Father of the Rain

9

I didn’t want a party, but Jonathan insisted.

“Just let people be happy for you,” he said. And now he’s created my favorite kind of evening: our closest friends, his homemade $3 spaghetti sauce, and a round of Oh Hell before dinner. It’s June in Michigan. All the windows in the apartment are open. Bugs thrum and snap at the screens. There’s wine, but not enough for anyone to get drunk.

At dinner we end up counting how many of us have lost a parent. Out of the seven of us, five parents are already dead. Dan’s date, an earnest undergrad in shorts and a baseball cap, asks me how my mother died. Normally I just say she was hit by a car, but tonight — maybe because I’m leaving, maybe because she seems so young and doe-eyed — I tell her about the awful days that followed, how my father didn’t even come to the funeral. I don’t talk about my father much anymore, and I see him once a year at most, but I can feel a certain charge begin to run through me.

“He never called me or my brother to say he was sorry our mother had died,” I tell her. “Never came by. Never wrote a note. We were at her place — a mile away from his house — for a week and we never heard from him. To this day he’s never even mentioned her death to me.”

“Maybe it’s too painful for him.” Her name is Janine, I think. A psych major.

“They split up when I was eleven. They hated each other.”

“Still. Unresolved relationships can be the hardest to grieve.”

I look at her hard because she should know this if she’s going to be a shrink someday. “Some people are just assholes.”

She looks ready to argue the point, but something behind me catches her eye and her expression is forced into a smile. It’s Julie, coming into the room with a cake. Jonathan, behind her with three boxes of ice cream, starts singing, “Happy Berkeley to You,” and everyone else catches on and I try to wave them silent but they just get louder. I’m not sure I’m done complaining about my father.

Julie sets a banana cake, my very favorite dessert, in front of me. She’s decorated it with plastic palm trees and people on surfboards.

I hug her and she whispers, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me in this hellhole.”

I laugh, because I’m not. She landed a job at the University of New Mexico and is moving to Albuquerque in two weeks.

Jonathan wraps his arms around me from behind, kissing the back of my neck as I cut the cake. “Can you make them all leave now?” he says in my ear. “We only have a few more hours together.”

“This was your idea, Magoo.” He is nearly a foot taller than me and I can feel him pressing against the base of my spine. “Get ahold of yourself.”

We aren’t going to be separated for long. He’ll come out to California as soon as he finishes teaching the first summer session next week. I still can’t quite believe he’s coming with me. At the last minute Jonathan Fleury, who, as Dan likes to say, planned his bowel movements three years in advance, took the job at San Francisco State and turned down the one at Temple. Now it’s up to me to screw the whole thing up.

“You’re not going to screw it up,” Julie said a few days ago.

“How are you so sure?”

“Because it’s Jonathan. He won’t let you. He’ll be eight steps ahead of you.”

“You’re right. He will.” It felt a little suffocating, actually, when she put it like that.

When everyone has a piece of cake, Dan lifts his glass in my direction. “Here’s to Daley,” he says, “who soundly rejected me five long years ago in the middle of our first date.”

“Second,” I say.

Dan lowers his wine. “What was the first?”

“Coffeehouse.”

“Oh. Right.” He raises the glass again, resumes his stentorian tone. “All because my car wouldn’t start.”

“Not because your car wouldn’t start. Because you started pounding on the steering wheel and screaming fuck fuck fuck about fifty times.”

“I was trying to impress you with my manly bestiality.”

“Beastliness. Bestiality might have impressed me. Why is it that writers have such a lack of precision when it comes to the English language?”

“By the way, can you shut up? I’m actually leading up to saying something nice about you, so stop heckling me.”

“It’s so hard. You remind me too much of my brother.”

“So you have said. Many times. Just what a rejected suitor wants to hear. Anyway, despite your strange and inexplicable impulses”— he looks over at Jonathan, who grins at me; Dan introduced us: by accident, he always insists—”you have been a comrade to me through dark times and light, and I will miss you more than I will ever let on.”

Dan reaches across the table to hug me. His BO is as strong as always, and the grass smell of his hair brings back that first date when he kissed me in the middle of a conversation about Saul Bellow and my stomach spun for days at the memory — until the second date, when I had to get out of the broken-down car and walk away.

Julie clears her throat dramatically. Since Mallory, she’s the closest thing I’ve had to a sister. We’ve shared an apartment for four years. Even the way she holds up her glass now, crooked, as if she doesn’t care if it spills a little, is familiar to me. “I think we all know that Daley’s name will soon be in textbooks, so this may be our last evening with her as a humble mortal. Anthropology professors at Berkeley rarely fade away.”

“But they do get washed away,” Dan said. Last year one of them jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“She’ll have Jonathan to hold her back.” Julie looks down into her glass. The sentimental part is coming. “I just want to say how impossibly proud I am of you, Daley. You’ve been working toward this moment from the day I met you. And here it is.” Her big smile rearranges everything else on her face. Even her hair shifts. She has the most amazing ability to reveal her emotions without embarrassment. She cried when I got the call from Berkeley about the job. I’d never seen anyone actually cry for joy in real life. And there Julie was, crying for mine. “I wish you, as my father used to say to me every night”—her smile twists suddenly and her voice frays—”the sun, the moon, and the stars. You deserve them all.” I glance at Jonathan then. I can’t help it. We have a joke about how often Julie mentions her father. But he won’t meet my eye. He probably doesn’t think we should enjoy an inside joke about Julie at this moment.

Nico says he will miss eavesdropping on my conferences. “You wouldn’t believe the things her students tell her. It’s like sharing an office with Sigmund Freud.” He’s not comfortable speaking to a group, even this small group around Jonathan’s table. It makes me wonder how he gets through his lecture classes. “But the real testament to your character, Daley, is that you got the best job of all of us and nobody even resents you for it.”

“I do,” Jonathan and Dan say at the same time.

Kira says she wishes me the best but will not raise a glass because of the ritual’s patriarchal roots. The concept of toasting, she explains, evolved from the custom of flavoring drinks with spiced toast, and when the toast ran out, she says, a woman’s name would be called out to flavor the drink. “Yet another example of men attempting to consume women,” she says. Dan pretends to slit his wrists with the cake knife, which he often does around Kira.

When it’s Jonathan’s turn, the room gets quiet. People tend to listen to Jonathan a little more closely. When I accused him once of having this effect, he said that white people in academia always have to pretend they’re listening to the black man. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket, glances at it in silence, then stuffs it back. He turns to me and speaks quietly. “I wrote down some things. I even had a quote by Bronislaw Malinowski for you.” He laughs. “But what I really want to say is that I just feel so glad that, that somehow,” he rubs his finger on the tablecloth, “you showed up in my life. I didn’t expect that. As you know.” He smiles. He tips his glass over to tap mine. “Here’s to you and me and our unanticipated future.” I’m surprised by the emotion in his voice. He’s usually so controlled in public. I put my arm around his neck and he pulls me tight against him. I feel how fast his heart is beating and I think, briefly, the smallest pulse of a fear, that I am not worthy of that heart.

It’s true that Dan introduced us by accident. Nadine Gordimer came to campus for a reading last fall, and there was a reception afterward at the chancellor’s house. It was crowded, everyone hoping for a closer look at the writer, who was tucked away in some alcove at the back. Dan and I were at the buffet table when he saw a woman he was interested in across the room.

“We gotta get over there,” he said, and yanked me smack into Jonathan. A few cubes of cheese from my plate bounced off his shirt.

“Oh, shit, she’s leaving,” Dan said, and since he knew Jonathan from a writing class, he introduced us.

I’d noticed him before, the lean body, short dreads, round glasses, angular face.

“You still writing?” Dan asked him.

“Just my dissertation.”

“On what?” I asked.

“Hegel and Gramsci, supposedly.”

“Not going well?”

“I’d rather be writing stories.”

“You should,” Dan said. “You were good. That story you wrote about the two boys and their dying uncle. I can still remember whole sentences of it.”

We picked at the food. The room was hot. I told Jonathan I’d thought he was one of those precocious seniors who took graduate courses. He laughed and said he was thirty. I didn’t believe him.

“Let me see your license,” I said.

“I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean?” Dan asked. “It get taken away?”

“No, man,” he said, irritated. “I grew up in the city. Never needed one.”

“Shit. Really?”

“True. And my cousin just dropped off this truck she doesn’t need at my apartment, and I can’t even use it.”

“You’ve gotta get taught,” Dan said.

“I know it.”

People were still squeezing in the front door. An old boyfriend was at the other end of the table, debating whether to come over. I needed to get out of there. “I’ll teach you,” I said, and handed him the keys to my Datsun.

It was late afternoon, the third week of September. The day had been warm, but now the sun was low and the trees on the chancellor’s street shook out a cool breeze. In the car I helped him adjust the seat. He needed to put it all the way back. “I’m nervous,” he said, before he turned the key in the ignition. I couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. “I really don’t want to crack up your car.”

But he knew what he was doing. He just went very slowly. A line of cars grew behind us. I directed him out of town onto a back road, but still cars were behind us. He didn’t seem to notice. Every time a car approached from the opposite direction he veered off onto the gravel shoulder and I shut my eyes. He slowly moved the car back onto the road after the line of cars had honked passed. He drove in a straight line. He didn’t seem ready to make turns. Occasionally I’d offer up a tip I remembered from driver’s ed, but mostly there was silence between us. And then, eleven miles out of town, he asked if I liked to sing.

Thursdays were the only afternoon we both had free. We met at the car and we drove and we sang. The first song, that first day, was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” It took us the next three Thursdays to exhaust our repertoire of Beatles songs. Singing helped the driving. He went a little faster. Fewer cars trailed behind us. He began to argue with some of my driving suggestions. We came to a stop sign and I waited for him to slow, and when he didn’t I screamed for him to stop but we sailed through it anyway. I called him Mr. Magoo after that. He retaliated, saying I reminded him of Tweety Bird.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been called worse cartoon characters.”

“Like what?”

“My brother calls me Hermey.”

I didn’t think he’d get it but he said, within seconds, “The dentist?” and he looked at me. “I see that.” He kept looking and laughing. “I definitely see that.”

When we were through with the Beatles, he suggested Elton John.

“Which song of Elton’s do you think crossed over to the black community?” he asked. It was the first time he’d mentioned his race. It felt strangely intimate, and I wanted to get it right.

“‘Benny and the Jets,’” I said.

“Exactly,” he said, with a little smile. “We had no idea what the hell it was about, but, man, we loved that song.” Then he started pounding out the beat on the steering wheel.

“Watch the road, Magoo.”

“You watch the road. I’m on drums.” He made the intro noises and we sang, right on the same beat, “Hey, kids.” Then he sang “walking in the ghetto” while I sang “talk about the weather,” and we looked at each other and cracked up. Jonathan’s smile felt like the full sun on my bare skin.

After Elton, he launched into “Thunder Road.” And then we sang every Springsteen song we could think of, the fun ones like “Rosalita” and “Cadillac Ranch” and the mournful ones like “Independence Day” and “Nebraska.” When we ran out of Bruce, we were driving through a small town surrounded by open fields and I started to sing “Little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane” without really realizing it, and he screamed “No!” and stopped the car in the middle of the road.

“Why?”

“That song is too fucking white.”

“Every song we’ve sung so far is white.”

“I know, but—”

“The Beatles and Springsteen are absolutely fine, but John Mellencamp is out?” I felt myself blushing for having made such a blunder. I worried that it had revealed everything to him: my father, Myrtle Street, Ashing — everything I’d worked so carefully to cleanse myself of.

He grinned. “I switch-hit, don’t I? Shit, they talk about double consciousness, but I’ve got triple, quadruple — I’ve got origami consciousness. But I can’t sing that song. People get lynched in towns like that.”

I couldn’t fake it when he wanted to sing songs by groups like Cameo and the Whispers. I didn’t even know the choruses of those songs.

“This is tragic. Where’d you grow up, under a rock?”

“Pretty much.”

We settled on Marvin Gaye.

He told me he grew up in Philadelphia with four brothers, that his mother was a nurse from Georgia, that his father had come to Philly from Trinidad as a boy and had died from a heart attack when Jonathan was fifteen, that his mother had never remarried, that he had a friend from college named Stella who did improv in comedy clubs. I pictured it: the wooden stage, the confident voice, the room erupting. I knew I couldn’t compete with that.

I told him about my fieldwork in Mexico, twelve months in a village in the Sierra Juarez northeast of Oaxaca, and how the children I’d gone to study ran away from me for the first three months. When I did get close enough to observe their play, I found that the villain in many of their imagined stories, someone they called the See-through Demon, was me.

Once we passed an accident, a car on its side in a gully and three police cars and a fire truck along the shoulder. Jonathan drove slowly by.

“My mother was hit by a car,” I said. It felt like something he should know.

“When?”

“Nine years ago. She died.”

“Right away?”

“Yup.”

I saw his hand flinch on the steering wheel, lift off, and plant right back down again, all in less than a second. It gave me hope, that tiny impulse to touch me that he’d checked.

Sometimes Jonathan would see an animal out of the corner of his eye and stop the car. A fox cutting across a field, a porcupine at the base of a tree. Once we saw a long wide V of Canada geese drop down into a small farm pond all at once, forcing up a great white fan of water. We rolled down the windows and heard all their honking and wing smacking. It was dusk. Jonathan kept binoculars in my glove compartment by then, so we took turns looking at their long dark necks and prim white chinstraps, laughing at how loud and rowdy they were at the start of their long road trip.

When we got back on the road, we passed a sign that said STRATHAM 2 MILES. “I’ve read about that place,” he said. “It’s the Knights’ headquarters.”

“The Knights?”

He looked to see if I was seriously asking. I was. “The Klan,” he said. “Not the place you want to be stopped driving a white girl’s car without a license.” The road was empty and he made a wide U-turn.

Just a few miles out of Ann Arbor, and it was a different world for Jonathan.

We never did anything together after driving. We said goodbye on the street. In the car, while he watched the road, I watched him: his severe profile, the heavy ledge of his brow, the taut muscles of his jaw, and then when he turned unexpectedly, laughing at one of my nervous quips, that smile, his cheeks suddenly boyish. Sitting beside him in my car was becoming a form of torture.

“You’ve got to just kiss him yourself, Daley,” Julie said. “Anyone can see that he’s crazy about you.” But she didn’t know what she was talking about. We’d run into him once on campus, talked awkwardly, that was it.

I couldn’t make the first move. I never had and I never would. She thought I was anachronistic. She proudly claimed that she made the first move in every serious relationship she’d ever had. Men are the tortoises of love, she often said. But my interest and attraction felt too strong. In the car I had to rein in everything: my hands, my questions, my fascination. Sometimes it felt like there was a part of me inside him that I ached to get to.

There was a general store on our route, the only store in a tiny town that we often passed through. One day in early December, he said he was thirsty and pulled into a parking spot. We’d never gotten out of the car during our drives before, not even for animal sightings. An old couple sat on stools behind the counter, and there were several men in the aisles, one lifting out a six-pack from the cooler, another at the magazine stand. Everybody seemed to be talking at once until they saw us and stopped. It reminded me of walking into the kitchen when my father and Catherine weren’t expecting me. The same suspicious glares. Before I knew what I was doing I’d taken Jonathan’s hand. It was the first time we’d touched, though I’d longed for weeks to put my hand on his thigh as he drove, longed to kiss the side of his long neck, had already imagined, I admit it, straddling him, my back against the steering wheel. It was such a relief to touch him, to feel him squeeze my hand with his. We picked out cookies and sodas and I let go reluctantly when we had to pay.

“You did not have to do that,” he said when we walked to the car. “I didn’t need your protection in there.” He slammed the door.

I was stunned by his anger. I thought we’d get back in the car and laugh. I thought he might kiss me. My whole body was still straining toward his. I felt like he’d already touched me everywhere, the way his hand had felt in mine.

He started the car, put it in reverse without a word. I did not explain how to turn going backwards, and didn’t need to. Before we went into the general store we’d been singing “O-o-h, child, things are gonna get easier,” but now we drove back toward Ann Arbor in silence. I wanted your protection, I thought to myself. The man with the six-pack had scared me. But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what was the truth. For the first time in my life I’d made the first move. My hand had gone out to his and he had taken it and now he was angry at me. I felt like a child. I wanted him to get out of my car so I could cry and cry. I watched the road signs. ANN ARBOR 12 MILES; ANN ARBOR 9 MILES. And then he turned down a road we’d never taken before. I hadn’t seen a sign, didn’t know how he knew it. It bumped along for over a mile, a dirt road with huge ruts and a rise of grass in the middle that scraped the bottom of my car. I thought maybe he was going to drop me off down here as a punishment, make me find my way back. His profile looked particularly harsh then, the jaw working, shifting. The road ended at a lake. The sun had gone behind the tall trees and the still water reflected the purple dusk plushly, like fabric. We stayed in the car and did not look at each other.

“You probably won’t believe this,” he said finally, staring straight ahead, “but I’ve never crossed the color line before. It just never seemed worth it somehow. I wasn’t raised to believe that we’re all the same deep down. My grandmother used to say to me and my brothers, Stay away from white girls. Stay away from them. She was from Vidalia, Georgia, and had a million stories from her childhood. They all ended the same. The black man ended up either dead or in jail. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, there weren’t white people. Not in my neighborhood. Not on the streets, not at school, not in the shops. I knew they existed — I saw them on TV or if we got in my uncle’s car and went somewhere — but I didn’t think there were very many of them. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about white people. And then one day my uncle came by and took me and my cousin to a movie. I think we were six. He had some discount for a theater across town. We got there and there was a thick line of white people down the entire block and around the corner and down another block. All white. I didn’t understand where they could have come from. I still remember the feeling in my chest, terrified, utterly terrified, but also something else, a little thrill or something, because the world was different from what I had thought.” He was still looking straight at the lake, fingers looped around the steering wheel. I wanted to touch him again. “In there, holding your hand, I got that same feeling.”

