Lily King - Father of the Rain

A waitress comes and takes my menu and brings me french fries and a garden salad. Four cops come through the door. The woman behind the counter greets them easily. The people getting ice cream give them more room than they need. They drink their coffees standing up. Their walkie-talkies beep and hiss at the same time. And then one of them puts his cup on the counter and walks over to my table.

I panic. Registration? Inspection sticker? Unpaid fine? I hate cops, hate being stopped by them, can never be natural or easy around them like the waitresses are. I have no idea how people charm their way out of a ticket. I can never be anything but sullen and humiliated when a cop appears at my car window.

“Daley?”

I manage to raise my head and nod.

He laughs at my guilt, my deep blush. “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?”

It never occurred to me that I could know him personally, an armed, barrel-chested, meaty-faced man in full uniform. There were two Ashing cops when I was little: the rangy one who looked a little like Gilligan and dated the girl at the Mug, and the redheaded one who came to the house whenever the alarm system was set off accidentally. This guy is neither. He is amused by my complete bewilderment.

“Jason Mullens,” he says finally. “Patrick’s buddy.”

“Damn.” While I remained in school, other people were going out and growing up and getting real jobs and wearing uniforms, for chrissake. “I cannot believe I know a cop.”

He laughs again, and I stand and give him a hug. He is very hard and bumpy with his oblong chest and badge and buttons and buckles. I am used to slender, unshaven, underexercised men in flannel shirts. It’s like being introduced to a different species.

He slides into the seat across from mine and puts his thick forearms on the table. My waitress brings him a coffee cup and fills it.

“Thanks, Amy,” he says quietly, as if he is aware that he’s a cliché, like something out of the Andy Griffith Show , but can’t help his good manners.

“I’m stunned. You became a cop. I am sitting here across from a cop.” It is so preposterous that wily little Jason Mullens has grown up into this that I feel completely comfortable, as if it isn’t really happening. “Why on earth are you a cop?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” He glances over at his buddies. They’re talking to an older couple, their backs to us. “I was planning to be a lawyer but then my dad’s friend got me this job in a law firm for a summer during college and I watched these guys spend their time trying to get around the law for their clients. It really bugged me.” He looks down at his hands; then he looks up, surprised that I’m waiting for him to say more. “I realized I wanted to uphold the law, not try to bend it.”

“But you were such a rule-breaking hellion.”

He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling. “Especially at your house.” His perfectly shaven cheeks are round and shiny.

“How is Patrick? I’ve been wanting to get in touch with him, but—” I don’t know how to finish.

“Yeah, I heard about your dad and Catherine. I’m sorry. Patrick was here a couple of weeks ago, helping her move into her new place.”

I heard she’d rented a carriage house north of town. But Patrick was here in Ashing and I didn’t see him? Why hadn’t I called him months ago?

“I didn’t see him either,” he says, seeing my disappointment. “I was away that weekend.”

One of the other policemen is at the door, the other two already on the sidewalk outside. Jason holds up a finger and the last cop gives him an indulgent smile.

I can’t believe he actually thinks Jason is trying to hit on me.

Then Jason says, “I’m off at midnight. You wanna do something?”

“At midnight?”

“Mel’s is open until two.”

So we meet at Mel’s. I wait in my car until I see him pull up. He looks even broader in civilian clothes. He smells clean, his thick hair damp and combed straight down. Everyone knows him at the bar. He introduces me around. I watch Jason joust and parry reluctantly with the crowd. He’s in his element but he worries about me. He tries to include me. He doesn’t understand that it feels good to hold a beer bottle in a bar with people my age who are all a little too buzzed to care what I’m saying. It’s been so long since I’ve had any alcohol that the beer takes full effect and pulls me away from myself just a little. Normally I don’t like the feeling, but right now it’s a relief. People crowd around Jason. Someone offers him a shot and he looks at me and turns it down. Someone says something quietly to him and he laughs until his face gets red. “I’ll explain that one later,” he says to me. Like Garvey, Jason has changed socioeconomic groups, and I’m interested in this. I hope we’ll stay till closing, but instead of ordering another round he steers me out the door.

We go to his apartment, the second floor of a house on South Street. It smells like a gym. He runs around picking up the balled-up clothes and dirty glasses. He opens the windows and turns on a fan and hands me a beer. We sit on a red velour couch and he pulls off his shirt as if wearing it was causing him pain. It is truly a rippling torso, wide and deep, with very little hair and tiny tight nipples, tapering down into a narrow taut stomach with a deep clean belly button. He takes my hand and lays it on his chest and I cannot pull away. I have to know how it all feels. My fingers trace the skin across his chest, pausing at the dip in the center, then moving to the far side and over to his right arm which he is not flexing but is solid as steel, wrapped in veins. And then I am kissing his hard warm stomach, pressing my tongue in the taut belly button, and he is hard immediately and sighing and I feel his lips on my neck before he lifts me in one quick motion right on top of him and we kiss, hard, our teeth knocking, and then I hear Jonathan, slightly bemused, taking everything in, the gun he surely has in the house, the uniforms, the absurdly inflated pale chest, saying, “What do you think you are doing, tweet?” Jonathan, tracing my hip with his beautiful finger, talking about babies. I stop kissing and rest my head on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Jason. I’m so sorry.”

His hands are moving all over me. “It’s okay.”

On one vacation, when I was in high school, I had a room right next to my father and Catherine, separated by a very thin wall. “So now you don’t want it,” I heard him say to her in the middle of the night. “I thought you wanted it, but now you don’t want it.”

A vast heaviness weighs down my body.

“Really, it’s okay, Daley.”

He helps me find my shirt and shoes.

“It’s my fault,” he says when I’m at the door. “I took it too fast. I misinterpreted the signals.” It sounds like a line from some educational video on sexual communication. “I always had a little thing for you.” He’s lying now, poor guy. No one had a thing for me back then, not even a little one. He tries to hold my face in his hand to gauge my distress, but I turn and get out the door.

I didn’t have a boyfriend until college. Before that, the only time I can remember even the possibility of one was when Patrick came home from boarding school one weekend with a friend, After dinner that first night, Patrick asked me if I liked Cole. I said I thought so. He told me that Cole liked me, then teased me about how fast my face turned red. I waited for something to happen, but it never did, even though I liked him more and more. He was very funny and smart, quick but not mean. The three of us played Ping-Pong, saw a movie, went to the Peking Garden. I laughed at Cole’s jokes and he laughed at mine, but nothing else happened. They took the train back to school on Sunday. The next time Patrick came home I asked him, jokingly, trying to hide the hours I’d agonized over it, what had made Cole change his mind about me, and Patrick looked at me oddly.