Lily King - Father of the Rain

Carly Bridgeton opens the door.

“Uncle Gardiner!” she says, and gives my father a big hug. Carly is his goddaughter. I forgot that. She’s the oldest of the Bridgetons’ children, well in her thirties, but the quilted vest and knee socks she’s wearing take twenty years off her.

“Hey there, little peanut,” he says.

“Look at you,” she says. “You look great, Uncle G.”

And he does. His skin is a tawny pink, and his eyes clear and alert. He’s gained a little weight. He looks fit and strong and a good deal younger than sixty-one.

“You remember Daley.”

“Of course I do.” She hugs me, too. “We made cootie catchers together, remember?” But I don’t. Her narrow nose and big freckles are not familiar to me exactly, but if I saw her on a street in a big city, I would think I knew her. She looks like a lot of people I grew up with.

Carly takes our coats and leads us into the living room. On the pink chintz sofas are the two Bridgeton boys, both in coat and tie, pouring handfuls of Chex mix into their mouths. They stand when they see us, wiping their salty hands on their pants before shaking. I can’t remember which one is the one who is doing “who knows what” in Colorado. They both seem to be what Ashing Academy followed by a New England boarding school and a small liberal arts college conspire to produce: clean-cut, self-deprecating, socially agile men. Together we identify who was just a year older than Garvey (Scott) and who was just a year younger (Hatch), who had been on Dad’s undefeated Little League team three years in a row (Hatch), and who remembered Garvey winning the declamation contest with Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (all of us).

Mr. Bridgeton comes in the room then, lurching, his right foot in a blue cast, the toe of his white sock poking out. On this little patch of sock, someone has drawn a smiley face. A scotch and soda rattles in his hand.

“Holy Christ!” my father yells. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, just a little run-in with a moose.”

The boys laugh and Hatch fetches a doorstop at the other end of the room. It’s a brick covered in needlepoint, the head of a moose stitched in brown and beige on the top.

“Ouch,” I say.

“Tripped right over the goddamn thing in broad daylight. Never saw it coming.” Mr. Bridgeton is looking above our heads and smiling helplessly. He is clearly enjoying his painkillers.

I hear the pulse of a food processor and excuse myself to help Mrs. Bridgeton.

“Don’t go in there unarmed!” Hatch says.

Scott offers me the cheese knife.

The kitchen is small, the pea green color of so many Ashing kitchens in the fifties. Mrs. Bridgeton is putting pecans on top of mashed sweet potatoes carefully smoothed into a fluted pie dish. She has a cocktail on the table, too, nearly drained.

“It smells good in here,” I say. It does. It smells like our kitchen did when my mother was making the Thanksgiving meal.

“Oh, Daley, I’m glad you’re here.” She kisses me on the cheek. Her own cheek is warm and smells like baby powder. “And look at you!” I can see her struggle for a way to compliment the severe colorless outfit.

“My father made me wear it,” I say, to let her off the hook.

“He did? Well, you look lovely.” Her voice grows quiet. “How is he?”

I reach into the bag of pecans and begin another circle inside the one she is finishing. “He’s doing really well. This week he started coaching basketball with this youth group. He loves it.” Kenny, who I recently discovered is my father’s sponsor, told him about the opening.

“I just wish Hugh would take him back.”

“I don’t think he’d want to go back to an office. He enjoys this much more.” He told me a few nights ago that coaching was what he’d always wanted to do full-time, but it wasn’t considered a respectable choice of profession. “Screw respectable, Dad. Follow your passion,” I said.

“Well, he’s wonderful with children,” Mrs. Bridgeton says. “We all know that.”

“My mother used to make this.”

“I know she did. I gave her the recipe.” She reaches in the bag for more pecans. “She and I were friends, you know, before she got involved with the Democrats and all the rest.” She says the word Democrats the way my father does, as if they are a cult that whisks away decent people.

“And then you slather it with brown sugar and broil it?”

“You bake it and then at the very end you broil it.”

“My mother sometimes burned it.”

“It’s easy to burn. It goes from brown to black very quickly.”

“Thank you for having us here. It’s nice.”

“Holidays are hard alone.”

He’s not alone. I want to say. I’m not alone. I wish she were capable of appreciating his progress.

“Who’s in here?”

My father ducks to come through the low doorway.

Mrs. Bridgeton brushes back her hair and smoothes down her green dress.

“Just us Thanksgiving elves,” she says.

My father is handsome in his charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, and tie with the blue and green fish on it. “Look at this feast.” He eyes the vegetables in bowls, the golden turkey lit up in the oven.

“Same meal I’ve been making for thirty-nine years,” she says, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.

“If it ain’t broke,” my father says absently, looking out the window at the gray water. I know he wants to drink with the rest of them in the living room. I can feel it as if the craving were in my own body. I want to hold his hand and tell him it will pass. Be strong, I’d tell him. The holidays are the hardest.

“I bought a little bottle of bubbly to have with dessert. Can you have just a few drops, Gardiner?”

I feel like she’s just soaked me in ice water. I hold back. It is not easy.

My father shakes his head. “Nope. I’ll stick with my seltzer.”

I smile at him but he doesn’t look at me.

“Daley,” she says, handing me a silver water pitcher, “would you mind filling up the water glasses in the dining room? We’ll be ready to eat soon.”

In the dining room there are big bowls of orange and green gourds and place cards in the shape of turkey tails. I’m seated on Mr. Bridgeton’s right and Scott’s left. My father is down at the other end of the table, next to Mrs. Bridgeton. Everyone around him has a highball glass full of alcohol. Why were we here among people who could not see his struggle, who probably didn’t even believe it was a disease? I feel I’ve failed him, failed to find him an alternative set of friends, another way of living.

Eventually we all take our places and pile our plates with food. Scott and I ask each other polite questions. On the other side of the table, Hatch and my father reminisce about the Pirates. Mrs. Bridgeton indicates with her napkin and the word gooseberry that Mr. Bridgeton has some gravy on his cheek. They all drink steadily but no one seems particularly drunk. No one gets angry. No one’s personality changes. They tease but they don’t snipe. They seem genuinely glad to be together. When I ask how often they all see each other, Hatch says not enough, but it turns out that none of them have ever missed a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, and they spend at least two weeks together every summer at their cabin in the Berkshires and another ten days in the Bahamas in March.

Afterward we all, minus Mr. Bridgeton and his bad foot, take a walk down to the water. The tide is out on the small beach, the sand a wet dark gray. You can see more islands from their point than you can from Ruby Beach. Hatch names them for me. The others have a rock-skimming contest. Scott leans back and flicks one across the shallows.

“That’s a beauty!” my father calls out as Scott’s stone bounces across the skin of gray water. “Nine.”