We reached for each other at the same time. Hands, then mouths, then our bodies pressing against each other. I could not stop tears from leaking out, so great was the relief of his touch and the end of his anger. I hoped he wouldn’t notice but he did; he found them and licked them and apologized for yelling. I wasn’t used to apologies. It brought on a few more tears.

I’d always paced things carefully with men, offered up my body piecemeal, resisted exploration of theirs until I felt certain the emotional connection was keeping pace with the physical. My mother had told me not to make love without love, but I had become a freakish air-traffic controller, determined to land the two, love and sex, at precisely the same time. It rarely worked. The orchestrating itself derailed things. With Jonathan I lost interest in control, lost the ability to control. And that first sex in the car by the lake was always with us, every time we made love afterward, and never once did I regret it.

I can’t offer anyone a real goodbye at the end of the night. When people hug me, I insist I’ll see them soon, I’ll see them around. Julie squeezes me hard. This is the end of our life together. I took all my things out of our apartment this morning and crammed them into my car. There is only a little hole for me to squeeze into tomorrow and drive to California.

“I hate this,” she says. “I hate that I’m not going to find all your dirty dishes in the sink tomorrow night.”

“Please don’t make me cry. If I start, I won’t stop.” But I feel numb, nowhere close to tears.

She kisses me on both cheeks and leaves them wet. She promises to visit in the fall. It doesn’t feel real, my future, all that I have worked so hard to make happen. But the future always sits uneasily with me. I’ve never been able to really trust it. I’ve trained myself not to look forward to things very often. And I’m tired. I’m bone tired. Part of me just wants to curl up on a couch and sleep for a few years.

Dan is the last to leave. From his car he asks, “Can I use that bit about your father not going to the funeral?” He means in a story. “Please? I’ve already wrung my own childhood dry.”

“Go ahead,” I say, and then he is gone, just a hand out the car window, and then that is gone, too. He was my very first friend here.

Jonathan and I stack the dishes in the kitchen and lie on his bed in our clothes. It’s how we’ve always done it, like teenagers, as if each night we spend together is our first. My old boyfriend David used to have to brush his teeth and change into a clean T-shirt and fresh underwear before he got near the bed, and liked me to do the same. I couldn’t stand the sterile marriedness of it. I make sure I don’t always sleep on the same side of Jonathan’s bed when I stay over. I don’t want ritual or routine in a relationship. Ever.

Jonathan traces a finger along my temple and around my ear. When he takes off his glasses you can see that he has little stripes of tawny gold in his dark brown eyes. “You were so funny when people were toasting you. You looked like they were giving you an enema.”

“I hate watching people have to come up with nice things to say.” I kiss his finger, the tender pink pad of it. “Thank you for the party.”

“You’re so welcome, my Daley bread.”

We kiss hard, our hands reaching for bare skin. He lifts a breast out of my bra and into his mouth and my groin starts to ache. I wonder how long our desire will last. We’ve signed a year’s lease in California. Will we still touch each other so hungrily after a year of living together?

He pulls me on top of him. I feel him hard beneath me under his jeans. I push against him lightly, then harder, feeling the rush, the swell, the want. “Everything on earth should be just this simple,” I say. I take his earlobe in my teeth and feel him moan. “Tell me what it’s like again,” I whisper, still grinding against him, feeling the exact shape of him through our clothes.

It takes him a second to find his voice. “You know it’s Paloma Street when you see the big fence covered in bright red flowers. And then five houses down you see a tree out in front. Enormous. Maybe a eucalyptus. Please take off your clothes.”

“Tell me about the front door.” He flew out to California last month and found the cottage for us.

“Yellow. It’s yellow.”

“And the little window in the door?”

“The color of pale green sea glass. Please.”

I pull off my jeans, clumsily. I’m like a drunk when I’m horny, completely without fine motor skills. Jonathan scoots himself down and pushes my legs apart. He grins up at me, then slides a finger up inside me. I’m wet and swollen and it goes in easily. He pushes it in and slides it out and pushes it in again. Unable to wait, I press myself to his mouth, feel the warmth of his tongue on my clit and the finger drawing back and forth inside me. I can feel the orgasm now, assembling in the distance then moving swiftly in, opening up, opening me up, coming, coming closer, coming to split me down the middle.

But the sudden ring startles me. “Just the phone, tweety,” he says without lifting his head.

Three and a half rings, then the machine catches it. The orgasm veers off. My brother comes on. “Jesus Christ, Daley. Where the fuck are you?” There’s a panic in his voice I’ve never heard before.

“Don’t,” Jonathan says as I pull away from him. “Please don’t.”

But I’m already across the room, reaching for the receiver. “Garvey, what’s wrong?”

“Oh fucking Christ. There you are.”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh my God. Dad. Dad is what’s going on.”

“Is he okay?” I feel that cool whiteness that happens just before you hear someone is dead.

Garvey starts laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. “No, he is not okay or I wouldn’t have been leaving you so many goddamn messages.”

I look at the machine. A red 5 flashes. “Please calm down and tell me—”

“You haven’t been here. You have no idea what I’ve seen in the past—”

“Garvey, you are scaring the shit out of me. What’s going on?”

“Catherine left him.”

He’s alive. That’s all I care about. “When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”

I wait for the rest.

“He is a fucking mess.”

I snort. “Tell me about it.”

“No, Daley. He’s totally lost his shit. He’s threatening to kill all his dogs. And Hugh fired him. It was Hugh’s wife who called me. He’s drunk ‘round the clock. He’s unrecognizable.”

“Unrecognizable would be Dad sober. Dad drunk is not at all foreign to me.” All those years that I had to go up to Myrtle Street every weekend, every vacation, while Garvey showed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

“Daley.” His voice cracks. I haven’t heard him like this since Mom died. “You gotta come here and help me out.”

“What? No, Garvey. I’m driving to California tomorrow.” He knows all about Berkeley. He calls us Malibu Smart Barbie and Black Marxist Ken.

“He’s talked about offing himself.”

“Oh, come on. He’d destroy every living thing on this planet before he’d kill himself.”

“No, Daley, you have to believe me. I think he might hurt himself. I need some backup here.”

“I’m not coming. Not right now. I have a job that’s about to start in California.”

“Stop saying California like it’s so important. I’m in Massachusetts and I need your help with our father. Two, three days, that’s all I’m asking. Just to kind of settle him down. You’re good with him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You are.”

“I couldn’t even get there tomorrow. I’ve got to send out this article I just finished and have lunch with my advisor and—”

“I know. You’ve very busy. Get here when you can. Just for a day or two.”

“Goddammit, Garvey.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Jesus Christ, Daley, thank you.”

Jonathan is sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. I sit beside him. I have no clothes on.

“I have to, Jon. I have to. Garvey sounds really freaked out.”

“He always sounds freaked out.”

“Not like this. My stepmother has taken off and my father is falling apart.”

“What can you do in two days to fix that? Nothing.”

“I don’t want blood on my hands. I don’t want to hear that my father shot himself while I drove to California.”

“That’s just Garvey being hyperbolic.”

“He needs my help.”

“I don’t think you’ve spoken to your father since I’ve known you.”

“Probably not.”

“But within seconds you’ve decided to fly off in the wrong direction to a man who’s not even a part of your life.”

“Garvey needs help.”

“Are you going to tell your father you’re moving in with a black man?”

“Not if there are any knives around.”

He doesn’t smile. “Don’t do this. Don’t go back there.”

He’s still trying to persuade me to head west when I squeeze into my car the next afternoon.

We’re tired. We’ve argued in circles since last night. And now I’m doing it — I’m about to drive away in the wrong direction.

“Daley,” he says. He squats beside the open car door and holds my hands. It’s still the same feeling from the general store, every time our hands touch. “Please be careful.” He, too, has an uneasy relationship with the future. We understand each other in that way.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Your father has a lot of power.”

“You’re confusing me with Julie. My father has no power over me. He wasn’t even a father.” I see he is scared for me, far more scared than I am. Clearly I’ve told him too much.

“He still has the power to hurt you.”

“No, he doesn’t. It’s all scar tissue now.”

“I’ll be at the yellow door a week from Monday,” he says, kissing me one last time.

“I’ll see you through the sea glass window.”

And then I start the Datsun and drive east.

10

You can’t get to my father’s house from the highway without passing the Water Street Apartments. I didn’t mean to come here first. I meant to go straight to Dad’s, but I find myself peering into my bedroom window. It’s someone’s home office now, with two computers, a fax machine, and a leather swivel chair. The posters of Robert Redford, Billy Jack, and the Fonz are gone. Paul would have taken them down when he moved out the summer after my mother died. I’m certain he’s rolled them up neatly in tubes; he’s saved everything for Garvey and me in storage somewhere.

My mother died instantly. People tried to comfort us with that. But to whom was that a comfort? To me? I would have liked to see her one last time, no matter how crushed her body was; I would have liked to say goodbye, even if she couldn’t have heard me. Was it a comfort to her? Who would choose to die instantly, without a chance to process the transition? But then, I don’t like to be startled. I don’t like to be surprised. She and Paul had eaten dinner in Boston, he’d gone to get the car, she’d decided to cross Tremont to make it easier for him to pick her up, and a car had struck her. The driver had had a few drinks in him; my mother was prone to daydreaming. It’s hard to say what really happened. No one claimed to have seen.

I walk around to the living room windows. The current tenants have a sofa where we had one, a large dining table where our small one was. I’d been in my dorm room when Paul called. I was a sophomore in college. My roommate was dating a hockey player who’d just gotten back from a game. His shoulder pads were leaning against the wall by the phone. Paul was crying. The inside of the pads were streaked with filth. I just talked to her last night. I think I told this to Paul many times. It might have been the only thing I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was the only thing that made sense. Garvey came and got me a few hours later.

I often try to remember my mother’s funeral. It was at the little Episcopalian church she used to take me to before she left my father. I can remember those Sundays: my blue velvet coat, the white gloves, and my mother’s long prayers on her knees on needlepoint cushions. I don’t think she went to church after she left him. I don’t think she needed to. But I can’t recall the funeral. I don’t know what was said. All I remember about that day, that whole week, was my father’s absence.

Garvey thought my expectations were ridiculous. “You’re going to make yourself sick your whole life if you think he’s ever going to behave like a father to you,” he told me as we lay on the twin beds in my room after the funeral. “We’re basically orphans now. Get used to it.” But I could not.

I think I believed that with my mother dead the barrier between me and my father would fall magically away. I spent the second half of my sophomore year of college waiting for him to call me. I took a job that summer in a restaurant in Rhode Island and sent him my new number on a postcard, and he never called it. I didn’t visit him before I went back to school. I spent Christmas with a friend’s family. And then, spring break of my junior year, I took a bus to Boston and a train to Ashing and appeared at the kitchen door where he was feeding the dogs. “Well, well,” he said. “You pregnant or broke or both?” I stayed the night. It was just the three of us. Catherine made a roast. As they got drunk, then drunker, I waited for them to slip and make a jab about my mother, the way they always did. I waited to catch them. I was going to make a scene. A huge hair-pulling scene. For God’s sake, she’s dead. Can’t you leave her alone now? But they never mentioned her. He hugged me goodbye at the train the next day. “You’s a good kid for visiting,” he said. I spent the rest of the break off campus, in a friend’s empty apartment, alone, sobbing. I had held off the grief with anger towards my father, but now I was blindsided by it, terrified by the sudden gaping hole of my mother’s absence. She was my ballast, my counterweight to the downward pull of Myrtle Street, and she was gone.

I take one last look at the apartment. My mother’s toes used to snap when she walked barefoot. Alone in the bathroom she talked out loud and made herself laugh. I was unhappy when we lived here together. I ricocheted from this apartment to my father’s house for seven years, until I went to college. I was never able to please either household. At my father’s I was too bookish, too liberal, too much like my mother; at my mother’s I was moody, mercurial, and under-achieving in school. I’m sorry she can’t know me now. My daughter is a tenured professor at Berkeley, she might have been able to say in a few years. She would have liked that. She would have liked Jonathan.

I continue on toward Myrtle Street. The BMW in the bank parking lot might be Catherine’s. She’ll go back to him. I feel sure of it. She just needs a few days to cool off. I cross the railroad tracks and head up the hill. The houses are larger on this side of town, big clapboard Capes and Colonials with wraparound porches and pots of daisies on the wide steps before their front doors. There are hammocks and swing sets and lacrosse goals in the long green yards. The harbor glitters behind them. I can smell the salt in the air. It’s heavy, humid air. I need sleep. Garvey will have to let me have some when I get there.

I park next to Garvey’s van. It’s one of the small ones. He has his own moving company now, a fleet of six trucks with flying refrigerators painted all over them. The dogs go berserk at the sight of my car, the three of them, a tan one, a black one, and an auburn one, chasing it and then positioning themselves in front of the car door, their legs and chests motionless as statues, their mouths and throats furious at the foreign invasion. They make a ridiculous racket. The older I get, the more my father’s dogs exhaust me.

“Calm down,” I tell them coldly as they triple-team me all the way up the path. They are big dogs, retrievers of some kind. Something stirs on the porch. A little white and brown thing. A bunny? Then it bounds down the steps, or it tries to bound, but it ends up moving sideways, its hind legs stronger and braver than those in front. It runs right at me with no barking, then scrapes all its little paws at my jeans as if trying to climb straight up. The other dogs stop barking to watch.

“You’re a little hairball,” I say, laughing at its smashed-in face, its wet black nose. I scoop it up and it snorts a tiny spray at me. The tag on its collar says Maybelle. “Hello, little Maybelle,” I say. And she buries her funny little face in my neck. I leave my suitcase on the lawn and carry the dog in instead.

I see them through the screen door. They are both on the floor, in that wide open space where the kitchen table used to be. My father is lying down, bleeding from somewhere on his face. Garvey is sitting up but bent over, rocking.

“Is he dead?” I hear myself scream. “Is he dead?” I don’t know what I do with Maybelle. I’m on the floor between them, wiping the blood with my sleeve. It’s coming from just below my father’s eyebrow, not quickly. His skin is a green gray. “I think he’s dead!”

“He’s not dead,” Garvey says quietly.

It’s true. I can feel breath coming out his nostrils.

“I’m sorry I called you.” He stands up slowly. It hurts him to straighten up. “He’s not worth it. Just get in your car and go.”

I don’t move.

“I mean it, Daley. Leave. Go to California. I’m serious.”

“He’s unconscious and he’s bleeding.”

“He’s fine. He’s drunk and he has a scrape. C’mon, Daley. Get up and come with me.”

“You did this. You hit him.”

“All I did was defend myself. C’mon. We’ll stop at Brigham’s and I’ll buy you a lime rickey.” For the first time my brother looks old to me. Old and sad. He is growing jowly.

“You just had me drive sixteen hours in the wrong direction and now you want me to leave him passed out on the floor and drive away?”

“I said I was sorry. I was wrong, all right? Come with me. Now. Trust me on this one, Daley.”

“I can’t.”

“Fuck it then. Suit yourself.” He slides his old leather jacket off a doorknob. The screen door smacks behind him. “Call me when he’s dead,” he says, and starts down the steps.

“Garvey!” I want to run after him but I’m scared to leave my father. “You asshole!” I get up and scream through the screen at his back, moving away. “You fucking asshole! What am I supposed to do with him?”

“Walk away,” he calls without turning.

I go back to my father on the floor. The van starts up, the dogs bark, and Garvey yells at them as they chase him and his goddamn flying refrigerators down the driveway.

Maybelle has taken to her leopard-print bed in the corner but jumps up when I get a rag out of the drawer. She follows me to the sink and back to my father.

As soon as I put the wet cloth on his forehead he comes to, or maybe he’s been awake the whole time.

“Hello, elf.”

“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“All right,” he says. He sounds grateful, as if he’s been waiting a long time for somebody to say those words.

I know the way to the hospital in Allencaster. Mallory and I were candy stripers there one summer. We take my father’s car with automatic windows and seat levers. The steering wheel has a thick leather sheath. He falls asleep before we hit the highway. Every few minutes I poke him.

“Why do you keep doing that?” he says.

“Just checking on you.”

“Don’t check on me anymore.” Unlike my brother, he seems not to have aged at all. He looks as I always remember him, tanned, taut, and bony. The knees beneath his khakis are the same knobs I’ve seen all my life. I find myself wanting to stare.

He smells of alcohol and I’m glad. The doctors will notice. Maybe they will suggest a treatment center. Maybe this is the proverbial rock bottom.

It’s a small hospital with a small parking lot. We get a spot near the door. I help him out of the car and he walks slowly, more bent over than usual, one hand shielding his bad eye. I steady him, relieved when I see a wheelchair out in front of the door. I steer him toward it but he bats the idea away with his free hand and the word pansy and keeps walking.

After my father is admitted, I return to the desk and ask if I can see Dr. Perry Barns, who was his internist and occasional doubles partner when I was growing up. He comes quickly, short-limbed in his white tunic, one lone tuft of silver hair left on the top of his head. I barely know him; he is just a name I’ve heard on Myrtle Street all my life.

“Look at you!” he says from the doorway. People in the waiting room glance up at the unnecessary boom of his voice. He begins shaking his head. “You were this high.” He puts a flat hand level to his kneecap

I stand and he gives me a hug and a moist kiss too close to my mouth.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Barns. It would just make me feel better if you’d take a look at him.”

“At who?”

