Robert Butler - Perfume River

And William Quinlan is dead.

When the phone rings in the foyer, Robert is still sitting in his reading chair, his coffee mug empty for a while now. He’s not actively dreading his father. He’s not wavering in his intention to tell him. He’s just inert. Intending to overcome that. The dread driven deep. The wavering converted to dozy distraction: wondering if this lot of coffee beans is depleted yet at the roaster; watching the flash of cardinals beyond the veranda; thinking the room too warm and suspecting the weather has changed overnight. It takes a second ring of the phone to make him rise, and still there is no urgency in him, no sense of dread. Just the phone ringing.

Doctor Tyler himself. Very sorry. A saddle embolism is not uncommon in spite of doing everything possible. Death certificate signed. In the hospital mortuary awaiting instructions. Have you done this before? Do you have a funeral home?

“No,” Robert is finally saying, “I’ll have to see about one.”

“Not a problem. Call here and tell us when you decide. The home will take care of everything from this point on.”

“All right,” Robert says.

“I’m very sorry,” Doctor Tyler says.

“Yes,” Robert says. “Thank you.”

“He didn’t suffer.”

“That’s good.”

And the conversation is over.

Robert puts the phone down.

He finds himself inert again.

He does not miss his father.

But something got misplaced.

He looks around him. “Darla?” he calls.

No answer. Again, louder: “Darla?”

Nothing. She’s not back. She sometimes gets inspired and runs a long time. He understands that. She has to go up to the hospital afterward and she wants to run thoroughly first.

No.

She won’t have to go to the hospital.

There’s a beeping. Distant. But nearby.

He looks. It’s the cordless phone. He’s forgotten to push the off button. He picks up the phone. He pushes the button. He puts it down.

He drifts back into the living room, looks at the French doors, moves to them, opens them, steps into a morning that feels almost warm.

He looks to the live oak standing massively before and above him. He walks to it, turns his back to it, and sits heavily down in the crotch of two roots. He presses against his tree even as his limbs feel their tone fading. They waver, and he wills his legs to stretch flat and he lets his arms fall to his sides.

The oak’s trunk is rough, touching him hard in the back in long, uprunning ridges. He is glad for its hardness against him and he is glad to smell the sudden Florida warmth in the air. He is glad he is in his own country now and did not die. But he aches. He aches for the dead. For one man he did not know at all. For one man he knows too well.

He sits like this until he hears Darla calling for him from inside the house.

“Out here.” He does not move.

She appears in the open French door, sweating in her running clothes, a towel around her neck. “What is it?” she says.

“He’s dead,” Robert says.

She steps to the edge of the veranda, but pauses.

She doesn’t want to force him to stand by coming too near the tree. He seems propped there as if after a beating in a ring. “Are you okay?”

He rouses himself, flails a little with his arms, drags at his legs.

She presents a palm. “You don’t have to …”

“I’m fine,” he says, making it to his feet.

She steps closer, ready to hold him but not initiating it, regretting her sweat.

He’s not ready for the ritual of this. He holds still, looks down to the space between them.

The phone rings, a small sound from the foyer but it lifts Robert’s eyes to hers.

He knows who it is, and from his look, she knows.

Darla says, “Would you like me to talk with her?”

He considers this.

The phone rings again.

“Thanks,” he says. “But I better.”

He moves past her.

She remains.

Not just in the small of her back, the touch of his hand; not just in her chest, the press of his; but in her conscious memory now, his arms come around her in the darkness of their bedroom with both her parents laid out in a hospital morgue a thousand miles away, and he pulls her close. She should have done that for him just now, instantly, as he did it for her, not pausing in the doorway or on the veranda. But he surprised her, the tableau of him and the tree. She did not expect him to be stricken by the death of such a difficult man, a man who would no longer be able to disappoint him. She’d needed a few moments to get over her surprise. Then the phone intervened.

Darla needs to be close to him now.

She turns, steps through the French doors, crosses the living room toward his voice in the foyer: “Of course, Mom … Of course … Try to be calm till I’m with you … Say a prayer. Say a rosary.”

Darla hears these last few words trying to stick in his throat. She stops before she becomes visible in the living room doorway.

“Soon,” he says. “Yes.”

He listens. He says, “Of course. Very safe.”

Moments after this she hears the phone clack into its cradle. She steps into the foyer and he turns to her. She comes to him and puts her arms around him.

He draws her close, but only briefly, and he gently pulls away. “I have to go up there now.”

“I’ll follow as soon as I can,” she says.

An hour later Robert is sitting on his mother’s sofa, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder as she weeps. Across the room the leg rest of his father’s overstuffed brown velvet recliner remains raised from the last time he sat there, barely more than forty-eight hours ago. Whenever Peggy’s tears swell into sobs, Robert murmurs I know, I know until they ebb. She has not reminisced or eulogized or criticized but has simply wept, which makes her grief seem to him unadulterated and keeps his arm around her, gentles his grip on her shoulder, makes him long for his mother to show this part of her more often. He wonders if Darla’s arrival, the expansion of the audience, will put her back onstage.

He tightens his hold on her as if to prevent that.

As he does, Robert grows conscious again of the leg rest on the recliner. Whenever the old man figured he was returning soon, he kept it raised and worked his way out of the chair at an angle. He’d hobble then. He never spoke of them, but surely those knees hurt him. Most likely arthritis. They hurt him to push against the leg rest to lower it, though they probably hurt him as much climbing from the chair so awkwardly. But he’d gotten it into his head that this was the best way to do it, so by damn he’d do it this way forever. The last time he sat here he struggled to extend one leg off the chair and to drag his butt on the cushion till he could get the other leg over and then to drag some more to put both his feet flat on the floor and then he braced himself and he rose. He’d done this thousands of times and he thought he’d be right back. He was wrong. He’d be dead before he could do it again.

Robert finds his eyes filling with tears.

He does not feel as if they’re for the man himself exactly. Maybe some. Maybe for the father Robert wished he’d been. But these tears seem mostly about knowing this small, commonplace thing. How his father got out of a chair. True to his character. Stubbornly. Hurting himself trying not to hurt himself. Someone Robert comprehends in this small but telling way has vanished from the world: That’s what these incipient tears are about. And he raises his free arm, drags his wrist across his eyes, refuses to shed them.

He feels his mother’s face turn upward toward his.

She will get this all wrong.

That pisses him off.

He abruptly drops his arm. He does not look at her. He says nothing.