over to the pool to swim yesterday. His voice becomes regular and he says he took Scratch to the vet that afternoon. He got four shots and he was so brave.

“He’s right here,” he says, “right next to me, and he says hello to you and wants you to come home soon, little elf.”

“I’ll try, Dad.”

After I hang up I can see his hands and the sweat on his nose, and I miss him so much it feels like my skin is coming off.

In the dining room, my mother is complaining about him and the martinis and how he obviously talked to a lawyer who advised him to act like he wanted her back. “You watch,” my mother says, “he’ll write a letter. He’ll put it in writing.”

My grandmother sees me listening and asks if anyone wants more chicken.

I write to Mallory, Patrick, and Neal Caffrey. Mallory writes back first. She typed her letter in the shape of a giraffe.

Patrick writes next, on a turquoise card with his name embossed at the top.

Dear Daley,

I got this stationery for Christmas and this is the first time I’ve used it. It’s kind of dumb. We’ve been using your pool a lot. Hope you don’t mind. It’s hot here. Mr. Amory and me went to the supply place for more chlorine and a new DPD kit. We also went to Payson’s for an extension cord and thumbtacks. When are you coming back? The carnival is over. Elyse threw up on the Scrambler. It was gross. We capsized three times yesterday.

Love,

Patrick

I was the one who used to go with my father on all his weekend errands. The last time we were at Payson’s, he bought me a round key chain, one of the big silver ones like the kind the janitors at our school have that clip on a belt and have a little hard button in the middle you push to reel the keys back in. I forgot to bring it with me, and after I read Patrick’s letter I cry hard for that stupid key chain.

Then my father writes, like my mother said he would, a joint letter to both of us, asking us to come back. He used the white stationery from the desk in the living room that has our name and address on it in red letters. He wrote in blue ballpoint, pressing down hard against the blotter beneath so it feels like Braille on the other side. He says he misses us and loves us and wants us to come home and live with him. My mother lets me keep the letter in the pocket of my suitcase. She doesn’t write back. I do, but I don’t want to sound like I’m having a good time and I don’t want him to worry that I’m unhappy, so it’s a bad, boring letter. He never writes again.

After my father’s letter, Nora begins to send me cards with flowers or bluebirds on them and little poems on the inside. One says,

Before this little bird flies away

He wants to wish you a happy day .

She signs them Love Always, Nora .

I wait for a letter from Neal. I go with my grandfather nearly every morning to the Chigham General Store, where he buys a Boston Globe and a pack of Hot Tamales for me. Then we cross the street to the little post office. A woman named Mavis sits behind the counter. She blushes no matter what my grandfather says to her. I stand in a different spot in the small room each time, thinking if I can just stand in the right place a letter from Neal will be in my grandfather’s box. It can be as long as five or ten minutes that my grandfather talks to Mavis, never seeming to notice the hot flush of her flabby, downy cheeks. And then he reaches into his pocket for the key and steps over to box No. 5 and I stare down at the wooden planks of the floor until I hear the box click shut, my heart leaping in my body until I see that there’s nothing from Neal, and then it slows slowly down.

At the end of July, my brother comes to Lake Chigham with his new girlfriend, Heidi.

“Hermey!” he says, and picks me up in a big squeeze. He’s a little smelly and unshaven. “Hermey’s gotten so tall and even more fluffy-haired.” He calls me Hermey because I remind him of the little toymaker who wants to be a dentist on Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer .

“It’s the humidity,” I say, trying to mush down my frizz.

He introduces Heidi. She has long smooth hair and clear green eyes. He met her at the end of June at a party in Somerville, where he’s living for the summer.

“What day in June?” I ask him later, after dinner.

“I don’t know. It was a Monday night.”

“The twenty-fourth.” She hits my brother softly.

“Ow,” he says, not meaning it.

“The night before we left Myrtle Street,” I say. Everything for me is divided there, the before and the after.

“I’m going to marry her, Daley,” he says on the couch after dinner, when she goes to the bathroom. He puts his hands on his head and presses down. “Fuck. I’m going to marry her.”

When she comes back he clutches her tight, paws her hair, whispers something, and laughs into her neck. I’ve never seen him with a girl. He always only came home with other boys. They’d stay in his room all weekend, playing their guitars and rolling what looked like dirt into little squares of tissue paper. They listened to records I’d never heard of, cleaned every scrap of food out of the fridge and pantry, and then disappeared in a car until next time. But with Heidi, Garvey is very different. He’s soft and mild and always asking her what she thinks or what she wants.

“He’s really fallen in love,” my mother says.

We lie in our twin beds and listen to them murmuring in Heidi’s room. My mother tells me about her first love. She met him here one summer. He was visiting her cousin Jeremy. I know Jeremy. He looks like an old man already with tough leathery skin. He always wants a few kids to go out sailing with him, but he barks at you if you pull the wrong line on his boat. Jeremy’s friend was named Spaulding. He spied my mother from Jeremy’s porch.

“‘You’re a pretty thang,’ he said to me, just like that, thang because he was from Georgia and that made me curious. I was fourteen. I climbed right up onto the porch. The first night we went out I told him I felt like I was in a novel. That’s the way he made me feel. It’s the way I always feel when I fall in love.”

Garvey and Heidi have stopped talking and are making other noises. I know what they’re doing but it sounds like they’re both jumping on the bed, which I’m never allowed to do.

“We’re all lucky my father is losing his hearing,” my mother says.

The next day we go to one of the islands in the middle of the lake with a bucket of fried chicken. On the picnic blanket my brother licks the grease off Heidi’s fingers until my grandmother reminds them of their napkins. Then they go for a walk around the island. My grandparents walk in the other direction, shoes on, arms linked, leaning into each other as they speak. My mother, in her yellow bikini and enormous sunglasses, reads the newspaper, talking to it like she always does. “A five-minute-and-eighteen-second gap in the latest tape. How shocking.”

For a split second I think it’s my father on the front of the paper — the stoop, the heavy eyebrows, the small eyes — but it’s Nixon, waving from the metal stairs of his airplane.