“At my father. I’m sorry. I thought they had explained—” I glance over at reception. The chair is empty.

“What’s going on?” Like that, he switches from country club parent to doctor. I feel my body relax.

I tell him what I know, and he disappears through the swinging doors. I zone in and out of The Price Is Right.

When he comes back a few minutes later, he is smiling again. He sits next to me in a plastic chair and puts his hand on my leg. “You.” He squeezes the skin of my thigh several times. “You are all grown up.”

It would be one thing if I were recently grown up. But I am twenty-nine years old. “Could you tell me about my father?”

He pulls back his hand. “He’s going to be okay. Honkey-donkey, as my daughter used to say.” I never knew what a moron this guy was. “He’ll be hitting those famous crosscourt volleys in just a few days.”

“I’m concerned about his drinking.”

“Drinking?”

“Since Catherine left, he’s been on a bit of a tear.”

“Your father has never been a binger.”

I laugh. “You’re right. More of a steady alcoholic.”

He frowns. “Oh, now, alcoholic is a strong word. He likes his martinis, I’ll grant you. But that’s never been a problem.”

I have a swirling slippery feeling in my stomach. I feel the small stool in St. Thomas beneath me. “You’re right. I’m exaggerating. Please don’t mention to him that I said that.” I don’t need my father’s fury turned on me during the forty-eight hours I’ll be in Ashing.

He smiles. “I won’t.” He puts his hand back on my leg and squeezes a few more times. “I promise.”

My father is wrapped up in a lot of bandages, and in many more places than I thought he’d been hurt: both wrists, one ankle, his entire forehead, and around his chest. The wrist wraps look hasty and uneven and I wonder if he did it himself when the nurse left the cubicle. Once he has the bandages on he becomes even more frail, moving more slowly to the car than he did into the hospital.

When we get home I take him directly upstairs to his bed, hoping I can steal a little sleep as well. But as I’m leaving the room he says in a small voice, “Any lunch down there?”

At least I know what to make him: three hot dogs, no bun, and a sliced tomato slathered with mayonnaise. I’ve seen him eat that lunch my whole life. Tomatoes and hot dogs are the only edible things in the fridge. The other vegetables have blackened; the milk has gone sour. There is an explosion of dirty dishes in and around the sink. As far as I can tell, Garvey and my father ate everything with ketchup, which has now hardened into a scarlet shellac on every plate. I can’t cook, can’t even boil hot dogs, in such a filthy kitchen.

He looks at the clock when I come in with his tray, but he doesn’t complain about how long it took me.

He sits up and puts the plate in his lap and says, “This is terrific.” He picks up one of the pink-gray tubes of pig intestine, dips it in the mound of ketchup, and raises it to his open mouth. It makes a pop as it splits between his teeth.

“You have yours already?”

I realize I’m hovering.

“No, I—”

“Want some?” He pushes his plate toward me.

“No, I don’t—” eat meat, I want to finish, but can anticipate the mockery too well. “Thanks anyway.”

He confuses me. He disgusts and compels me. I don’t want to stand and watch him eat three hot dogs (I had to use several different utensils to get them out of the package and in and out of the boiling water without having to touch them) and yet the sight of his fingers, the tip of a pencil embedded since kindergarten above the knuckle of his first finger, the long yellowing thumb steadying the plate, keeps me in place.

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.” He says it in a bad New York accent. Noyvus. He points to the wooden chair in the corner. I pull it up to the bed.

He cleans the plate, then puts it on the bedside table. He lies back on his pillows.

“Dad, will you tell me what’s been going on here?”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”

I wait.

His eyes flash open. “Do you know what that ungrateful asshole brother of yours said to me?”

“No, but let’s start at the beginning. What happened with Catherine?”

He looks at me blankly for a moment, as if there’s only room for one enemy at a time in his head. Then he smiles before shaking his head again, even more slowly this time. “Now there’s a real beauty. There’s a real little cunt for you.”

“You had a big fight?”

“No we didn’t have a big fight.” He isn’t one for narrative unless it has a punch line. “She just took off and I said good riddance.”

“Were you home?” Did Catherine leave in the same way my mother had, on the sly, a note on the kitchen table? It seemed the only way.

“Yes. I was in the poolhouse. She drove right past me.”

“What time of day was it?”

“About nine in the morning.”

I figured she’d left in a drunken midnight rage, not on a sunny Saturday morning.

“She came crawling back, too, the next day. But I had a gun and told her to get off the property.”

“A gun?”

“Damn right.”

“A BB gun?” I try not to smile.

“If you aim it in the right place, that thing can do some damage.”

“Dad, you and Catherine have been together a long time.”

“Worst years of my life.”

“Really?”

“Well, some of the worst.”

“I’m going to talk to Catherine. I know you can work this—”

“If you do that—” he struggles to sit up and point a finger at me—”if you do that, if you go anywhere near her, I’ll call the police. You can get out of this house right now if that’s what your plan is. I want nothing, nothing to do with that woman, do you understand that?” His eyes are small and yellow.

“Yes,” I say thinly. The walls of my stomach begin to buckle. I feel myself rise, put back the chair, lift his plate, and move quickly out of the room and down to the kitchen. Over my shoulder, as smoothly as I can, I tell him to have a nap.

It’s been years since I’ve triggered my father’s temper. I learned my way around it long ago. I do not bring up politics, history, literature, lawyers — especially Jewish lawyers — or any other subject that can be linked, however loosely, to my mother. I do not tease, and I receive teasing with a smile; I keep my thoughts and opinions to a bare minimum. I ask questions. I make myself useful. I do not discuss my interests, my relationships, or my goals. He and Catherine find me dull company, and tease me for that as well, but it is a small price to pay for peace.

It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t want Catherine back. He’d wanted my mother back, or at least I thought he had. I have no Plan B.

I pick up the phone, the old one that’s always been there, with the long cord and rotary dial. Jonathan answers before the second ring.

“It’s just me.”

“Hey, just you.” His voice jiggles; he’s flopped on the bed and smashed a pillow beneath his head. He’s settling in for a long conversation. Suddenly I don’t have that in me. “So how is he?”

“He’s okay.” It feels like too much to explain: Garvey, the hospital, the loss of Plan A. “I miss you. I want to be on Paloma Street with you.”

“Nine and a half days. Here. I was just thinking of you. Listen to this. I’ve been reading Go Tell It on the Mountain again.” There’s a muffled scraping sound. “Okay, here it is.”

It’s a long quote and I try to concentrate, but the words just bounce off me.

“I like that,” I say when he’s done, but I don’t have anything more to say about it. “There are these plates here. I remember coming back from my grandparents’ that summer and seeing them in my kitchen: Catherine’s good china. The kids ate off of plastic, but Dad and Catherine always used these plates. She didn’t take them with her. She doesn’t seem to have taken much of anything. That’s probably a good sign, right?”

“You want her to come back?”

“It’s my father’s only hope, I think. He can’t cope alone.”

“How about some sort of housekeeper?”

“He doesn’t like people he doesn’t know.”

“Did you really come from the loins of this man?”

“Please don’t put it that way. How was class today?”

“Two more to go.”

“They’ll hand in their papers next week?” Once he got those papers and graded them, he could leave.

“Wednesday morning. You know, this Baldwin book probably means more to me than anything I’ve read in any philosophy class. Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.” It’s weird to hear his voice and the words Baldwin and philosophy and narrative coming through the same phone line we used to use for prank calls. Is John Wall there? Are any Walls there? Then what’s holding up your house?

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You okay, Dales?”

“I should probably go check on him.”

“You sure?”

I wish I hadn’t called so soon. It’s never a good idea to try and mix the world of my father with any other world. I’d learned that over and over. “I’ll call you when I get on the road again.”

“I love you,” he says. It sounds dutiful. But I know that’s the Doppler effect of being here in this house.

The minute I hang up I want to call back.

“Who was that?”

I flinch. He can really creep up on you when he wants to. “A friend of mine. She’s moving to California, too.” The impulse to lie is instinctive, like one of those desert cats hastily burying its kill in the sand.

He’s changed into bright red pants. His hair is damp, combed neatly in ridges. “When do you have to go?”

“The day after tomorrow. I have a professorship at Berkeley that starts in ten days.” I don’t know if Garvey mentioned this to him.

He moves past me to the door where the dogs are scraping to be let out. They move in a runnel of fur through the opening he makes. He stays looking out the screen door. The little dog remains beside him. He nudges her with the toe of his topsider. “Well, we don’t have a professorship, do we, Maybelle?”

He moves with sudden purpose to the bar. It’s not yet 2 P.M. I’ve never tried to control my father’s drinking, never suggested that he not have a drink when he wanted one. It would be like trying to separate a snake from a mouse.

It’s all done with such precision: the ice into the monogrammed glass, the snap of the paper across the cap of a new bottle of Smirnoff’s, the splash of vermouth, the tiny onions jiggled out so carefully. Then the pause, and then the sip, his eyes pulled shut by pleasure. I’ve never noticed what an act of love it all is.

Alcohol has never done anything for me. The first time I got drunk was with Mallory in eighth grade. My mother and Paul were out, and we mixed Grand Marnier with Hawaiian Punch. Mallory got giggly and I got sick. When my mother came home I was still bent over the toilet. She seemed more relieved than angry. “I think you’re like me, honey,” she said, rubbing my back. “You’ll never be able to hold your liquor.” She was right.

The afternoon, the evening, the night spreads out before us. Outside the sky is wide and blue; the sun beats on the grass, on the fur of the dogs on the back porch. Inside is cool and dark.

“Backgammon?” I say, slightly desperate.

“Sure.”

We go into the den, to the cabinet where the games are kept. A hot cedar smell spills out. Backgammon is on the bottom, the fake leather case stuck to the wood. I have to give it a good tug. He takes his seat on the sofa and places his drink on the end table, a fluid gesture I have seen a million times. I pull around an armchair to face him, the game between us on the coffee table. The pieces are heavy, marbleized. The dice thud in their felt-lined cups. I haven’t played a game with him since I was a very little girl.

We set up. There is no confusion about which side is home, my left, his right. He does not say, as Jonathan always does before any kind of game, I am going to whup you silly, just to up the tension. But I can tell by his breathing and the careful straight rows he makes that he is thinking about winning. I never think about winning at the beginning of a game. At the start I am always just thinking how happy I am to be playing a game, what a particular old pleasure it is, what a wonderful detour from regular life, regular conversation. My desire to win comes later, when I recognize that my delight has not put me in the lead. Then I become focused and anxious. If I lose, it feels like more than losing a game, and if I win, the elation is momentary — the other person’s discouragement makes my own enjoyment impossible.

My first roll is a six and a five, lovers’ leap. He tries to blockade my remaining man, but he doesn’t get the rolls. I hit him several times on my way out. Soon I have trapped four of his men in my home.

When I win, he moans, falsetto, but he isn’t angry. He’s barely taken a sip from his drink. We set up the board again.

The dice are with me again. I double him after my third roll and he accepts.

“You’re a little whippersnapper, aren’t you?” he says. “You and your professorship. But I’m not as dumb as I look, you know.” He gets double fives and knocks off two of my men. “I was pretty good at school once upon a time.”

“Were you?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not. I know you’re smart. Maybe not really smart in back-gammon.” I come in on a four and a three, and bump off two of his men.

“You know what I loved in school?” he says.

“What?”

“Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare?”

“We had to memorize something from Julius Caesar once.”

“A soliloquy?”

“I think so.” It’s his turn, but he doesn’t roll. “O conspiracy, sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, when evils are most free?” His neck lengthens as he speaks, reddens, the Adam’s apple sharp as ever, cutting its pale path. “O, then by day where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage?”

“Wow, Dad. Good memory.”

He looks at me like he used to look at Catherine sometimes, a defiant go fuck yourself look. And then he takes a long sip of his martini and the blush drains out of his face.

The next game he beats me. He gets up and makes another drink. He beats me again. He drinks faster when he is winning.

“I used to play this with my mother,” he says.

I wait for more. It’s rare for him to talk about his childhood.

“She used to send me to the kitchen to fetch the maid and she’d change the board around. She was a terrible cheater.”

She was a terrible drunk, my mother told me.

“I’d say, ‘Ring the bell for the maid.’ There was a button under the carpet beside her chair, and all she had to do was step on it and it would ring in the kitchen. But she’d say ‘The maid’s going deaf.’ There was no contradicting my mother. I learned that early enough.”

“How? What would she do?”

“She’d put clothespins on my ears.”

“What?”

“She’d put clothespins on my ears and I’d have to walk to school like that.”

“Dad, c’mon.”

“They hurt like hell, too.”

“Oh my God, that’s so twisted.”

He laughed at the word. “She was twisted all right.”

“Have you ever lived alone before?”

“Let’s see. I had a single my senior year of college.”

“And you ate in the dining hall?”

“I ate at my club.”

“And your laundry was done for you?”

“Every Monday morning.”

“Before I leave, I’m going to show you how to wash your own clothes and make a few meals.”

“I know how to make steak and hot dogs. That’s all I need to know.”

“There’s nothing you want to learn to cook?”

He thinks about it. “Hollandaise sauce. Catherine’s was awful.”

He wants my mother’s recipe. He’s saying he misses my mother’s hollandaise. Even now, I thrill when I find a chink of light in the great wall between them.

When he comes back into the room with another drink, he says, “This is nice.”

“What?”

“Playing backgammon.”

“It is nice.”

“I wish you could stay longer.”

These are words I’ve never heard from him, simple words. This is nice. I wish you could stay longer.

“Me too.” It feels true and then, after a few seconds, completely untrue. Two nights is all I can handle. And I know what he’s doing, how he can put on the charm when he needs something from you.

I beat him the last game, backgammon him, and he laughs as I do it.

“You’re a good player,” he says, packing up the case.

Afterward I drag him up to the laundry room. It looks just the same, the ivory-colored machines, the hampers, the cabinet with the safe inside.

I explain the separation of lights, colors, and darks. There are enough of his tennis whites in there to make a small load, so I toss them in, measure out the powder detergent, read out the cleaning options, and pull the knob. Water rushes in and I shut the lid. We move to the dryer and I show him the dials. I scrape the lint tray clean. He says Mm-hmm and Okay at all the right times, but he isn’t paying attention. He’s behaving as if it’s all hypothetical, like I’m preparing him for an emergency situation that will not actually come to pass.

He points to the old hair dryer standing on its wheels in the corner, a gunmetal-gray helmet my mother used to spend hours under, deaf to the world. I go over and touch the thick metal lip. I can see her foot bobbing, hear the pages of Time magazine snapping. I feel my ache for her grow and then freeze — I can’t miss my mother in front of my father. But she once stood here; we’d all once been a family in this house. It’s like a story, a fairy tale, something told to me, not remembered. Once upon a time a beautiful lady lived with a handsome man in a big house near the sea. They had two lovely children, a boy and a girl. But the beautiful lady was not happy, and one day she took the little girl and all the jewelry and disappeared.

11

Since there is no space for groceries in my car, I take my father’s to the market. Going down the hill into town, I get behind a Volvo whose bumper declares they’d rather be windsurfing. A Saab at the fish market says it would rather be skiing. I laugh as if Jonathan were beside me and had made a joke. Yeah, he’d say, where I grew up we put stickers on our asses that said I’D RATHER BE DRIVING A CAR. At the sight of my father’s beige sedan, hands rise from steering wheels to wave and then surprised eyes peer in. They do not know me, but I know them: Mrs. Utley, chain-smoking in a green station wagon; Mrs. Braeburn, pursing her stiff lips in a navy Jeep; small Mrs. Wentworth leaning forward in a van, only her forehead visible; Mr. Timmons, who inexplicably retired in his early forties, parking his powder blue convertible outside the post office with the concentration of a leader of a small military operation.

After my mother died, I came to Ashing seldom and briefly. Two nights a year with my father and Catherine was enough. On the way, I’d think of all the people I wanted to see, old friends who might by chance be back visiting at the same time, friends of my mother’s who’d written kind letters to me after she died. I’d plan to go to all the shops, poke my head in at the Mug and the penny candy store. I wanted to visit people because I missed them and because I knew it would be healthy to break up the intensity of seeing my father. But my father’s house was not one you could flit in and out of. It sucked you in until it spat you out. It was seductively familiar, my father greeting me in the driveway, his scratchy voice animated, full of stories he’d seemed to save just for me. I rarely managed to time my visits with Patrick’s. After college he moved to Miami with a woman named Hill and her three children, and they didn’t come north much. Frank ended up in New York City and Elyse in Wyoming, and I never saw them, either. So I’d sit with my father and Catherine the first night and wonder why I didn’t come home more often. My father would get drunk, but he seemed happy, playful. That first night I never thought to go downtown to the bars like other people my age did when they came home to visit. I went to bed when he and Catherine did, and fell into a heavy sleep. But the show would always be over by the next afternoon. My father’s good mood never lasted long. Catherine would have said something that pissed him off, or a neighbor would have come over uninvited, or someone from work would have called. His anger would ramp up, and by nighttime he was seething and muttering, while I just tried to dodge as many insults as I could. I never ended up seeing anyone else in Ashing. He made me forget my attachments to others; he made me reptilian. To go see other people meant they would see my scales.

But the circumstances are different now. The last time I was here my dissertation was over two thousand pages of notes in a milk crate in the back of my car and I’d just had a bad breakup. But I am beyond all that uncertainty now. Almost miraculously, I think as I walk up the slight incline of Goodale’s parking lot to the glass doors, I have come back to Ashing whole.

