John Brandon - Further Joy

The fathers knew it was important to have meals with their daughters. For one father, breakfast was convenient. For another, dinner. One of the fathers regularly picked his daughter up from school and took her for salads in the quaint town center of their neighborhood. One of the fathers was only free on Sundays and he took his daughter to brunch on the water, and he’d recently begun to feel, sitting there just the two of them in the midst of so many hungover, sated couples and sprawling wedding parties, oyster shells and champagne everywhere, that something was not quite natural about his and his daughter’s lingering over this sunny midmorning luxury, that this familiar indulgence had curdled.

The fathers remembered their own childhoods lovingly, remembered that first summer they were allowed to walk down to the old pier without any adults and fish an afternoon away, many years younger than their daughters were now. They remembered the storm beginning to assemble on the horizon as they pulled lunch out of a plastic grocery bag — a sandwich of whatever pastrami had been left after their father’s work week, a peach, a warm can of ginger ale. They remembered taking their shoes off and setting them in an out-of-the-way spot where they wouldn’t get knocked down into the swells. They remembered getting their bait stolen by pinfish, getting their lines tangled. They remembered the clouds rising, advancing, snuffing out the sun. They remembered pointing at the lightning in the distance and tasting a metallic tang on the breeze. Soon everyone else on the pier began reeling in and packing up and shuffling toward land, throwing in the towel — first the young professionals on a day off, wearing bright ball caps and expensive deck shoes, then those women of indeterminate age that had always frightened and interested the fathers when they were boys, with their platinum hair and harsh laughs and sculpted manly arms, and finally the pier hounds, their mustaches unkempt and shorts ratty, who fished for their dinners most days. The storm had been racing in, aimed directly at the pier, and then it seemed to hold itself in place a moment, offering a fair chance to anyone who’d not yet fled. The fathers found their shoes then. They remembered the sky growing dark as night, the thunder seeming to come from beneath them. That was when the snook finally started hitting, forced landward by the storm. They remembered throwing the wriggling creatures back, too small to keep anyway, and slicing a finger while dislodging a hook, knowing that this moment, with fish caught and the line up and blood dripping onto the planks of the pier and the lightning close enough to blind them, was when they should run for cover. But they didn’t run. Something inside them wanted this danger. If the storm washed them off the pier, they would drown. The lightning could fry them crisp. Yet they baited and dropped their hooks once again. They remembered being fascinated at being alone, remembered turning and looking back at the beach, which was abandoned and which seemed itself to be bracing for a siege. They remembered the first fat drops of rain hitting the backs of their hands. The angry front was now hanging over them like a cliff. They remembered not being able to account for their stubbornness, not understanding why the thing that ought to chase them off was holding them still. The gusts rocking the pier. The surf pounding the pilings below. They remembered those days and prayed, knowing it wouldn’t be so, that whatever fates their daughters were testing were as wholesome as rough weather.

It was breakfast time, and Sofia was in the kitchen with Uncle Tunsil. He was eating a lemon with sugar and had a glass of milk waiting for him. Sofia was working on a bowl of colorful cereal meant for children, crunching it down in the quiet morning. Uncle Tunsil gazed out the front window. The lemon tree was out there, and also a colossal nut tree that had been struck by lightning and rendered half dead. The branches that shot out over the house were pale and bare, while the branches over the road hung lush in their own shade.

Uncle Tunsil took down his milk in one steady draft, then looked toward Sofia. “I’ll be right on the other side of the glass, and I’ll make sure he’s aware of that. We’ll just see how this goes. I’m a long sight from comfortable with it.”

“I’m pretty tough,” Sofia said. “That’s something you might have noticed about me.”

Uncle Tunsil had already spent too much energy making sure Sofia wasn’t frightened, telling her she could back out anytime she wanted, squaring what he was going to allow her to do with his conscience. When she’d first offered her help, her uncle had balked, and she’d had to remind him she was an adult who’d been through a lot in her life and could handle herself. She’d stayed on him two days straight about it. And she’d known he would relent. The two of them had gone years without any mention of the unexplained events of Sofia’s childhood, but when Sofia finally brought up the topic, he hadn’t shied away from it. Courage was a settled fact of Uncle Tunsil’s makeup, and though he was charged with keeping order, there was something unaffiliated about him. He operated according to a reserved but staunch open-mindedness. He didn’t care what people thought, didn’t mind that some folks would snicker at his pursuing a case this way. And he understood this was important to her. There was a part of her she’d tamped down into a shadowy corner and she wanted to try to bring it out.

Sofia didn’t know what to expect out of the experiment. She had warned her uncle that if she did in fact discover anything, it likely wouldn’t be anything concrete, that she might only get a feeling, and probably not even that. Uncle Tunsil had tried to muster his familiar easy grin, and had told her a feeling would work fine. A feeling was exactly what they were lacking.

He started the faucet running and set his milk glass and lemon dish in the sink. There were some other dishes in there from last night. Sofia was finished with her cereal and he took her bowl too. He found a rag and started washing, his forearms flexing. He had a beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. It would’ve made someone else look like a fool.

“I keep thinking would your momma have let you do this,” he said, raising his voice over the running water. “I suppose we know the answer to that. That’s what I’m always thinking, what she would’ve said.”

“If my mother were around, she wouldn’t still be telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I’m the boss now. I’m the boss of Sofia.”

“Whether she’d let me do this, is maybe what I mean. You’re the boss of Sofia but I’m the boss of the police station.”

The salt and pepper shakers on the table were in the image of a farmer and his wife. Sofia touched the top of each one, then licked her finger. When she or her uncle mentioned Sofia’s mother, it was usually to say they missed her on a holiday or to praise her cobbler or, most often, to admire what a hard worker she’d been. She’d been able to leave enough money for Sofia’s college, no small accomplishment.

Sofia said, “Her way to deal with this, to deal with me, was to… not deal with it. And maybe that was the best thing for me back then. I’m sure it was.”

Uncle Tunsil was nodding, putting some elbow grease into one of the dishes. “You want to find out about yourself and that’s fine. You want some answers, like everyone wants. I’m still allowed to say this thing makes me nervous.”

“Think of it this way,” Sofia said. “It’s just talking to some guys who might be lying. For girls, that’s old hat.”

Sofia was behind her uncle, so she couldn’t see if he’d smiled at what she said. Wisps of steam were rising up from the sink and vanishing.