Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“The hell—sit down, have some marrow.”

Grandpa drags back a chair, sits in it. It seems to her that she has spent her entire life hoping that he was the man she believed he was, and not the man Martin believed him to be, and now she wants only for him to sit there and say nothing. Martin gestures to the lattice of bones, the grooved condyles like volute woodwork, the marrow crawling in the pipings, tendons glazed to the bone. “Have some marrow,” he says again, shaving it up and spreading it across his toast. With a fork he lifts a small portion of radish and parsley, takes a shattering bite.

“Martin—listen,” Grandpa says, leaning in, his arms on the table.

“No marrow? Can I get you a beer?”

“I don’t want a beer.”

“Let me get you a beer,” her daddy says. “I always try and keep some of your beer around. I know you like that cheap tasteless shit. Good whiskey and shitty beer, that’s Daniel Alveston.”

“Sit down, goddamn it,” Grandpa says. Martin goes to the fridge and opens it and stoops inside, looking for a beer. He comes back with a bottle of Bud Light and says, “See, I always keep some beer for you, Daniel.” He bangs it open on the table’s edge and Grandpa sits looking at him, hands crossed over his belly, his jowls deepening his frown into an impenetrable discontentment. Martin stands holding the beer out for Grandpa and the head runs over and down the sides of the bottle, but Grandpa will not take it. He says, “I don’t want your beer, Martin.”

Daddy puts the beer beside Grandpa’s plate. He drags back his chair, sits. He says, “Well, the marrow isn’t popular tonight, but you know, I tried.”

“It’s not the marrow,” Grandpa says, looking at the crab with its dead legs in the air.

“I could make you a grilled cheese.”

“I didn’t come here to have dinner with you, Marty. Listen—”

“Listen—? Listen, hell. Drink your beer, Dad. You look silly with it just sitting there in front of you.”

“Martin, you have to know, this is no way to raise a child.”

“You motherfucker,” Martin says, “you motherfucker. You think I don’t know that? You fuck . You come here , to tell me , that this , this is no way to raise a child?”

Grandpa reaches for his beer and it pitches over, skitters across the table into Martin’s lap with Martin snatching it up, saying, “What the—?” and fumbling the spuming bottle back into his lap, trying to stand and overturning his chair, almost going backward in it, then standing with beer dripping off his sleeves and off his shirt, the bottle rolling curlicues around the floor, knocking against the counter in time to the sloshing of its contents. Martin shakes off his wet hands, saying, “Christ! Christ!” He stalks to the kitchen, takes down the blue shop towels, spans them out, shears them off, pats at his sodden shirt, his soaking lap, pulls off his wet flannel and casts it across the dishes on the counter.

Grandpa says, “This is no way to raise a child, not like this.”

“Christ,” Martin says, looking down at himself.

“Martin,” Grandpa says.

“What?” Martin says.

“This is no way to raise a child.”

“Christ, Dad,” Martin says, opening the fridge and taking out another beer. He bangs it open. “Christ,” he says. “Tell me again, Dad. Tell me again how this is no way to raise a child.”

“You’ve got to know it, Martin.”

“I know it,” Martin says, coming to the table, setting down the new beer. “Christ, Daddy,” he says, still shaking foam off his hands, looking at his sodden shirt.

“Well, goddamn it, Martin,” Grandpa says. “For fuck’s sake, listen to me.”

“I am doing the best that I can, Daniel. The best that I fucking can.”

“Listen, Martin,” Grandpa says, “it can’t go on this way.”

“Yeah?” Martin is composing himself. “Is that right, Dad?” He says it with some meaning Turtle does not understand, and Turtle looks quickly away from the table and says it again to herself, silent, framing his face, his expression, the tone, Is that right, Dad? wringing the meaning out of it, and then she looks quickly back to them.

Grandpa says, “And look at you, Marty. Just look around you. You don’t want your daughter to come up like this.”

Martin looks at Grandpa, one of his eyes more lidded than the other.

“She could be a very fine young woman,” Grandpa says.

Martin opens his mouth, looks aside, touching his jaw.

“Martin—”

“I know it, Dad.”

“She can be—”

“Dad! I goddamn know it. Don’t you think that’s what I’m goddamn fighting for? Don’t you think that’s what I tell myself when I get up in the morning? Only take care of this girl and she will have more than you have, Martin, there will be more to her life. Her life will not be like yours. Only do right by her and it’s all hers, the world, everything.”

Grandpa sits scowling.

“You think I don’t know that? You think I’m not fighting for that? With what meager fucking resources I have, Dad. With everything I’ve got, Dad. And I know it’s not perfect, I know it’s not even enough, it’s not what she deserves, but I don’t know what the hell you want me to do. I love her, and that is more than I ever, ever had from you.”

Grandpa says, “Listen— There are bruises on that girl’s thigh as deep as you please. Bruises. Black as you please. Bruises, Martin, that about look like you took to the girl with an iron rod. I ask you. I ask you, Martin.”

“Shut up,” Martin says.

Grandpa frowns severely, the flesh of his face yellowed, his jowls curtains of old-man flesh almost like rinds. He says, “I’m done letting you raise this girl, and if you know what’s good for her, you are—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Martin says. He scrapes at the table’s edge with his thumb, and then he looks back at Grandpa. “You don’t know what the fuck —”

Grandpa says, “There are bruises—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“It looks like you—”

“Go back to your trailer, old man.” Martin gestures to Turtle. “You have no idea.” He looks steadily at her. They all wait on his silence. “Apparently—neither do I. Nor she, I bet. Oh, she likes you. She loves you. Don’t you, kibble?”

She is silent.

“Kibble—you love your grandpa?”

Turtle can hear the crab’s legs creaking as they cool.

“Kibble?”

“I love him, Daddy.”

“See—? See—? But you do not get to come here, reeking of whiskey, come here into my house and say she has bruises. You do not get to do that.”

“Marty, you’ve got to want something different for Julia. Not this, Marty. Not this.”

Martin sits raking his finger pads down his stubble. He says, “Well— fuck . I see kibble’s got your knife now.” He extends his hand and Turtle draws the knife off her belt and passes it to him. He hefts it. He says, “You know how many throats he slit with this knife?”

Turtle looks down at her plate.

“Forty-two, isn’t that right?”

“Forty-two,” Grandpa agrees.

“Korea, kibble. And at some point they put him to work in the DMZ tracking down infiltrators, and these poor fucks, these poor fucks had no idea that a bloodthirsty fucking psychopath from a wilderness a world away, a man whose forefathers hunted Indians in the American West, was out there just waiting in the weeds. How could you understand a thing like that? That was the most fun you ever had, I think.”

Grandpa says nothing. His jaw tremors.

“He liked to come up behind some poor fuck, some fuck who’s been forced into the war by governmental coercion and crushing socioeconomic pressure, and Daniel would come up behind him and just about take his head off with that knife. Isn’t that right? Arm around the neck, raise the chin, and then right down through the big arteries on the left side. Isn’t that right?”