It’s been at least a decade since I’ve entered this store and seen Mrs. Goodale glance up in irritation, as if she needed another customer like she needed a hole in her head. I don’t bear much resemblance to my child self: my hair has grown down my back, my skinny frame has filled out a bit, and the defensive grimace I wear in all the old photos is gone. I planned to be a spy in the aisles, listening for any talk of my father and Catherine, for where she might be and if there is any hope of her coming back. But Mrs. Goodale lifts her head and says, without a moment’s pause, “Daley Amory, back from beyond the beyond.”

It’s a bit like being announced by a footman at the entryway of a ball. Her proclamation carries straight back to meats then ricochets across to frozen foods and dairy. Fortunately the store is nearly empty. There’s only my sixth-grade teacher perusing the tomatoes, awful hard pale balls grouped in threes on green Styrofoam trays and wrapped in thick cellophane. Her scowl has deepened, though I think she’s trying to smile at me now. I see she isn’t as old as I once thought. She doesn’t look more than sixty now. She didn’t like me much. I had her the first year we lived on Water Street, the first year of my parents’ divorce. She called me a sullen little girl in the report card that came home at Christmastime. Garvey taunted me about it. He even called me Sully for a while. When, at the end of that year, I got a perfect score on my math exam, she called it a fluke.

I slip into the narrow vegetable aisle and stand beside her, closer than I normally get to people, especially people I don’t like. “Hello, Miss Perth.” I’m not much taller than she is but I have on my favorite shoes, black lace-ups with a chunky heel, and feel like I’m towering over her.

She startles like a cat and steps back. “Oh, it’s you,” she says, not remembering my name. “Gardiner’s sister.”

That reminds me of another thing she said, a few weeks after school had started in the fall: “Well, you’re nothing like your delightful brother, are you?”

“And what are you doing with yourself these days?” She says these days as if she doesn’t approve of the expression but has forgotten how to better articulate the time frame.

I pause. I want to brag, prove to her that I was no fluke in the end, but I want to do it with humility.

“A bit at loose ends, it seems,” she says.

“Not really.” I laugh, but an explanation is frozen in my throat. Defending myself has never been one of my strengths.

“Daley?” A large woman in a navy dress hurries up to me from the back of the store. “God, it is you! You hot shit. Look at you in your shiny shoes!” She envelops me sideways, my shoulder disappearing between her enormous breasts. “I can’t wait to tell Neal you’re home.” This is Mrs. Caffrey. Since I’ve been back I’ve forgotten to remember Neal Caffrey. Please don’t, I think. Please don’t mention my name to Neal.

“He’s here, you know. I mean he lives here. He has a shop.” She points back toward the middle of town. Neal Caffrey runs a shop in Ashing? He won all those subject prizes at graduation in eighth grade, and the big silver cup for excellence in scholarship, athletics, and citizenship. The Renaissance Cup. “He’d love to see you.” She glances at my left ring finger, finds it bare, and gushes on. “I think the two of you would really hit it off.”

“I’m only here for another day. I’m leaving for California on Sunday morning. I’m a professor at Berkeley.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it like that, in the present tense. I speak loudly, but Miss Perth has turned the corner.

“Oh.” Mrs. Caffrey looks gravely disappointed. She kicks an unpacked box of leeks on the floor. “He’ll never meet anyone in this town. Everyone interesting leaves. Only the screwups hang around.”

This is as much as I’ve ever spoken to Neal’s mother. I remember her in the carpool line. She’d always be out of the car, leaning into someone else’s window, then leaning back out, howling. She had that large person’s jolliness and warmth. Neal didn’t inherit that. By eighth grade he’d become more of a brooder. A popular brooder, though. He had his pick of girls. I never did speak to him after that summer. He didn’t notice. He thought I was concave. That’s what he told Stacy Miller in seventh grade, that I was so flat-chested I was concave. After eighth grade he went on to Exeter while I stayed at the academy.

Someone comes in the store behind us — I feel the short burst of warmer air — and bypasses the vegetable section. I recognize, just from the dimmest shape at the periphery of my vision, Catherine’s long gait.

“So tell me what exactly you’re a professor of, smarty pants,” Mrs. Caffrey asks, her good humor returned to her.

“I have to run. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop by Neal’s shop on the way home! It’s the one with the lighthouse on the sign.”

I duck down the middle aisle where I saw Catherine go, but it’s empty. At the back of the store, Brad Goodale is behind the meat counter, just where I left him in the early eighties. He’s slicing up something for someone I don’t recognize. In the last aisle there are two men my age, studying the yogurt. I rush past them to the front and see that one has his finger hooked in the other’s belt loop. Despite my frenzy I smile, happy that change has come even to Ashing. I reach the register just in time to see the thick dark hair, more cropped than I remember, beyond the door, turning left into the parking lot. I think of chasing her but I don’t think desperation will help my case. And I feel nothing but desperate at this moment.

“Guess she forgot her list,” Mrs. Goodale says as she rings up Miss Perth’s small batch of groceries.

I stare out the plate glass, breathing heavily, still struggling with indecision. I should go stop her before she leaves the parking lot. But is she, in the end, good for him? Wouldn’t he be better off with someone more disciplined? But without someone he may simply self-destruct. I move to the door. And then I see her car, the little burgundy BMW, and on the back a new bumper sticker that says: I’D RATHER BE DIVORCED.”

My father is watching the news in the den. It’s strange to see him back in that room with his ashtray and his drink, as if he never left it for the sunroom and all those years with Catherine. A couch has replaced the recliners that replaced the couch my mother took to Water Street. The room looks almost back to normal, though the slipcovers are made of a nubby wool, something my mother wouldn’t have chosen. He bends his head down to watch the television, his eyes straining up just beneath their hoods. A woman is discussing affirmative action on some courthouse steps. She speaks articulately, quickly, trying to get the most words into her few seconds of time on national TV.

“Why are black people always talking about black people?” my father says in his disgusting version of an African American accent, though the woman speaking has the regionless accent of a newscaster. “Have you noticed that?”

“Because in this country they are defined by their skin color, and they’ve had to fight for every basic right that we get automatically by being born white.”

“Fight for their rights? This woman is fighting for inequality. This woman wants a black C student to be chosen over a straight-A student. She’s fighting for their right to cheat.”

My retort constructs itself swiftly. I’ve got a lot of ammo now on this question, yet none of my knowledge will help me win a fight with my father. He will cling to his position even when all reason fails him; he will cling to it as if it’s his life and not his opinion that is in peril. He will get vicious and personal, and every negative thing he ever felt about me will pour out of his mouth. Ridding my father of his racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric would take a long time. It would be a whole reeducation. His prejudices are a stew of self-hatred, ignorance, and fear. If those feelings could be rooted out and examined somehow, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink so much to squelch the pain of them.

“You don’t have much of an answer to that, do you?”

Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice? Would he understand that to argue would be futile, would wound me deeply and do nothing to change him?

“I’m going to get dinner started.” I can hear my mother in my tone with him. “Do you want me to call you when I’m ready to make the hollandaise?”

“The what?” Then he remembers. “Okay. Sure.”

But when it’s time, he slouches against the counter with his hands in his pockets, staring but unseeing as I whisk the egg yolks in a saucepan and add cubes of butter, one at a time.

“It’s so easy, Dad. The only trick is to get the flame as low as possible and keep stirring. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot. Here, you take the whisk.” He takes it and, in a fairly good imitation of me, flicks the wire bulb through the thickening sauce. Hope swells in my chest. I have this idea that if he can make his own hollandaise he’ll be okay. And if he can learn to make both hollandaise and wash his clothes, he won’t need a wife at all.

At the table, A-1 sauce slathered over his rib eye, hollandaise over his asparagus, he is grateful. And very drunk. “You’re a goddamn good cook, you know that?”

I sleep in Elyse’s room, my old room. The rug is green, not yellow, the walls stripped of the daisy paper and replaced by a blue sponge wash. Out the windows are the same trees, though. Pine, beech, oak. One for each window. I get into bed and shut off the light. All my books are in the car. I have nothing to read to make me sleepy.

“Who we got here?” my father would say every time he came to say good night to me in this room. He’d yank Piglet up by the ear.

“No, not Piglet,” I’d giggle.

He’d wind up and hit Piglet in the face with his fist. “Pow!” he’d say. “Right in the kisser.” Piglet would go flying. Then he’d find all the rest of them scattered at the end of my bed and on the rocking chair and, one by one, speak kindly to them, wait for my false protests, then punch them across the room. I’d laugh and laugh.

In the morning I stand in the middle of the bathroom for a long time. It was here at the sink that my mother told me about her plan to leave my father. Eighteen years ago last week. I was wearing a white sleeveless nightgown. She was scared. I can see that now. Her lips were the color of her skin. Her eyes were filled, the brown trembling. She stood right there at the sink, holding her toothbrush, smelling the way she did in the morning, slightly sour. And now she is dead. Has been dead for years, though it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like she is just off with Paul somewhere. In all my dreams she is away, just about to return. I am often on the way to the airport to pick her up, or on my way to Water Street to clean before she gets back, neither of which I ever did in real life.

Paul writes regularly, calls on my birthday, asks me to visit. I write back sporadically, rarely remember his birthday on time, and never visit when I come to Massachusetts to visit my father. I think I will, and then I don’t. I wonder if he’s on the Cape right now. He spends as much time as he can there, he wrote in his last letter. He and my mother rented a little house in Truro every summer, and last fall the owner sold it to him. The letter was filled with exclamation points, which was not his style, so I knew how excited he was about it.

Now I get back into Elyse’s bed and wonder if I ever wrote back to congratulate him. I have no memory of it. It sets off a whole pageant in my mind of people I’ve let down or underappreciated. An old feeling, a weightless unease, creeps into my limbs. I need to shut my eyes and sleep it off, but I hear water rushing through the pipes for my father’s shower. Morning is always the best time to be with him.

Today, though, he is sullen when he comes down, making his coffee without his usual songs or whistling, calling the dogs sharply to their bowls, opening the sports page and cursing some Red Sox player I’ve never heard of. He’s even angry at his own foot, which he slips out of his moccasin twice to scratch. I notice he has a hole in the toe of his sock. It’s unlike my father to wear anything torn.

“Look at that big toe poking out.”

“I don’t have one decent goddamn matching pair of socks.”

“Well, let’s get you some. Today.”

“Really?” It’s as if I’ve suggested cotton candy to a six-year-old.

“Sure. Is Piper’s still around?”

“It sure is. I could use another pair of pants, too.”

Maybelle bounces at the screen door. “Oh, I sees you,” he says brightly, lovingly. “Here I am.”

And there is Piper’s, right where it’s always been on the first floor of an old house with a big veranda. Through the window I can see the madras dinner jackets, the white canvas golf hats, and the belts with sailboats or trout or tennis racquets on them. I cringe at the sight of it all. But to my father there is nothing ridiculous and foppish about this style of dress, nothing fetishistic about having symbols of wealth, little ducks or martinis, sewn all over your pants. It is all he’s ever known. This is what his whole world wears.

He pulls open the door of the shop and then stands aside to let me pass. But in the equally insulated world I have been in, men do not hold doors for women and, if they do, if they have just arrived from Pluto, women do not walk through them. I want to simply walk through the door he holds for me. Our outing has reversed his mood. I have less than twenty-four hours with him. The socks and pants he needs are only a few yards away and the smell of the store comes rushing at me, the sweet smell of new cotton clothes that brought me so much pleasure as a child. But I cannot do it.

I gesture playfully for him to go through first. He will not.

“C’mon, Dad. You’re the one with the hole in your toe.”

He laughs a disgusted laugh. “I am not going through a door held by a girl.”

“Why not?”

He shakes his head. “Is this the kind of crap you get at your fancy schools? You learn to be rude to every person who shows the slightest bit of upbringing?”

I feel the fatigue of trying to communicate with him. Twenty more hours. I go through the goddamn door.

“Hello,” a woman says to us from the back, where she’s folding cable-knit sweaters. I can only see her dimly but I recognize the voice. My father veers right, into the men’s section.

“Didn’t I go to school with her?” I whisper.

“Her? No. She’s twice your age.”

“I think it’s Brenda McPheney.”

“Oh, Christ, that’s not Brenda McPheney. Brenda McPheney was a skinny knockout of a girl.”

“She had anorexia, that’s why she was so skinny. She almost died senior year.”

“Well, she looked a hell of a lot better with anorexia.” He points to something over my shoulder. “Look at that. Isn’t that great?” On a shelf was a shiny ceramic statue of a black Lab with supplicating eyes and a real leash hanging out of its mouth. “I love that.” And he did. He stared at it like someone else might stare at a Van Gogh.

We pick out pairs of blue, gray, and black socks. We’re going through the pants rack when my father looks over into the women’s section, says, “Duck!” and pushes me down by the shoulders into a little nook.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

“Is it Catherine?”

“Christ, no. You can’t buy muumuus in here. It’s Tits Kelly. If she sees us, we’ll never get out of here.”

The wooden floorboards creak.

“Fuck. She’s coming. Suck in your gut and don’t breathe.”

No one in town ever calls her anything else, except to her face, and I can’t even remember what that name is. She’s a terrible busy-body and, as my father has said a million times, completely humorless. The ultimate condemnation.

Brenda McPheney comes over and asks her if she’s looking for something special.

“Not really,” she says, more of a sigh than words. Brenda goes back to her sweater folding. Mrs. Kelly cuts a long, low growling fart. Dad looks at me, delighted, making an O with his mouth and squeezing my finger to help him stay quiet. I laugh in silence, my stomach knotted in pain. We are bent over and mushed together to fit in this tiny hole in the wall. I don’t know how it’s possible she doesn’t see us, but she takes her time choosing a man’s shirt. Finally, she brings her selection to Brenda at the register.

“I wonder who she’s buying that shirt for,” my father says on the way home. “Husband Number Two left her last spring. You ever hear the story of little Davy Kelly and the two C-pluses?”

I have, but he’s in such a good mood. “No.”

“No?” He’s thrilled. And he tells me about how in fourth grade little Davy Kelly brought home a report card with two C-pluses in math and social studies. Little Davy, according to his mother, never got anything but As. Then she found out that in both math and social studies, little Davy sat next to Ollie Samuels. So Mrs. Kelly marched over to the Samuelses’ at dinnertime, stood in their kitchen, and demanded that Ollie tell her what he’d been doing to distract her son during math and social studies. Ollie told her he’d stopped talking to Davy long ago, when he realized Davy was paying Lucy Lothrop ten cents for her answers in English and only gave Ollie a nickel for his.

My father laughs like it’s the first time he’s heard it himself. It seems to me a story much older than Davy Kelly, a story my father might have heard on a radio show when he was little. It’s just the kind of story he likes, about people getting their comeuppance. In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.

I figure it is time to ask about work. “What happened with Hugh, Dad?”

“Fuck him.”

“What happened?”

“That’s over with. I’ve retired.”

When we get home, there is a message on the machine in the kitchen. “Hey there, Gardiner, it’s Patrick. I’ll call another time. All right. Hope you’re well.” You can tell he was nervous. The message is breathy and full of lurches, not really Patrick’s normal phone voice, which is, at least with me, as goofy as he was as a kid. It makes me miss him. I’ll call him as soon as I get away from here.

“You should call him back.”

“I’m not calling him back and you’re not either, you hear me?”

“He adores you, Dad. You can’t just drop him.”

Watch me, his eyes say, glaring at mine.

He goes upstairs and changes into his new pants and blue socks with geese flying on them. I go to the bathroom off the den and stare for a long time at the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall, my father’s team pictures from St. Paul’s and Harvard, rows and rows, years and years, of white English-looking boys holding oars and footballs and tennis racquets. I have seen these so many times I can quickly find my father in each one, his small nervous face in the earlier ones, when he was only eleven and twelve, and then his more mature, impatient expressions later on. Clearly no one was encouraged to smile in photographs back then, so it is impossible to say if he, or anyone, was happy.

He fixes himself a drink when he comes downstairs. It isn’t yet noon. We sit by the pool. I bring out tuna fish sandwiches, and we play backgammon while we eat them. The sun beats down. The pool glimmers and beckons. I’m not sure I still own a bathing suit, and if I do it’s buried in a garbage bag somewhere in my stuffed car.

He makes trips to the poolhouse to refill his glass. I watch his bowed spine, his splayed step, the need on the way in and the fulfillment on the way out, that first sip of a fresh drink, eyelids swooning shut, lips amphibious, reaching out and around the curve of the glass, desperate to make contact with the alcohol. Sixteen more hours until I can drive away from the sight of it.

The sun sears my back.

“Aren’t you hot, Dad?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe we should move under the tree.”

“No.”

He beats me.

“Have a swim,” he says.

“Will you?”

“Nah. Not today.”

“I guess I could just jump in in my clothes.”

“Take ‘em off. No one’s looking.”

He leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes.

I jump in in my shirt and shorts. The water is colder than I ever remember it. Everything in my body withdraws, as if trying to contract to a single point. By the time I reach the shallow end I can’t feel the skin on my legs. As I get out, the water rolls off them as if over rubber.

My father is laughing. “I thought you’d at least test it with your toe!”

“What’d you do, fill it with ice cubes?”

“Haven’t turn on the heat yet.” He wipes his eyes. “You should have seen your face. Priceless.”

I flick water from my hair at him.

“Nice tits.”

“Dad.”

“Why do you wear such baggy clothes? You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, believe me.”

I can’t find my voice.

My father rolls doubles and hoots.

“I would appreciate it,” I begin, shakily, “if you would not speak of my body like that again.”

“And I would appreciate it if you would just roll the dice. I was giving you a compliment.”

Eventually he goes inside to take a nap. Fourteen more hours.

