Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Grandpa looks back at her and says, “You get some mussels and we’ll call that dinner.” He hands her the knife and she takes it and passes it into her teeth, clenching down on the spine and holding it this way. She grips the mussels in one hand and cuts through the hairy holdfasts with the other. When the bucket is a quarter full, she passes it up to Grandpa, and then boosts herself out of the well, dripping water and rising to a stand in her pink panties, the knife in her teeth.

Grandpa gets unsteadily to his feet, knees popping, and says, “Julie, turn around.”

Turtle says, “What?”

“Julie, what is this?” He comes toward her, touches her arm where the bruise from the fire poker is a black and green line, the first blow that Martin struck to knock her down.

“It’s just a bruise, Grandpa,” she says.

“Turn around,” he says.

“Grandpa,” she says.

“Turn around, sweetpea,” he says.

She turns around, and he says, “Jesus Christ.”

“They’re just bruises.”

“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ,” he says.

“Grandpa, it’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.”

“Jesus Christ,” he says, lowering himself shakily back down onto the rock.

She walks to her jeans, picks them up, and unfurls them. She begins pulling them on with rough jerks.

He says, “What are those bruises?”

“They’re just bruises,” she says.

“What from?”

“It’s nothing,” she says, “really.”

“Christ, they look like they’re from an iron rod.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Jesus Christ,” he says.

She buttons her jeans, zips them closed.

“Grandpa,” she says, “I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. Really.”

“What is that from?”

“Nothing,” she says, “it doesn’t matter. Really.”

“All right, sweetpea,” he says, getting up with difficulty, “let’s take you home.”

They walk back to the truck, Turtle limping badly, her wet legs sticking to her jeans, her panties standing in sodden outline through the denim, the sloshing bucket banging against her knees. Rosy gallops ahead and then galumphs back to stand stiff-legged before them, grinning sloppily.

“You old pooch,” Grandpa says.

They follow the path back up to the highway, and Turtle sets the bucket into the footwell and gets in. The crab crawls around on top of the harvested mussels. Grandpa coaxes Rosy back into the truck with some difficulty, and then gets in himself. He starts the engine and then sits with it idling and leans back and wraps and rewraps his hands on the wheel and says, “Jesus Christ.”

They pull onto the highway and drive fifteen feet and then turn up the rutted gravel drive to the house, the truck surging and lurching out of ruts, the crab clacking around in the bucket, while Rosy curls up, exhausted, watching Turtle with small supplicatory motions of her eyebrows. Grandpa takes a long draw on the Jack Daniel’s and drives with one hand, sometimes looking over at Turtle, who sits with her hands clasped between her legs, looking out the passenger-side window at the field and the shore pines.

When they reach the Y where Grandpa’s dirt road goes off just beneath the apple orchard to the raspberry fields and the other road goes up to the house, Grandpa stops. Turtle takes the bucket and gets out. Grandpa leans toward her and says, “Tell Martin I’m going to come to dinner.” Turtle stands beside the truck. She cannot remember Grandpa ever coming for dinner. She just nods.

Then he drives away, and Turtle stands holding the bucket and watching him go. She picks up her boots, tied together at the laces, and yokes them over her neck. Then she limps away up the hill, the bucket bouncing against her leg, thinking, you cunt, you reckless, you reckless, reckless, reckless.

There are green tide lines scrawled on the porcelain of the tub, claw-footed and enormous. The copper fixtures and pipes are plumbed into crude holes in the redwood boards, ragged apertures gone to cobwebbed spider dens filled with cotton-ball egg sacs and the husks of spiders, haunted by one enormous black widow, so bloated that when she goes across the floor, she drags her bulk behind her and leaves trails in the dust, a creature Martin likes to call “that poisonous bitch Virginia Woolf.”

Above the tub, a picture window looks down into Slaughterhouse Gulch, the pines hung with lichen, the blackberries clambering up from the sword ferns. The window is poorly sealed, the lintel pulpy and black with rot. Red mushrooms grow along the sill. Their caps are patched white from their broken cauls.

She hears him set the groceries on the kitchen table and then come into the bathroom. He sits on the wooden chair beside the sink with two bottles of Old Rasputin held loosely in one big hand. She settles into the tub so only her head is above the surface, hiding her purple and green shoulder.

He sighs and hooks the bottle caps over the chair’s arm and bangs them open one after the other with the flat of his hand. Then he props his boots on the edge of the tub, looking past her and into the pines of Slaughterhouse Gulch, and seats one beer between his thighs and holds the other out to her. He nods encouragingly. She takes it and drinks from the bottle, looking at him sideways and resentful. He sits gathering his thoughts, raking the pads of his fingers across his stubble with a discontinuous rasping. He says, “Kibble, I fucked up. All right?”

She leans back deep in the tub and considers him.

He says, “Kibble . . . I am sometimes not a well person. You know, I try, for you.” He clasps, unclasps his hands, displays his palms.

She says, “How are you not well?”

He says, “Well, kibble, it runs in the blood, I guess.”

She drinks again from the beer, shovels wet strands of hair back from her face. She loves him. When he looks like this, and she can see how he tries for her, even his hurt has value to her. She cannot bear that anything should disappoint him, and if she could, she would wrap him up in her love. She sets the beer down among the mushrooms. She wants to tell him, but she doesn’t have it in her.

Turtle says, “Grandpa says he wants to come for dinner.”

“Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” Martin says. “I brought home some cattle bones and I saw the mussels and that big goddamn crab. We have enough for a feast.”

Turtle dollops shampoo into her palm. She lathers it into her hair.

“Kibble,” he says, “you’re just a goddamn beautiful human being. Look at you.”

Turtle laughs, looking up at him with her mop of hair piled above her head, sudsy with shampoo. Daddy beckons her and she leans nearer and he puts his strong fingers in her hair and works the pads of them down her scalp. She closes her eyes, face presented up to the ceiling where cobwebs hang in sashes. “God, kibble,” he says, lathering the shampoo, “you’re the most beautiful thing in the world. I ever tell you that? Just the most beautiful thing.” She extends her arms to the ceiling, stretching them, and the water goes in trembling drops down her forearms and into her armpits, and she thinks how good it is, the pleasure and the comfort.

Martin finishes lathering her hair and she lies with her neck draped over the side of the tub looking up at the ceiling and he stoops over and kisses first one eyelid, and then the other. He says, “I love this eyelid, and this one.” His kisses the bridge of her nose. “And this nose.” He kisses her cheek. “And this face!” She wraps her sudsy arms over his neck, his stubbly jaw against her naked one.

He pulls away and says, “Oh, kibble, I am so sorry, so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” she says.