Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“How come?” Helen said.

He did not answer. She shut her eyes tight and distracting, eerie images came to her, stars exploding and shadowy figures like those in movies — she had gone to the movies all the time in the city, often taking in the first show at eleven in the morning; not because she was lonely or had nothing to do but because she liked movies. Five-twenty and he would come up the stairs, grimacing a little with the strange inexplicable pain in his chest: and there Helen would be, back from downtown, dressed up and her hair shining and her face ripe and fresh as a child’s, not because she was proud of the look in his eyes but because she knew she could make that pain of his abate for a while. And so why had she left him, when he had needed her more than anyone? “Pa, is something wrong?” she said, as if the recollection of that other man’s invisible pain were in some way connected with her father.

He reached down vaguely and touched her hand. She was surprised at this. The movie images vanished — those beautiful people she had wanted to believe in, as she had wanted to believe in God and the saints in their movie-world heaven — and she opened her eyes. The sun was bright. It had been too bright all summer. Helen’s mind felt sharp and nervous as if pricked by tiny needles, but when she tried to think of what they could be no explanation came to her. She would be home soon, she would be able to rest. Tomorrow she could get in touch with Paul. Things could begin where they had left off — Paul had always loved her so much, and he had always understood her, had known what she was like. “Ma isn’t sick, is she?” Helen said suddenly. “No,” said her father. He released her fingers to take hold of the steering wheel again. Another curve. Off to the side, if she bothered to look, the river had swung toward them — low at this time of year, covered in places with a fine brown-green layer of scum. She did not bother to look.

“We moved out here seventeen years ago,” her father said. He cleared his throat: the gesture of a man unaccustomed to speech. “You don’t remember that.”

“Yes, I do,” Helen said. “I remember that.”

“You don’t, you were just a baby.”

“Pa, I remember it. I remember you carrying the big rug in the house, you and Eddie. And I started to cry and you picked me up. I was such a big baby, always crying… And Ma came out and chased me inside so I wouldn’t bother you.”

“You don’t remember that,” her father said. He was driving jerkily, pressing down on the gas pedal and then letting it up, as if new thoughts continually struck him. What was wrong with him? Helen had an idea she didn’t like: he was older now, he was going to become an old man.

If she had been afraid of the dark, upstairs in that big old farmhouse in the room she shared with her sister, all she had had to do was to think of him. He had a way of sitting at the supper table that was so still, so silent, that you knew nothing could budge him. Nothing could frighten him. So, as a child, and even now that she was grown up, it helped her to think of her father’s face — those pale surprised green eyes that could be simple or cunning, depending upon the light, and the lines working themselves in deeper every year around his mouth, and the hard angle of his jaw going back to the ear, burned by the sun and then tanned by it, turned into leather, then going pale again in the winter. The sun could not burn its color deep enough into that skin, which was almost as fair as Helen’s. At Sunday school she and the other children had been told to think of Christ when they were afraid, but the Christ she saw on the little Bible bookmark cards and calendars was no one to protect you. That was a man who would be your cousin, maybe, some cousin you liked but saw rarely, but he looked so given over to thinking and trusting that he could not be of much help; not like her father. When he and the boys came in from the fields with the sweat drenching their clothes and their faces looking as if they were dissolving with heat, you could still see the solid flesh beneath, the skeleton that hung onto its muscles and would never get old, never die. The boys — her brothers, all older — had liked her well enough, Helen being the baby, and her sister had watched her most of the time, and her mother had liked her too — or did her mother like anyone, having been brought up by German-speaking parents who had had no time to teach her love? But it had always been her father she had run to. She had started knowing men by knowing him. She could read things in his face that taught her about the faces of other men, the slowness or quickness of their thoughts, if they were beginning to be impatient, or were pleased and didn’t want to show it yet. Was it for this she had come home? — And the thought surprised her so that she sat up, because she did not understand. Was it for this she had come home? “Pa,” she said, “like I told you on the telephone, I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I went. That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, I’m sorry for it, isn’t that enough? Did you talk to Paul?”

“Paul? Why Paul?”

“What?”

“You haven’t asked about him until now, so why now?”

“What do you mean? He’s my husband, isn’t he? Did you talk to him?”

“He came over to the house almost every night for two weeks. Three weeks,” he said. Helen could not understand the queer chatty tone of his voice. “Then off and on, all the time. No, I didn’t tell him you were coming.”

“But why not?” Helen laughed nervously. “Don’t you like him?”

“You know I like him. You know that. But if I told him he’d of gone down to get you, not me.”

“Not if I said it was you I wanted…”

“I didn’t want him to know. Your mother doesn’t know either.”

“What? You mean you didn’t tell her?” Helen looked at the side of his face. It was rigid and bloodless behind the tan, as if something inside were shrinking away and leaving just his voice. “You mean you didn’t even tell Ma? She doesn’t know I’m coming?”

“No.”

The nervous prickling in her brain returned suddenly. Helen rubbed her forehead.

“Pa,” she said gently, “why didn’t you tell anybody? You’re ashamed of me, huh?”

He drove on slowly. They were following the bends of the river, that wide shallow meandering river the boys said wasn’t worth fishing in any longer. One of its tributaries branched out suddenly — Mud Creek, it was called, all mud and bullfrogs and dragonflies and weeds — and they drove over it on a rickety wooden bridge that thumped beneath them. “Pa,” Helen said carefully, “you said you weren’t mad, on the phone. And I wrote you that letter explaining. I wanted to write some more, but you know… I don’t write much, never even wrote to Annie when she moved away. I never forgot about you or anything, or Ma… I thought about the baby, too, and Paul, but Paul could always take care of himself. He’s smart. He really is. I was in the store with him one time and he was arguing with some salesmen and got the best of them; he never learned all that from his father. The whole family is smart, though, aren’t they?”

“The Hendrikses? Sure. You don’t get money without brains.”

“Yes, and they got money too, Paul never had to worry. In a house like his parents’ house nothing gets lost or broken. You know? It isn’t like it was at ours, when we were all kids. That’s part of it — when Paul’s father built us our house I was real pleased and real happy, but then something of them came in with it too. Everything is spost to be clean and put in its place, and after you have a baby you get so tired… but his mother was always real nice to me. I don’t complain about them. I like them all real well.”