I call Jonathan from the poolhouse but only get the machine. I love the quick rumble of his voice. I feel like calling back just to hear the recording of it again. In a week we’ll live in a cottage in California together. Stop saying California like it’s so important. It is important. It is deeply important to me. What if one of us doesn’t make it out there safely? I’m bad at trusting the future. It seems suddenly improbable that both of us will make it there alive. I have an urge to get in my car and outrun fate.

I get up off the floor of the poolhouse and go back out into the heat. I cross the grass to the tennis court. I reimagine the rose garden, the scrolled bushes, the faint blue paint of the fountain’s basin, the smell of the black leaves when we cleaned it out the first nice day of spring. I see my mother in her kerchief and gardening gloves and me asking her as she sprays for aphids what a French kiss is. She wore bright cotton shifts, laughed loudly when Bob Wuzzy or Sylvie Salters was over, had so many convictions. And then in Paul she found a true partner, a fellow believer, and I would hear them on the couch late into the night talking about his cases, about the abuse of children and the rights of minorities, talking seriously, though laughter would always burst out unexpectedly. It didn’t include me, and maybe that accounted for some of my sullenness with them, but it’s still my idea of love, of harmony, that sound of them on the couch with all their beliefs and hopes and laughter.

I think I fall asleep in the grass. The next thing I hear is the snap of the screen door. I look up and my father is crossing the lawn again, showered, in another new pair of pants, drink in hand. Martini number five? Six?

“Ahhh,” he says loudly, for my benefit, as he sits down. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Twelve hours. Or I can leave at five in the morning, not six. Eleven more hours, then.

“I’m going to start cooking.”

“It’s barely six.”

“Early supper tonight.” Again like my mother, speaking cheerfully while fleeing the place he was, her words shot through with a lightness she did not feel but needed for protection.

I try to cook slowly. Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, lima beans. More foods of my childhood. I wonder what he’d do if I served him a tofu curry or bi bim bap and laugh out loud, imagining his over-reaction. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of him through the window, sitting and staring at the pool. He makes his trips to the bar in the poolhouse; he switches from the chaise to a chair. The dogs follow him, resettle against his feet. When a neighborhood dog barks, all four of them lift their heads and tilt their ears, Maybelle rising to her feet. My father speaks to them. Settle down, fellas, settle down, he’s saying.

Before I call him in, I drag the old glass-top table from the pantry back into the kitchen where it belongs. I set it with some old linens Catherine never used that I find in the dining room. They are perfectly pressed — my mother would have sent them to the dry cleaners — and smell of the pine of the sideboard drawer they have sat in for the past two decades. I remember the pattern, small white daisies on cornflower blue. The creases in the tablecloth stand firm no matter how many times I smooth it. The napkins are slightly frayed at the corners, but when I stand back everything looks as lovely as it used to be.

I don’t know how he’ll react. The table in this position is where my mother left her note before we left. But my father, when he comes in, seems not to notice at all. He is breathing in his heavy, drunk way. He puts his glass above the knife and sits in his old seat, the seat facing the stove, as if that intervening score of years never happened.

He eats the meat first. It disgusts me, the thin bone, the dead baby flesh, but I can’t help watching him eat. I feel like I’m seven years old again. The sound of his breathing, the sweat on his brow and nose, the vodka and onions and tobacco create a sort of dis-orienting fog that obscures the present for long moments at a time.

“Dad, will you promise me right now you will take care of yourself?” I say, to shake off the spell.

“I will.” He looks up from his plate. “This is good, by the way.”

“And you’ll make yourself vegetables?”

“Yup.” He scoops three lima beans onto his fork unconvincingly.

I want to ask him what on earth he plans to do with himself for the rest of his life. He’s only sixty.

He eats a few bites of the mashed potato, pushes the lima beans around a bit, and sits back. I see how drunk he is then, just before he begins speaking. “And you’ll take care of yourself, too, Daley?” I don’t like the way he says my name. He says it like Catherine used to say it, Day-lee.

“I will.”

“You’ll go shut yourself up in another Commie college and get even more asinine ideas in your head about the way the world should be and how everyone who ever lived before you got it all wrong?”

“I guess so.”

“Let me ask you something,” he says, pointing his fork tines at my chest. “Let me ask you. Did they ever make you study the Second World War? Did they ever teach you about this country and what it did for the world? The sacrifices that were made to save all those goddamn people who now just want to stick it up our asses? I’ll tell you what’s fucked up. What’s fucked up is everything that happened after 1955. That’s what they should be teaching you. Everything—everything—they are teaching you is a crock of shit, and you people are all so far gone you don’t even know it. You don’t have a clue.”

He leans forward and hoists himself up. He takes a few steps to the bar and then realizes he didn’t bring his glass and comes back for it. I see how it will be when I leave, and an image of him on the floor of his bathroom comes to me.

Ten hours. I can do this. I can say something. “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to drink yourself to death.”

He slams the glass on the counter of the bar. “You know what, Day-lee. Just go off to college — again. For the third decade. Spend your whole life in college. Don’t grow up. And take all your faux concern for me with you.”

“It’s not faux, Dad.” I’m surprised he has that word in his vocabulary.

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, going through his rites at the bar and returning with an exceptionally full glass, “you know why I drink? You know why? I drink because of people like you, people who think they are so perfect, who think they have all the ans—”

“I do not think I am perfect. By any means.”

“Good, because you are not perfect. You’re a disaster. You’re an embarrassment. You and your brother.” He puts his hands on his head as if they can stop his thoughts of us. And then he looks right at me with his yellow eyes. “You two are everything I’m ashamed of.”

I put down my knife and fork. I’m done taking this shit. “And you should be ashamed. You should be dying of shame. Because your two children didn’t get a father. They got a monster. They got a drunk, ignorant bigot who poisoned them with pure bile.” My argument begins to form itself. I have so much proof. I’m going to shove all my memories in his face.

He laughs. No, he doesn’t laugh, but there is no word for the noise my father makes when he is surprised and furious at the same time. “You know something. You turned out worse than your mother, you little bitch.”

The mention of my mother, his first since she died nine years ago, slits my vocal cords clean through. All I can do is get myself out of the room and up the stairs.

I cry on my bed with the despair of a child. I keep telling myself to get up and drive away. But I can’t. I feel pinned down by the weight of all the years and insults. I can hear him downstairs, doing the dishes, letting the dogs out, letting them back in. It’s a normal night for him. A quart of vodka, a vicious argument. He probably feels damn good, like he’s just played two sets of tennis. I worry he might even try to say good night to me, so I hoist myself up long enough to lock the bedroom door. The feel of the lock in my fingers is so familiar to me. It’s a little silver macaroni-shaped thing with a deep solid thunk when the thick tongue falls into place. I can practically feel my mother on the other side of the door, pleading with me to come down and say hello to Cousin Grace who’s come up from Westport. But I don’t want to. I’ve just gotten out the big wicker picnic basket of Barbies and their camper from the closet and am settling in for the afternoon. I do not want to have tea with Cousin Grace.

Back on the bed, I think of Paul and how respectful and patient he always was with me, how he did edify me after all, and how now I’m certain I didn’t write him back after he bought the house. I’m the closest thing to a child he ever had. I cry for him and how his grief at losing my mother was too much for me at the time, and how we couldn’t help each other and how it was easier for me to just close the door on him and all his evocations of her, my mother, who loved me but did not protect me, who let me go off every weekend for years and years to my father’s even though I returned a wild animal and she never asked why.

12

If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough. I feel certain, as one does in bed in the dark, that if I can line up the right sequence of thoughts I can solve the problem of my father, the problem of me and my father in the same room. My mind circles. But at some point through the thin lids of my eyes I begin to feel the slightest lifting of the night from the sky, and then I’m liberated from the cell of these useless thoughts, and I see eucalyptus trees, a narrow road, and a yellow door with a pale green window. My heart begins to pound. I’m free again. The little hollow of the driver’s seat is waiting for me. The radio works. Jonathan had it fixed for me last week. I’ll stop at Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. I’ll sit in the booth my mother and I sat in on the way to Lake Chigham. As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.

The hallway is dark, the air moist. I smell the cedar balls in the old chest as I pass it. If I go down the front stairs I’ll see my father, who always leaves his door ajar. But the back stairs are a straight shot to the kitchen and out the door. These steps are steep and I take them slowly, the wallpaper with its relief of ivy and berries beneath my fingers as I descend, the worn steps full of old smells, and then the humming refrigerator at the bottom, the little wedge of space between it and the wall I used to fit in neatly, so warm in winter. The big dogs are downstairs for some reason. They leap to their feet when they see me.

“Don’t get up, fellas,” I whisper, giddy. “Please.”

They try to block my path. For the first time since I’ve been here, they seem to think I’m in charge. They seem to think I should be feeding them, and they push their noses into my thighs.

The table is clean, cleared of dishes, the blue cloth still on it with just a few grease spots from the lamb. In his careful, slanted boarding-school script my father has written: The pills should do the trick. Goodbye, Daley.

There are neurologists who postulate that we have not one but as many as eight brains tucked in our heads. At that moment I’m proof of it. Some of my brains are trying to misinterpret his words. Pills for the dogs? Antidepressants he didn’t tell me about? And some of my brains just want me to keep moving. He’s lying, one says. It’s a trick, says another. But one brain knows that my father and Catherine have a medicine cabinet full of painkillers and sleeping pills.

I find him on his bed in his clothes on top of the covers. He’s breathing but I can’t wake him. I’m still not sure it isn’t a trick, but I pick up the phone.

I press 911, then wonder if it’s 411, then wonder which one I actually pressed. But a woman is on the line, asking me what happened and quickly with sirens there are people in the house and a stretcher and my father’s eyes open but he can’t tell them what he took or how much. There’s no trace of anything by his bed and none of the many prescription bottles in his bathroom are completely empty.

They pump his stomach. Seven Bayer aspirin.

A psychologist comes to talk to me in the waiting area. He has the eyebrows of a surprised cartoon character, thick diagonal charcoal smudges.

“He’s very lucky,” he says quietly.

“Don’t I know it. Another twenty and he could have irritated his stomach.”

The man’s eyebrows invert and become quite stern. “This was a serious cry for help, young lady,” he says, though he can’t be more than five years older than me. “People cross a line when they take pills, no matter their efficacy. Your father might very well have believed seven aspirin would do the trick. And the statistics are that he will make another attempt and it will be more dramatic. He will need to be monitored closely.”

“I am leaving for California today. I won’t be monitoring anything.”

“They told me you were his daughter.”

“I am.”

“Your father has attempted suicide.”

“He drinks on a temperate day six or seven strong martinis. In my opinion he has been trying to commit suicide most days for the past thirty or forty years.” I feel so still and cold inside. I feel like I could rip this man’s lungs out if I tried, and you can hear it in my voice. Goddamn my fucking father for doing this now.

He scrawls something at the bottom of the white page on his clipboard and rubs his face.

“I specifically asked if there was alcohol abuse because of the blood tests I saw, and his doctor assured me absolutely not.”

“His doctor is one of his oldest drinking buddies. Not a reliable narrator.”

He nods, makes crosshatches in the top corner of his sheet of paper. “Are you familiar with the term intervention?”

I laugh. Hard. “Let’s see. His second wife just left him, his son claims never to want to see him alive again, his parents are dead, he has no siblings, and his friends should all be in rehab themselves. That would leave me and him in a room. I’d have a better chance in the Coliseum with a bunch of lions.”

“There’s no one who could support you in this?”

“This is not a man who can change.”

“Anyone can change, given the right tools.”

“I challenge you to this one. You take him on and call me when he’s all fixed.”

“California can wait a week or so. Your father needs you.”

“California cannot wait a week or so. I am a full-time professor and my job starts a week from Wednesday.”

“Where?”

“Berkeley.”

“Nice.” He puts down his pen. He is suddenly seeing me as a compatriot. I am in his league now. And I am a woman, I see him also realize. “What department are you in?”

“Anthropology. I’m going to go in and say goodbye to my father now.”

I move down the hallway, blue under the fluorescent lighting. I feel stiff. You’re worse than your mother, you little bitch. Seven aspirin, for fuck’s sake. He had everyone jumping around for seven aspirin. I hope he’s asleep.

But he is not. He lies there with the sheets tucked up to his chin, his eyes wide and staring at the door before I come through it. I stand several feet from the bed, keep my hands in my pockets.

“I’m not doing so well, elf.” He bunches the sheet up in his fists. His face turns a raw red and he begins to cry. “I’m not doing well at all.”

I really don’t know where he should begin. The man needs so much. I squeeze the car keys in my pocket. I have to go. This is a sick man. This is a sick man whose problems I cannot remedy.

“I’m not doing well at all,” he whimpers again.

“You’re not, Dad. You need help.”

“I do need help.”

“But not my help.”

“Yes, I need your help.”

“No, you need professional help. You’re sick.”

“I’m just… I’m just… I don’t know what I am.” The crying turns to sobs. His chest pumps up and down and his mouth opens crookedly. His teeth are yellow and gray.

“Dad, let’s get you some doctors who can help you.”

“What can doctors do? Perry? Perry can’t help me.”

“Not Perry. You need to go somewhere where people are going to take care of you and help you get better.”

“Where?”

“Some beautiful place. Maybe Colorado or Arizona.”

“No.”

“Maybe nearby. Vermont.”

“You’re talking about that place Buzz Shipley went to.”

“Maybe someplace like that.”

“That guy came back a fairy. He went in a perfectly nice guy and came out a fairy.”

“You need to stop drinking. You won’t be able to see anything clearly before you do.” I wait for him to lash out.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “But I won’t go anywhere.”

“Dad, you can’t do it on your own. No one can. A program is the best way. You go away and you get a lot of support and therapy.”

“Therapy? You mean a shrink?”

“Someone who can help you figure out—”

“No shrink. No way. That stays on your medical record for the rest of your life. It ruins people. Remember that wing nut McGovern picked for vice president? Never. I will not give her the satisfaction.”

“What do you mean?”

“I won’t have anyone talking about me the way they talked about Buzz.”

“No one’s going to talk—”

“Oh yes they will. You don’t know how this town talks.”

“We can say you’re coming to California with me. No one will have to know.”

“I’m staying in my house. If I leave she’ll come and take everything from me. Everything.”

“What about AA?” Julie’s uncle is in AA. He hasn’t had a drink in over twelve years. “I bet there are meetings nearby. Will you do that?”

He nods.

“Every day?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Dad, I know you’re not going to do this.”

“I am. I need to. I know I need to.” He is not convincing.

“I’ll leave and you’ll just go back to your old patterns.”

“So stay and watch me.”

“I can’t.”

A nurse comes in. She pads across the room like a child pretending to be a nurse. Her hands move efficiently, though, changing the IV bag, making a ripping sound with Velcro, sealing everything back up.

“Let me show you how the bed works, Mr. Amory.” She taps the blue and red buttons on a remote with a long fingernail. “This will sit you up and this will make you lie back down. Would you like to sit up a bit now with your daughter?”

“Yes, thank you. Ah, that’s much better. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Amory.”

“You’ll come back before one and show me how the tube works, right? The Sox are in Cleveland this afternoon.”

“Oh I know just where they are. And Clemens’s ankle’s worse, and they’ll probably start Ryan, Lord help us all.”

“Oh, c’mon. Six-point-five’s not good enough for you?”

“Not by a long shot.”

My father laughs. She pulls the door shut and then he looks back at me and seems to remember he’s supposed to be suicidally depressed.

“I know you need to go. I’m proud of you. I really am. I know this is no way to show it but I am, Daley.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I keep thinking about is that time we went to get your mother a painting in Wellesley. Do you remember that day?”

“No.”

“You weren’t more than four or five. We snuck out of the house early so we didn’t have to tell her where we were going. You’d gotten yourself dressed in a little pink dress and you’d put some sort of bow in your hair all crooked, and we went to a gallery where there was this painting of the swan boats that your mother liked and we walked in, and the man there said hello and you lifted your dress up all the way and you weren’t wearing anything underneath. You should have seen the man’s face!

“You know, the saddest day in my life was the day your mother drove off. Saddest day of my life. I never thought she’d do something like that. And take you with her. Take you away from me. I know it was tough on you, but it was tough on me, too. My daughter was gone. I kind of went off the track then, you know. I shouldn’t have hooked up with Catherine so quickly. It wasn’t right. It was never right. She wanted me to be someone else. They always want you to be someone else. Even you want me to be someone else.”

“No, Dad. I want you to get sober and then see what things look like from there.” It’s slightly hallucinatory, the whole idea of him being sober, becoming self-aware.

“Oh Jesus, you sound like that girl Garvey brought home one time. What was her name? Lynnette? Lianne?”

I don’t supply the name, Lizette. I don’t say anything.

“I’d go crazy if I had to see things any more closely. Ever since Catherine my brain has been gnawing on itself.”

I know that feeling. “And you drink to stop feeling that way?”

“Oh Christ, I suppose so. If I stop with the booze, I just don’t want to turn into a guy like Bob Wuzzy. Remember him with his diet sodas? Jesus Christ.”

I can’t help smiling. “You won’t become anyone else, Dad.”

He looks out the window. I study the fine crosshatching near his eyes, the thin straight ridge of his nose. “I know you’re right,” he says without looking at me. “I know you are.” His hands are folded neatly in his lap, like a sad little boy in church. “But you’ll go and I’ll go home and it won’t feel like you’re right anymore.”

At least he knows himself this much. I have to be on campus on July ninth, ten days from now, to start an urban kinship project. I can skip the stops to see friends in Madison and Boulder. I can drive straight through, taking catnaps along the way.

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay for six more days. You go to AA every day. You have one drop of alcohol and I’m gone. On top of that, you will not make racist jokes or objectifying remarks about my body. Plus you will not be allowed to insult me or my mother, or anyone else for that matter. Deal?” I put out my hand.

He unthreads his fingers and clasps my hand tightly. “Deal.”

“You’re going to be miserable.”

He gives me a thin smile. “I know it.”

13

We take a cab back to Ashing. It turns out my father coached the driver’s son in Little League three years in a row, a team called the Acorns.

“You remember that coach for the Pirates, big guy, big paunch?” he says to my father, looking at him intensely through the rearview mirror.

“The one who always ate the peanuts?”

“The very one.”

“He was a real beauty.”

“Prison. Five to ten.”

“Jesus. For what?”

“Nearly killed his girlfriend.”

“Jesus.” My father looks out the window a moment. We’re off the highway, going past Shining Saddles. Little girls in hard hats, no longer velvet-covered, more like helmets, are posting in a ring. He turns back to the mirror. “You remember that game against the Astros?”

“When we were down by seven?”

“And that little scrawny kid, never hit the ball in his life, Barry something—”

“Barry Corning.”

“That’s it, Barry Corning; he popped one right out there over the fence. You couldn’t wipe the grin off his face for the rest of the season.” My father rubs his hands on his pants, one of his happy gestures. “He was a good kid.”

The dogs, hungry, distraught at the disruption of their routine, circle my father even closer than normal as he comes through the door. He presses down their heads, speaks gently to them, gives them each a long rub, then squats in the middle of the kitchen to receive all their licks and nudges. Finally he gets up and goes to the pantry for their cans, and they leap and shake in excitement, their nails skittering to keep their bodies pressed to him as he moves.

My bag is still near the table, where I dropped it that morning. I look out at my stuffed car in the driveway. I don’t understand why I’m not in it. The dogs receive their food, and their collars begin to clank loudly against their blue ceramic bowls as they jerk down their smelly clumps of brown.

My father stands against the counter with the can opener in his hand, looking at me. He looks older now, as if the years have just descended on him, as if for the first time I am seeing him not as the forty-year-old man of my youth but as the sixty-year-old man he really is. The skin beneath his eyes is dark gray, while the rest is green-gray. His eyes are bloodshot.

“Thank you, Daley. Thank you for being here.”

“You’re welcome, Dad.”

I see him glance at the clock. It’s late afternoon and he wants a drink. I cross the room to the bar. I take two bottles at a time, by their necks, to the sink. My heart is pounding, my body tensing itself, preparing for violence. But he does not strike. The can opener does not come smashing into my head as I pour all the alcohol— first the vodka, then the vermouth, then the gin, the bourbon, the scotch, and the rum — down the drain.

I make us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, the first time I’ve fixed him something I can eat, too. Afterwards, while my father watches the second of the Red Sox’s doubleheaders, I make some calls and locate the head of the region’s AA chapter, a man named Keith who tells me the times and locations of nearby meetings.

Then I call Jonathan.

“Hey there.” His voice is rich and happy. “How far have you got?”

He thinks I’m calling from a pay phone. He’s entirely certain I have been on the highway all day.

“I’m still in Ashing.”

“Very funny.”

“My father tried to commit suicide.”

“What?”

“We’re home now, but he’s a little shaky. I think it was more a gesture than anything else.” I listen to the silence, then say, “I have to stay for a few more days.”

“You’ve got to get yourself across the entire continent in your car.”

“I know. I’ll make it. But I think you’ll beat me out there. I’m sorry.”

“No.”

“I promised I’d stay for six more days, just to—”

“Six more days? You don’t have six more days. You have to be there on the ninth.”

“I know that. I’ll drive straight through.”

“You can’t arrive having not slept for three days. I’m coming right now and airlifting you out of there.”

“No, Jonathan.”

“I think you’ve lost your grasp on reality.”

“He promised to stop drinking.”

“Of course he did.”

“He admitted it was a problem.” Didn’t he? “He’s never done that before.”

“You are living on a big pink cloud.”

The AA meetings in Ashing are held in the rectory of the Congregational Church every evening at seven. I drive my father there the next night. I need to see him walk through the door. I need to make sure he stays there the whole hour. He’s quiet in the car as we go down the hill and through town, and the silence in the car at this time of night reminds me of the Sunday evenings when he drove me from Myrtle Street to Water Street. I pull right up to the stone path.

“This is going to be good, Dad.”

He nods and gets out of the car. He takes his long splayfooted strides up the path, a handsome well-groomed man in his light blue cotton pants and navy blazer. His hair is still damp from his shower, combed down neatly. I glance at my watch, and when I look up I see him glancing at his. Two minutes to seven. I wonder if he’ll wait out the two minutes, but when he gets to the door of the rectory, he doesn’t pause. He pushes down the brass handle and disappears. Other people come after that. A man in a T-shirt and work pants stops outside the door to finish a cigarette. Two elderly ladies come up and speak to him and then he holds the door for them and they all go in. A woman with long stringy hair comes running up five minutes late. She fixes her sandal strap while holding onto the door and then swings through.

It’s only then that I realize what an absurd amount of faith I’ve put into this idea of AA. Where did it come from? Linda Blair and that Afterschool Special? Bob Wuzzy? Julie’s uncle? I’m not sure, but it now feels like I’ve always believed that if I could just get my father through the door of an AA meeting, all would be well. But when I imagine how it must be in there, a small room with a stained carpet and the smell of old coffee grounds, metal chairs, and a motley group in a circle speaking of their feelings, I see what a complete disaster it’s going to be. I can hear Garvey laughing at me already.

I brace myself for him to come sprinting out of the building. I stare at the green door, the institutional handle, the black mat on the granite stoop. I wonder if there is another exit, if my father is already halfway home. The sky dims. Streetlights come on. A few teenagers walk by, look sidelong into the car, speak loudly. Mallory’s old piano teacher, no longer young but still brilliantly blonde with her excellent posture that we used to imitate, passes by with a limping greyhound. At 8:09 the green door swings open and a cluster of eight or ten people emerge, my father among them. Several of them shake my father’s hand. He nods goodbye to the group of them.

“Okay, let’s go,” he says before he’s all the way in the car.

I decide not to ask him about it and he volunteers nothing.

I fix him a steak and french fries for dinner. I make myself a salad with avocados and put some on his plate, though I know he won’t touch it. He is at his place at that table without a drink by his plate. It’s dinnertime and my father is not drunk.

“Good steak. You get it from Brad?”

“Brad wasn’t there. It was Will behind the counter.”

Usually any mention of Will Goodale, the third of the Goodale sons, is enough to launch him into a tirade. Will is a crook, a pig; they shouldn’t let him within twenty yards of the place. He is going to singlehandedly sink the business that his father started in 1933. Old Mr. Goodale. They don’t come any better than him. There was a gentleman. Always wore a coat and tie to work, every day. He didn’t deserve a slob like Will for a son.

But all he says is “Huh,” and returns to his steak.

I want to say encouraging things, but to make a fuss might be the wrong move.

Over his ice cream and chocolate sauce he says, “I think I’ll go over to the club tomorrow and hit a few balls.” He looks up. There is a terrible amount of despair in his face. “Do you want to come?”

“I’m sorry, Dad.” How am I going to say this without starting a fight? “I can’t go to the club.”

“Sure you can. I know you’re not a member, but you’re under the roof.”

I take in a breath. I try to speak as gently as possible. “I can’t support an institution that chooses its members based on their skin color, religion, and bank accounts.”

“All right.”

All the fight has gone out of him.

He does the dishes and goes to bed.

The next night I drive him back to the church. The woman with the stringy hair is outside smoking. My father says something that makes her smile and then goes inside. I watch her lean against the wall and blow smoke up into the trees until the library clock across the street says five past seven and she goes in, too.

I get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. I have no idea what to do with myself. After my mother died, I started studying. I’d never really studied before, never applied myself, as my report cards in high school always suggested I do. But I worked hard my last two years in college to get into Michigan’s graduate program in anthropology, and I worked much harder there, my sights on Berkeley from the start. For so very long, my life has been about deadlines, weeks at a time indoors, nights without sleep, reading, writing, and typing. I have been a slave to professors, to students, to the computer room, to syllabi, and then to my dissertation, a behemoth at five hundred and eighty-six pages called “Spirited Play: Zapotec Children’s Understanding of Life and Death.” When I was finishing it in the spring I didn’t see anyone for twenty straight days. I stayed in the apartment of a friend who’d gone to Nagasaki for her fieldwork on the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people.” I stocked up on rice and beans and water and chained myself to the desk. I slept in the chair, head on a book, for a few hours at a time. When I ran out of toilet paper I used a sponge, which I scalded with hot water afterward. I had only the vaguest sense that that was disgusting. At the time it felt efficient. When I was done and had defended it, Jonathan took me to the Upper Peninsula for a long weekend, but talking was difficult, and everything in the natural world seemed to be moving at an alarming velocity. The wind felt so heavy against my body, the new leaves whipping around so fast. I had a sense that some force was at work, not a neutral force but an angry, aggressive force that made me afraid of the physical world. Jonathan expected me to relax, to luxuriate, but I didn’t know how to anymore. I felt as detached and remote from my life as I had when I came back from my fieldwork in Mexico. He was patient and took me on long walks in the woods and across sandbars, and I did slowly, slowly, let down, but within a few weeks I was back on deadline, with three articles to revise for publication and a hundred final undergraduate essays to grade.

Since then I’ve often thought proudly back to those twenty days of pure mind-life. Jonathan and Julie refer to that time as the lock-down, and I freely admit I became a freak, but I liked it. There is a part of me that could live in my head quite happily, a part of me that longs to return there, that doesn’t need or want the body. But now on the sidewalk in Ashing, removed from any intellectual demands and thrown back into my child mind, which senses only the visceral — the smells of my father, low tide, wet dog, and the sounds of seagulls and church bells and station wagons — I feel the need to let my mind wander. Does it know how to wander anymore? Do I know how to think without a book or a notebook or a computer screen? I think of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their walks through the chalk hills. I suppose a walk would be a good start.

The sun has dropped behind the library and the sky has gone lilac white, waiting for night. Most people are home, fixing dinner. The library is closed, Goodale’s too. Only the gas station is open; a man in a loosened tie is filling up his Audi, his gaze unnecessarily fixed on the task. The sub shop has lights on, teenagers in the booths. Then there is a row of dark storefronts, places and awnings that didn’t used to exist: a kitchen store, a pizza parlor, a fancy stationery shop. There is only one light at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. As I get closer I see it is a small wooden sign lit by a bulb above it. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS.

Concave. The creep.

His store is tiny, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. All the walls are shelves; a freestanding bookcase runs down the center. Books, new and used, are squeezed in tight, their spines carefully aligned with the edges of the shelves. More books are stuffed in horizontally above them, and even though it’s all neatly done it has the chaotic feel of a professor’s office. There seems to be no cash register, no counter, and no owner.

My educated adult self pleads with the adolescent to step out of the shop. Proving to a jerk that you have finally developed breasts — not huge ones, by any means, but proportional — is a stupid reason to be in a bookstore. But then my eye catches on a Penelope Fitzgerald novel and what looks like a new Alice Munro collection, and soon I’m squatting on the floor, trying to find Independent People, which Jonathan is always urging me to read; it’s there, and so is Song of Solomon, which Julie worships and I haven’t read yet. Then I see that there’s actually an anthropology section all on its own, not combined with sociology or general science, and there are both volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology and The Collected Letters of Franz Boaz. They are not the rarest of finds, but I specialized so early in Zapotec children that I didn’t get a very broad base in my own field. There’s even Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, my first bible, which I lent to someone once and never got back. I have a tall stack of books in my arms when Neal steps through the door. I completely forgot about him.

“Sorry about that. I meant to leave a note,” he says, not looking, putting a sub wrapped in tinfoil on a little card table in the far corner. “You finding everything okay?”

He has his back to me. I assent with the slightest murmur.

His voice is exactly the same. Why are voices so distinct, so recognizable, when all they are are vibrations against two reeds in the throat? It’s understandable that there can be a few billion variations of the face, given all the variables, but the voice? Neal’s is smooth, like skates on fresh ice. It hasn’t deepened much, though he has grown tall. And there is his hair, the same brown curls Miss Perth used to tease him about. She called him Shirley Temple when he was bad, which he sometimes was. Shirley Temple, go sit on your stool, she used to say without turning from the blackboard. I have eyes in the back of my head, Shirley Temple. In second and third grades we had red math workbooks and we used to race each other to finish one and get the next. We were paired together, pitted against each other. In those lower grades we were sent out of our classroom and into the next grade up for English. In fifth grade we were captains of opposing spelling teams. And then my parents divorced and my grades slipped and Neal’s never did.

He was small and narrow, almost scrawny, when he was younger, with square teeth too big for his face, but now he is long and broad, shirttails hanging out, an overgrown prep-school kid. I know the type and avoided them in college, those guys who never quite adjust to the world that isn’t boarding school, who can’t believe their angelic faces, long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes, and quick sardonic responses are no longer enough to impress every teacher or get every girl. They have a knack for sniffing me out, those disillusioned preppies, sensing my background despite all I have done to disguise it, and I run from them as fast as I can. Boys like that turn into men like my father.

I keep my back to him, moving toward poetry at the back. I hear him sink into a cane chair, prop up a book in front of him, unwrap the sub.

“I’m ready to settle up,” I say, after I hear the foil crumple and drop into a trash can.

His head jerks up from his book. I suppose my voice hasn’t changed either. “Jesus. I thought my mother was delusional. Daley Amory’s in town, Neal. That go-getter is a professor at Stanford.” He does a pitch-perfect imitation of his mother. But I don’t like being used as a prod. I didn’t realize she had a cruel streak. She seemed glad to have him home, proud of his store. The brief performance leaves me at loss.

“Berkeley, not Stanford,” I say, finally. And then, looking around, “This is a great store.”

“Yeah, well, I think I should call it Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow, but maybe everything is like that.” He clears a spot on the card table. “Here, put those down here.”

I slide my stack of books onto the table, nudging off a receipt pad. I bend to pick it up, noticing that the last person has bought The Pickwick Papers for $3.95.

“Your dad okay?” he asks as he writes down my books, his tone already apologizing for the question. How much has he heard? What does the town know?

“Yeah, I think he is.” I want to tell him that my father is at his second AA meeting, that he dresses for them like he’s going to a cocktail party, and who knows who is in there or what they talk about. I want to ask him if he has known anyone who has gone to that meeting in town and if it really might work — no, I don’t want to hear any stories of failure. “How are your parents?”

“They’re all right. They endure.”

His mother was such a presence that I barely remember his dad. A beige windbreaker is all that comes to mind.

I don’t know what to say after that. I watch him write, the handwriting familiar, bunched.

“Congratulations on the job at Berkeley,” he says, handing me my books, the receipt stuck in the middle of the one on top. “That can’t have been easy to get.”

I smile more than I should. “Thanks.” That job is my talisman against all this. “Take care of yourself, Neal.”

I look back before stepping off the stoop, but he’s putting the cash box back on the floor.

I head back toward the church. “Well, that was awkward,” I say to the empty sidewalk. “Not sure he even noticed the boobs.”

And then I hear it, the sound of heavy pieces of metal knocking against one another. I’m flooded with an old feeling, a delicious anticipation. It’s coming from behind me, across the tracks. I turn and, sure enough, the trucks and trailers have just arrived. The true sight and sound of summer in Ashing: the carnival is being set up.

I wish I could go watch like I used to with Patrick and Mallory, straddling our bikes outside the fence, sometimes for hours at a time, mesmerized by all the trailers and what came off of them, the enormous limbs of rides like the Scrambler and the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, the horses for the merry-go-round on their poles, the big crowns of lights and mirrors, upholstered seats, little boats and planes. Once a boy about our age brought us some fried dough from his family’s stand a day before the carnival actually opened. We devoured it and asked him questions about his life, if he got to ride for free, what was his favorite ride, his favorite food, his favorite town. “Not this one,” he said. “Rich towns like this keep all their pennies up their asses.” We laughed hard and a couple of other boys came over, but that caught the attention of a big guy attaching the fake balcony to the haunted house. “Hey,” he called down to us, “don’t harass the kids. They got work to do.” Rich towns like these, Pennies up their asses, and Don’t harass the kids all became refrains for us for years.

I sit on the bench outside the library until the clock strikes eight, then I cross the street and wait in the car until my father comes out. I recognize hardly any of them from the night before, but again they all make a point of saying goodbye to my father.

“All righty then,” he says when he gets in. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”

“How was it?’ I think I can risk it, given his good mood.

“Good.” He looks at the door of the rectory.

I can’t tell if he’s faking it all for me.

“Not too much God?” This is one of the things I’ve been worried about. My father hates God almost as much as he hates Democrats.

“No.” He’s still looking out the window, away from me. “To each his own.”

To each his own? I think of quoting this to Garvey and have to clench in a laugh.

The light is out at Lighthouse Books.

“I walked down here while you were in your meeting. To the bookstore.”

“Oh yeah? Never been in there. Nice place?”

“Small, but good books.”

“That poor kid.”

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head. “With a mother like that.”

“I like his mother.”

“Yeah, well, let me advise you right now, stay away from her. She’s got a big screw loose in her head.”

We pull into the driveway, and I realize I forgot to check the sign in the park that tells the day the carnival will open. I hope it’s before I have to leave.

I have Dad cook his own pork chop and show him how to poke holes in the potato before baking it.

We eat by the pool. The dogs swim. When we’re done, I ask him how he feels.

“Good,” he says, in his new preemptive way.

I can tell he doesn’t feel good. His right leg bounces incessantly, like Garvey’s, his eyes flit from thing to thing, and his skin is gray, not the purple gray it gets after many drinks but a pale ash. He smokes one cigarette after another, their tips trembling. I got a book out of the library to help me understand what he might be feeling, but all I learned was that each body reacts differently to the sudden absence of alcohol.

“I know it has to be really hard right now.”

He jiggles his leg. Many times he looks at me like he is going to say something and stops. Finally he says, “I’ll tell you what. I need you to sweeten the deal. I do this for you, and you come to the club with me on Saturday morning, just to hit a few balls.”

“First of all, you are not doing this for me. You are doing this for you. And second, we made our deal. I stay for six more days, and you don’t drink.”

“If I make it to Saturday, will you come? I can’t miss another week.”

I point to the court in his backyard. “We can play right there.”

“I like playing at the club. I like clay.”

“Dad, I haven’t played tennis since I was sixteen.”

“Please?” He needs me in case Catherine is there. He needs someone beside him when all eyes are on him. “Please, elf?”

It won’t kill me to be for an hour the daughter my father has always wanted. I can give him that memory before I leave. But the idea of going up the long private drive to the white columns of the brick clubhouse is almost enough to make me wish my father won’t hold up his end of the bargain.

14

But he does. After probably more than forty years of vigorous daily drinking, my father goes six days and six nights without alcohol. On the phone Jonathan suggests that he could have a stash somewhere. But I know the difference between my father drunk and my father sober. I know the sated smugness of the early drinks, the agitation that turns to wrath of the next few, and the slack yellow-eyed hollowness at the very end. I’ve also cased the joint. I’ve rummaged through his closets and cars, through the basement, attic, shed, and garage. Nothing. And I stay up late, hours after he does, hearing only the heavy, steady throttle of his snore.

On Friday night, after his meeting, he takes me to the Mainsail for dinner. It’s the only fancy restaurant in Ashing, with a dining room that overlooks the harbor. The entrance is a dock that rises up from the parking lot and makes everyone’s footsteps ring out. I wear a blue dress, wrinkled from days in my hot car. My father is nervous and cups his hands tight as he walks.

“Well, hello to you,” he say to the wooden statue of a boy holding a net with a wood fish in it. “That’s probably a six-pounder you got there.”

He’s worried Catherine will be here, but I’ve reassured him that she knows this is his restaurant, his territory, and she won’t dare. I hope I’m right.

Harold, the bald obsequious manager who has been stationed at the podium in the entryway all my life, bows to us. “Good evening, Mr. Amory. Good evening, miss.”

“Oh for chrissake, Harold, it’s Daley.”

He bows again. “Good evening, Miss Amory.”

“Ms., if you wouldn’t mind.”

My father lets out a small groan.

“Oh, did you get married?”

“No, but please, just call me Daley.”

“I will do that,” he says, lifting two long leather binders out of the holder on the side of his podium, his lips tightly pinched, clearly displeased by how unsmoothly this interaction has gone.

“Daley,” my father says when we slide into our chairs beside the enormous window, “please don’t go around trying to paint this town Commie red. Someone calling you miss is not trying to harm you in any way.”

“I don’t care if they’re not trying. It does harm me.”

“Why?”

“Because the terms Miss and Mrs. are like branding cattle. No one needs to know I’m unmarried.”

“Yes, they do. People want to know these things.”

“There’s this tribe in New Guinea where the available women are given a suffix to their name that literally means tight vulva and the taken women are given a suffix that means floppy vulva. Should we do that, more to the point?”

“You are making me sick to my stomach, for chrissakes.” But he is amused. He is having fun.

“Here you are, Mr. Amory.” Harold drops a vodka martini on the rocks with two onions and an olive beside my father’s right hand. “And what can I bring your lovely daughter?”

I can feel the vibration of my father’s jiggling leg on the wooden floor beneath us. I can feel the attraction between him and the martini, and his restraint, everything it takes to not get that martini down his gullet and into his blood system. He lifts it up and hands it back to Harold. “Sorry about that, sir. She’s keeping me clean tonight.”

Harold glances at me—haven’t you made enough trouble already? — and then sympathetically back at my father. “Excuse me, Mr. Amory. I shouldn’t have presumed.”

I watch over my father’s shoulder as Harold goes back to the bar with the drink. I can’t remember the bartender’s name but I know he has a tattoo of a submarine on his upper arm and a roll of crystal mint Lifesavers in his pocket. His head jerks up toward us when Harold speaks. He shakes his head, then dumps the drink in the sink.

My father doesn’t need to look at the menu. He always orders the filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. I hurry to figure out what I can eat. All the writing is in big slanted script. I worked in a restaurant like this in college, waited on people just like my father, with their regular drinks, their regular cow parts.

There is vichyssoise, but when I ask Harold if it has chicken stock he returns from the kitchen quite pleased to tell me that indeed it does. My father shakes his head. He apologizes to Harold when I order a plate of steamed rice and french-cut green beans.

“To each his own, Dad.”

Across the harbor, the Ferris wheel begins to turn. Its red and blue lights smear slowly into huge purple rings. It’s the first night of the carnival.

“Oh, Christ,” my father says, briefly eyeing the door. “They won’t leave me alone,” he whines, though his face betrays nothing. I wonder who it is but he’ll be furious if I turn around to look. “Here they come,” he whimpers, and then he glances up, feigns convincing surprise, and leaps to his feet to shake the man’s hand firmly and kiss the woman on the cheek. I know them, her squat forehead and his puffed-out chest. I kiss them both as they marvel at how long it has been and what a lovely girl I’ve become, and my father shoots me a look because he knows how I feel about being called a girl at the age of twenty-nine. I ask them about their kids, hoping to jog my memory. Carly was in Woods Hole, Scott was working for Schwabb, and Hatch was in Colorado “doing who knows what,” the woman says, laughing.

“There’s always one of those,” the man says with a phlegmy chuckle.

“I’m two for two,” my father says. I think he’s forgotten for a moment that he isn’t out with Catherine.

“Hardly.” The woman covers up for him. “I heard this one got herself a fancy job out west somewhere.”

I remember their names, Ben and Barbara Bridgeton. Their children went to Ashing Academy with us, but none of them were in Garvey’s or my grade. My father coached at least one of the sons.

“What is your area of expertise, Daley?” Mrs. Bridgeton asks.

“Oh, Jesus. Don’t ask,” my father says.

“Post-Contact Zapotec, the children in particular, and how, if they survive, they process the high infant and pre-school mortality rates.”

I see Mr. Bridgeton shoot a look at Harold, who trots right over with their drinks.

“Okay, Margaret Mead,” my father says. “Let them sit down.”

“How long are you here for, dear?” Mrs. Bridgeton squeezes my hand.

“Until Sunday.”

“We’ll take good care of him once you’re gone. Not to worry.”

Harold leads them to their table and my father and I sit back down. “One more minute and you were going to start in on the floppy vulvas, weren’t you? And I should have warned you not to tell her when you were leaving.”

“Why?”

“They were coming over every night after Catherine left. Quiches, soups, some sort of goulash. I had to toss it all down the pig. Even the dogs wouldn’t touch it.”

“But that’s so nice of them to be thinking of you.”

“About the only ones, too. That bitch has told so many lies about me. All over town.”

I have to get him off the topic of Catherine. “Did you coach Scott or Hatch?”

“Both. Six years of that woman yak-yak-yaking. Remember I got her that Assistant Manager cap and she wore it all summer? She didn’t even get the joke.”

Our salads come. Iceburg lettuce, mealy tomatoes, and one skinless slice of cucumber with creamy Italian slathered over it. The Main-sail is its own time capsule. But I know better than to make fun of it.

My father pokes his fork into it once and then sets the salad aside.

“So what happens? You drive out there and they have a place for you to live?”

“I found a place. A little cottage.” It’s so silly, what rises inside me, a swell of warmth, of good feeling, a flood of endorphins — all because my father is asking me a question about my life.

“Near the school?”

“Five or six blocks.” I want to tell him about the eucalyptus tree out front and the color of the door but I know I’ll lose him. I have to sound blasé, as if it doesn’t mean much to me.

“Expensive?”

“No, it’s pretty reasonable, for California.” It’s actually a great deal, four-fifty a month. “Probably pretty beat up.”

“You haven’t seen it yet?”

“No. I had a friend out there take a look at it for me.”

“And this job of yours, how long does it go for?”

“I hope it’s permanent, if I get tenure.”

“And how do you make sure you get that?’

“I don’t know.” But of course I know. I just have to get the right tone with him, not too cocky, not too flaky. “I’ll have to publish steadily, get consistently good student evaluations, make nice-nice with all my coworkers, and lead at least one team in fieldwork somewhere.”

He watches Harold’s tray as it passes, scotch and sodas for the people behind us. “You got it all figured out, don’t you?”

Too cocky.

I coach myself to stay upbeat, not react. The man wants a drink. Of course he’s going to be irritable.

“No, I don’t. But I like having a goal. Something to move toward.” Too transparently preachy. He’ll know I’ve shifted the conversation to him. My insides weaken, wait for the cut.

But he nods. “Good to have your eye on something.”

I’m grateful when Harold arrives to remove the salad plates and replace them with the filet mignon and the steamed vegetables. I’ve had enough of talking with my father about my life.

Later that night, when he starts snoring, I call Jonathan.

“Six days and six nights,” I boast.

“And tomorrow morning you’re driving away.”

“Sunday morning.”

“You said Saturday.”

“No, it was always Sunday.” Wasn’t it? “I never really believed he’d be able to do it. But he trudges down the little walkway to his meeting and he comes out again all spry and bolstered up.”

“Sunday at the crack of dawn.”

“Stop worrying.”

“You’re getting sucked in. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I’m not sucked in.”

“I think we should go camping at Crater Lake next weekend.”

“Aren’t we going to want to unpack a little?”

“I got this guidebook. You should see the pictures. I’m not sure I can wait.”

The next morning, I call Garvey.

“Hmmm,” he answers after a lot of rings. I’ve woken him up.

“I know you don’t want to hear about Dad but—”

“You’re right.”

“Garvey, he’s quit drinking.”

A huge muffled laugh.

“He has. Six days and six nights.”

“Oh, Hermey, you gullible titmouse.”

“I’ve combed the place, believe me. There’s nothing hidden. He’s doing it. He goes to AA every night at the Congregational Church.”

Another huge laugh. “I don’t believe you.”

“I drive him there. I watch him walk in. He gets all dressed up in his summer pants and blazer.”

“And I’m sure he walks right out the back door.”

“No, Garvey, I see him come out. He’s chatting with people, shaking hands.”

“He might be doing this for you for a few days, but the man can’t change his ways now.”

“He can if he has help. Couldn’t you come here for a few days next week after I’m gone? Just to help him along a bit.”

“Fuck no. Daley, you don’t get it. God, for all your education you really don’t have much smarts.” He said smaats, Boston accent, just the way Dad would.

“Oh, shit, it’s nearly ten. He’s calling me. Please think about it, Garve.”

“I won’t. Where are you going?”

“Just out with Dad.”

“Hmmm. Ten A.M. on a Saturday morning in July. Could it possibly be to the Ashing Tennis and Sail Club?”

“I lost a bet.”

“I want a photo.”

“I have to go.”

“You’ll have to wear one of those little pleated skirts.”

“I have some white running shorts.”

“How quickly we forget. You’re over eighteen and you have to wear a skirt.”

“That was in 1972.”

“But it’s 1952 in Ashing. And it always will be.”

He is right. I have to have sneakers, a skirt, and a shirt with a collar. My father takes me to the pro shop and a woman my father calls H puts me in a dressing room with saloon doors and keeps sticking her bony sunfried arm in and out until I’ve chosen a skirt with navy stripes and its matching polo shirt. Then she fits me into some very cushiony tennis sneakers.

“Hey, hey,” my father says when I come out. He hands me a brand new racquet. Before I can protest, H has put my hair in a high ponytail. They both beam at me. In the mirror across the room, I look eleven again.

My father makes a point of saying hello to everyone we pass on the way to court five, of introducing me with much more enthusiasm than normal. “Look at my Daley, all grown up,” he says to several people.

Look at Daley, fucking out of her mind.

I want a father who doesn’t get drunk. He wants a daughter to take to the club. It’s a deal with the devil for both of us.

He hits a few soft ones to me at first, perfectly placed so that all I have to do is swing. The first few go way out, and the next few into the net, but my father shows me how to follow through on the stroke, finishing with my weight moving forward, and my next shots are decent ones.

“Holy smokes,” my father says, reaching the ball easily. “I’ve got to stay on my toes today.”

It feels great to move with my body, think with my body. I haven’t exercised in months. I copy his movements. My focus is pure. I feel my father’s desire for me to play well but it doesn’t disable me like it used to. For the first time I can fully appreciate what a beautiful player he is. No matter where I place the ball he is there in a few steps, having anticipated its direction as soon as it leaves my racquet. His strokes are fluid, graceful, deceptively strong. There is nothing that looks like effort in his game. He sweats more eating a steak.

I can’t explain why I’m suddenly okay at tennis. Maybe I was never as awful as I thought. All I know is that it is pleasurable. I like the feel of the clay beneath my new leather sneakers and the pale mark the ball leaves when it lands in front of me and the moment when the ball has crested from the bounce and has just started to drop and I strike it with my racquet in just the right place. The racquet has a huge head and is surprisingly reliable. I even like the skirt and all its pleats that swing as I run. I’m an imposter, an inter-loper, in a deeply familiar environment. I’m here but soon I will be far away. This is my own dirty secret. Everyone I know would be disgusted with me. I smile at that thought.

“You could be a damn good player, Daley. You know that?” My father says when we take a break at the water dispenser between the two courts.

We sip from paper cones, and I feel the cold water hit my stomach.

Then he says, “I can feel the difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“Without the cocktails.”

It’s the first benefit he’s mentioned.

We play two sets. He beats me 6–3, 6–4. I know he has the ability to beat me 6–0 left-handed if he wanted. I kept thinking I could tire him out by hitting them to one side and then the other, but he returned them all — it never even looked like he was running.

Afterward we sit on the bench beside the court.

“I thought you had me that first set, when it was deuce and you fired that winner down the line.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. I can’t remember individual points once a game is over. The whole thing fuses quickly together.

“By the end of the summer you’ll be beating me,” he says.

“Dad.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “For a minute there I thought you were sixteen years old.”

For a minute there, I almost wish I were.

That afternoon, while my father is napping, I call Julie and confess where I’ve been.

“I know this sounds weird but I think there is something kind of powerful about wearing a tennis skirt,” I say.

“Oh, God, Daley,” Julie says. “Get out of there.”

“You sound like Jonathan.”

“You’re not going to tell him where you were.”

“Not over the phone. When I get out there and he’s calmed down. I really think the skirt helped me play better, though. It’s a uniform, and all uniforms are about power.”

“Or denigration.”

“I did refuse to eat at the clubhouse.”

“At least you have a shred of sanity left.”

“Tell me what you see out your window.” She just got to Albuquerque.

“Dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Dry, yellowish dirt. I keep walking around my neighborhood thinking, What is going to become of me?”

“What are you going to do until school starts?”

“Work on my syllabus. Read. Eat. And other things I haven’t done for seven years. I talked to my father today. He told me to set aside that long weekend in October. He says he’s sending me a plane ticket, but it’s a mystery as usual.”

I can see now that my old irritation about Julie and her father was the pain of envy. They are very close, capable of talking on the phone for two hours at a time, desultory conversations that can go from toothpaste brands to Simone Weil. She can call him at night and he will never be drunk. He’s a doctor, a radiologist, and he has a doctor’s smug confidence. I’ve always been half infatuated, half repulsed by him. The first time he met me, he told Julie I was a diamond in the rough. We laughed at the image, but secretly I puzzled over it for a long time, wondering exactly what on the outside was so rough, and where exactly the diamond was.

“I hope it’s to California. You can be our first houseguests.”

“If you promise to wear your new uniform.”

“Of course. I’m sure I’ll be playing in a ladies’ league by then.”

That night, my father pulls out a piece of paper from one blazer pocket and his reading glasses from the other. “I heard this tonight at the meeting. Thank you is all you need to say to get God’s attention. I thought that was pretty good.” He looks embarrassed, then laughs when he sees that my eyes have filled.

I lie in bed Sunday morning after the alarm goes off. I can hear the opener slicing through the dogs’ cans, the spoon whacking against the bowls, the dogs’ frenzy as my father carries the bowls to their place against the wall, the silence as they eat and my father returns to his coffee and paper, and then the smack of the screen door when they are done and need to go out. My father yells something at one of them. I’m relieved by the sound, the regular impatient tone. There will be no drama this time. I keep urging myself up, then rolling into another even comfier position. I was hot during the night and my blanket is at my feet, but now I pull it back over me. It looks cloudy and cold outside. I feel like sleeping all morning. I haven’t packed my clothes yet. They are in a heap on the floor.

I put on jeans I haven’t worn since Michigan. They remind me of winter there, of the big black boots I used to wear with them, of Jonathan and the orgasm he once gave me with just his thumb on the outside of these jeans. My stomach does a slow backflip. I need to get to him. I put the tennis outfit at the back of a drawer in the bureau. I pack the sneakers. I shove the books I got from Neal’s store into the sides of the bag and zip. Halfway down the stairs I realize I’ve left my toothbrush by the sink, but I keep moving. There will be plenty of toothbrushes on the road to California. I love a road trip. I can get at least as far as Indiana by midnight.

“Morning,” I say, my bag knocking through the doorway.

“Well, if it isn’t Little Orphan Annie,” my father says, lowering his paper. Then he gets up and takes the bag from me. “Christ, what’d you do, steal the silver on the way out?” He puts it by the door. “Coffee?”

Nearly every morning he’s offered me coffee and I’ve always said no. I like feeling a little sleepy at the start of the day, and he drinks instant. “Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

He gets down a cup and saucer, white with pale pink flowers. They rattle so loudly together he carries them in separate hands to the stove.

I wish I’d said no to the coffee. I need to get out before he blows up or collapses.

“What are you going to do today?”

“Beats me. Perry hurt his ankle again so tennis is canceled. I need to vacuum the pool. I never showed you the new vacuum.”

“The meeting’s at one today. You know that, right? Because it’s Sunday.”

“Yup,” he says, heading toward the door where the dogs are scratching to come back in.

They go directly to their places surrounding his chair.

I wait for him to tell me that at one he’ll be pouring his first martini.

“I can call you every night, see how it’s going.”

“You don’t need to do that. We’ll be fine here.” He pats the gray dog’s head, and the others lift their heads hopefully. “Don’t spend too much time inside. It’s not good for you. Get out and see the sun. Play a little tennis. You got your racquet? You didn’t get it, did you? You take that with you. Early birthday present.”

“Belated, actually. My birthday was two weeks ago.”

“All right then.”

“This is a real opportunity for you, Dad.”

His eyes are looking straight ahead, unfocused. He nods. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

I’ve spent so many years swallowing my feelings for my father, constructing a glib false self that sloughs off his jabs, evades questions, conceals facts that would displease him, that now I have a hard time finding the truth in his presence.

“You have been so strong this week. I know you can keep going.” Ninety meetings in ninety days is what they say. If you can make it that far, a return to drinking is much less likely. “Ninety in ninety. Do you feel like you can do it?” They also say, of course, one day at a time. Maybe I should shut up.

“Everyone leaves me.” He says it so quietly it takes me a second to understand what he’s said. It’s less than a whisper, as if it has just emanated up through him, despite his efforts to quell it.

Everything is silent after that. Even the dogs’ collars, a steady white noise in my father’s house, are still.

I put my hand on top of his, the raised veins pulsing hard against my palm. “I’ll call you every night.” And then I add, awkwardly, it has been so very long: “I love you, Dad.”

He nods and lets out a long breath.

The dogs chase my car down the driveway, then turn back to my father, who is still standing there, his hands in his pockets, in the shadow of the garage. He isn’t yelling at them as he usually does. When they reach him, he puts his hands on their heads and then turns toward the house. The slope of his back disappears behind the trees.

People are already walking up the hill to the beach, even though it’s only nine-thirty on an overcast day. The Ferris wheel is motionless. A big banner announces the carnival will open up again at noon. I have missed my chance. Kids are already circling the area on bikes, waiting. Lighthouse Books has a CLOSED sign dangling from its door-knob. The Congregational Church’s doors are flung open, the organ playing. The Bridgetons will probably ask my father over for cocktails this week. On Water Street the shades are down in the front windows of our old apartment. I turn up Middle Street, toward the highway. The green signs appear, the regular white paint replaced now by a reflective silver. Route 4 North and Route 4 South. I’ll take Route 4 South to 95 to 90, fork off to 80 in Ohio, and take 80 all the way to Berkeley. My father will not go to another AA meeting. I pass the Route 4 North on-ramp, put on my blinker for the next, but go straight under the overpass toward the town dump. Beyond the dump, in what used to be woods, a new subdivision has gone up. I turn into the long, newly asphalted drive and follow its smooth perfect circle past the freshly built houses, then turn back on Middle Street, back toward town.

He is standing at the pool when I pull up. There’s a thick cord that runs from the poolhouse right into the water. I walk across the grass. At the bottom of the pool is a little white box moving all by itself, sucking up all the dirt in a straight line. When it hits the side it turns and goes in a different direction. It is only when I am standing right beside him that he lifts his eyes.

“You know who the Sox are playing at one, don’t you?” he says.

“The Yankees?”

“But you’re going to make me go to that meeting.”

“Yup.”

“Shit.”

Then we watch the new vacuum make its clean random tracks across the bottom of the pool.

15

I call the chair of the anthropology department that afternoon. I’ve rehearsed a few phrases in my head, but once the phone begins to ring I forget them. A teenager answers eagerly. I didn’t imagine Oliver Raskin with a family. He’s out in the field for years at a time, has written over twenty books. This young voice gives me hope that as a family man, Dr. Raskin will understand my situation. The phone is dropped on a table and more than a few minutes later he picks up an extension.

“Please forgive me for calling you at home on Sunday, Oliver.”

“Not at all.” He speaks from a small silent room. “I’m sure you have questions, Daley. Fire away.”

“I am not able to come to California right now.”

“The project doesn’t start until Wednesday. I thought that was clear.”

“It is clear. I can’t get there by then. My father is sick.”

“I’m sorry, Daley.” I can’t tell if he means he’s sorry about my father or sorry that my father’s sickness doesn’t change anything. “What’s the matter with him?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m listening.”

I’m not sure why I thought he might understand. I can tell by his breathing he won’t.

“He’s going through a rough—”

“Is he dying, Daley? Because for you not to be here on the ninth of July he would have to be dying.”

“I worry that he will die if I don’t stay.”

“If you stay, he won’t die. If you leave, he will die.” I can hear him take a sip of something. “Are you a god, Daley?” I wonder if he’s drunk. “You signed a contract, if you will remember, in which you agreed to begin your research here in a few days. You may have ten more, if you think you can work your magic in that time.”

“I’m going to need more than that.”

“How many more?”

Ninety in ninety. “Three months.”

Silence. Another sip. More silence. “In other words, you’ve called to resign.”

“It’s a family emergency. I’d hoped I could have some sort of deferment.”

“This is not like applying to college. This is not a custom design situation. This is one of the most coveted positions in the country. We considered over a hundred applicants. We flew five candidates out here. The selection process took up the whole year.”

“I understand that.”

“Are you really my next suicide, Daley?”

I don’t want to work with this man. He’s a prick. “No, I’m not, Oliver. I guess I’m your first defection.”

The phone rings during dinner. My father answers.

“Yup, she’s right here,” he says, holding the phone out to me. But there is only the dial tone.

I put the phone back on its cradle.

“What happened there?” my father says.

“We got disconnected, I guess.” I’m trying to keep my voice steady.

“That your boyfriend?”

I nod.

I can’t eat what’s on my plate. I have no way to call Jonathan back. He’s already on the road by now. I’m not sure talking would help anyway.

The next morning my father is in a coat and tie. “I’m going to go in and meet with Howard this morning.”

“Howard Gifford?” The name of his divorce lawyer brings back pains in my stomach.

My father nods. “I want to get this thing moving.”

“If that’s what you’re sure you want.”

“Christ yes.”

After he leaves I unload the dishwasher. I carry the stack of plates into the pantry where Catherine kept them and stop in the middle of the room. I don’t have to put them there anymore. She isn’t coming back. Everything — silverware, napkins, glasses, salad plates, cereal bowls — can go back where they belong. As I work, I catch myself in conversations with Oliver Raskin or Jonathan or some amalgam of the two, trying to convince them that I have no choice but to stay here for a little while, that it is my duty not just as a daughter but as a human being.

When everything is back in place, I dig out the leashes in the coat closet and clip them on the dogs. They don’t know how to behave on leashes; my father only uses them for trips to the vet. As we make our way down the driveway, they weave themselves into tight tangles over and over, little Maybelle practically dangling off the ground.

“You guys are pathetic,” I say to them when we reach the street, and honestly their heads seem to lower in shame. “This is what we need to do. Sadie, you need to walk out that way, to my right; Oscar, way out to my left; Yaz, in front, and Maybelle, I’m attaching you to my waist like this.” I thread the small handle of her leash through my belt loop. “And now we walk.” We take up the whole sidewalk and the grass on both sides. Anytime Oscar looks interested in Sadie’s grass I tell him to cut it out and keep his eyes ahead. They obey me. Yaz, the biggest of all of them, pulls us all forward like a sled dog.

We pass the Vance sisters’ old driveway, filled with bright plastic tricycles and trucks, an enormous garage where the chaotic garden used to be, then take the shortcut, down Lotus Lane to the sandy path, ignoring the new NO TRESPASSING signs. I am having some trouble breathing properly. It feels like there’s a baseball in my lungs, taking up most of the room. I can really only half believe that I had that conversation with Dr. Raskin, and only half believing is shocking enough. The dogs, hearing the waves, smelling the smells, strain hard on their leashes. When we reach the boardwalk, the sea suddenly below us, I unhook them all and the two big dogs take off down the weathered wooden steps. They sprint to the water in a spray of fine white sand. Maybelle stays by my feet, taking each deep step down with brave caution.

Warm air rises from the sand and cold air comes off the water. Gulls screech and waves swell and break in gorgeous white diagonals all the way down the beach. Farther out the water is pale and glossy or a rumpled deep blue, depending on how the wind is touching it. Seeing the Atlantic is always like seeing an old love: a familiar ache, a tremendous pull, and a deep sadness. It’s so vast, so muscular, so devastatingly beautiful. Jonathan and I have never seen any ocean together. We were waiting for California. Our cottage is 2.4 miles from a beach. He clocked it when he was out there.

The big dogs stay in the shallows, barking at the waves as they grow and retreating when they shoot to shore. I take off my shoes. The wind flaps my T-shirt and shorts. I try to take in deep breaths.

There is a smattering of people down the beach near the main entrance, setting up their umbrellas, spreading out their towels. But down here there is only me, the dogs, and an old couple in coats, walking toward the rocks. I wonder if my father will have lunch in Boston with Howard Gifford. The dogs see the old couple and begin to run toward them. They will go to Locke-Ober’s and Howard will order a drink. When I call the dogs, my voice is thin and they don’t hear me.

Back at the house I sit at my father’s desk with a blank sheet of paper — it wasn’t easy to find one that didn’t have his name and address embossed on it — and a ballpoint pen. I have to write Jonathan, and I have to get the letter in the mail this afternoon so that it arrives in California when he does. I want to tell him that I need a little more time here, less than three months. And then we can go to Crater Lake. Maybe we both can apply for jobs in Philadelphia for next year. I can see him in his truck, the truck he couldn’t drive when I first met him, heading toward a job he didn’t even want. He wanted to get back to Philly. That had been his plan.

But nothing about me was in Jonathan’s plan. And he always has a plan. It’s the way he copes with fear. The way I cope is to never have expectations, so I’m not disappointed. Even with Berkeley I never let myself get attached to the idea. I wanted it, but I didn’t expect it. Maybe that’s why I can let it go now. I never really believed it was mine. And with Jonathan, too, I held back, until he called me on it.

“I want to have a relationship with you.”

I laughed. We were both naked. “I think we are having a relationship.”

“But these things need to be said. I think you don’t think I’m serious. Or maybe you’re not serious. What are your intentions toward me?’

I laughed again.

“I’m serious, Daley. What are they?”

“My intentions? You act like I’m angling to marry you or something.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

He was quiet.

“Aren’t you relieved?”

“No. I’m not interested in being glib.”

“I’m not being glib.”

“I’m not sure any of this is meaningful to you.” He put his hand on my chestbone. “You’re all sealed up in there.”

It was true. I loved him so much, and I was desperate to hide the extent of it. But slowly, he cracked me open. He pulled out all my feelings and made me talk about them. He had the ability to articulate emotions that most people simply feel as a clump in the belly. Carefully, patiently, he built a strong platform for us, and I came to trust that I could put the whole of my weight on it. It’s because I am standing on that platform that I am able to help my father now.

I stare at the page. It all feels so raw and wordless and unbelievable. He is driving west and I am not there. I am not going to open the door. I have broken my promise. I put my head on the paper, and soon the page is wet and buckled. I toss it in the trash and go up to my room.

On my bed I think back to our last night together, before Garvey called, lying with him, his finger slipping up into my underwear. He is on me, heavy, hard, his lips on mine. I want to fuck you, I whisper, and he pushes in and I come quickly. Too quickly. I lie there for a minute, sadness pooling, and then I take it slower, and come deeper. I can feel it spread everywhere this time, beneath my toenails, across my scalp. I feel close to him, lying here. I don’t want to stop and feel the distance between us again. I start moving my fingers again in the syrupy wetness until I hear hard knocking on the kitchen door.

I zip up my pants and smooth down my hair in back. My limbs feel loose but strong as I go down the stairs.

It’s Barbara Bridgeton. She frowns at the sight of me through the screen door.

“Have I woken you?”

No, but you did interrupt my third orgasm. “I was just cleaning.”

I let her in, and fortunately the kitchen is spotless from all my rearranging.

She swoops her laserlike gaze over everything and then puts a stack of Tupperware on the counter. “I made three meals for your father, but maybe he doesn’t need them now. Is he out?”

“He’s gone into Boston.”

“By himself?”

“Yes.”

She pinches her lips together. She wants to know why he’s gone to Boston. She looks unhappily at her meals on our counter. “I thought it was Sunday you’d be leaving.”

“I did too. But I’m going to stay longer.”

“Can you?”

“I can.”

“Maybe I should just take all that food home then. I’ve got both Scott and Carly coming this week.”

“By all means. We’ve got plenty. In fact, I’m trying to encourage Dad to learn to cook.” I sense her objection and hurry on. “But thank you. He is so grateful for everything you’ve done for him.”

“Well, he’s an old dear friend.”

Once the Tupperware is back in her arms she doesn’t look so pleased about it. I wonder if I should have just accepted it graciously.

“Well, you’re a good daughter,” she says, as if to convince us both. “Your dad needs his family right now, and at least he has you. I’m sorry Garvey wasn’t able to do the same. If ever a father loved his son.” She puts the Tupperware back on the counter and shakes her head. “If ever a father was proud of his son. You know they won the father-son tournament six years in a row. I’ll never understand what happened to that boy. And he had the lead in the eighth-grade play. What was it that year?”

“Bye Bye Birdie.”

“That’s right. You probably don’t remember it.”

Of course I do, and I remember my father prancing around afterward, singing “Put on a Happy Face “effeminately, making a mockery of the whole play in a few minutes.

“And he was always on the honor roll, which is more than I can say for two out of three of mine, though most of those smart kids turned into druggies and are a misery to their parents, so you never know. That Lukie Whitbeck, you remember him, with all the hair? I think he got every award in Scott’s class. Everyone thought he was so wonderful, but he had a mean streak; I had to talk to his parents more than once about it. He was in jail last year, not for long, but still. Well, I’m so pleased you’re here, Daley.” She smiles broadly. She seems to have perked herself up by that dip and spit into the past. “You’re a good daughter.” And she kisses me on the cheek, takes her food, and leaves.

My father comes home at three and falls asleep on the couch. When his snoring reaches full volume, I bend over him and smell his breath. Hamburger, fries, and ketchup is all I get. At six-thirty I wake him for his meeting.

“Losers of the world unite,” he says as he hobbles upstairs to shower.

I cleaned out the Datsun that afternoon, brought a few bags to my room, and put the rest in the shed. He groans when he gets in and exaggerates the lack of head and legroom by scrunching up into a little egg. The smell of his Old Spice fills the small space.

“You don’t have to keep driving me,” he says.

“I like to.” I want to get to the point where I trust him to get to the church every night at seven, but that will take time. Sometimes he is so sad and quiet on the way I feel certain that if I weren’t there he’d pull into Shea’s, the liquor store, and down a quart of vodka in the car, or head to the Utleys or the Bridgetons, who were sure to be having cocktails on their patios.

After I let him out at the church, I walk to the carnival. The fried dough is calling me. I have nothing due, nothing to research, no deadline. My mind keeps moving to that list and finding it empty. Over and over. Each time my body grows a little lighter.

It’s hard to recognize the park when the carnival is planted in it. All the structures — the swing set and slide, the baseball diamond, the gazebo — are swallowed by it. As a kid I had a hard time holding the two concepts in my head at once, and if on occasion I did notice that it was the baseball bleachers people were sitting on to eat red foot-long hot dogs before going on the roller coaster beside them, it was like discovering an artifact from another lifetime, the way they discover the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes.

I pay the six-dollar entry fee and go in. They’ve put down hay to protect the grass. It used to be free to wander around the carnival, and no one ever cared about the grass. It always grew back. Ashing is starting to be self-conscious that way, with its new matching awnings above the storefronts and the renaming of certain streets I read about in the paper. Snelling Street is now Coral Avenue. And Pope’s Road has become Bayview Lane. But the music at the carnival is the same as always, “Sweet Caroline” and “Mandy” and “My Eyes Adored You.” I can see Jonathan rolling his eyes, but he’d be singing along with me anyway. He’d know all the words. It’s packed, full of kids and teenagers and brand-new families, the parents my age, the children in little pouches and strollers. Again I feel like an interloper, a spy on my own past.

I go directly to the fried dough window. The woman hands me an enormous slab with pools of oil on top, and I shake the plastic tub of cinnamon sugar over it until it’s a deep, dark brown. I mean to find a bench and eat it slowly, but it’s so good I polish it off right there next to the condiments. After I buy a small book of tickets I go in search of the Tilt-a-Whirl. It’s right where it always was, to the left of the Ferris wheel, its hooded blue and white cars just coming to a slow undulating stop on their circular tracks. Mallory, Patrick, and I probably took this ride together over a hundred times. I always sat in the middle because Mallory and Patrick were heavier and could make the car spin faster by leaning to each side. Mallory screamed shrilly in my ear and Patrick kept his mouth shut, making little ghostlike moans every now and then. Just the sound of my feet on the thin metal steps after I give over my tickets brings whole summers back to me. The seats are still smooth red leather, the bar that comes down over your knees the same scallop shape. I have the same rush of anticipation as the man pulls the lever, and the belt that all the cars are on begins to move. I sit on one side of the car to make it spin more. Soon I’m being flung in circles so fast my brain gives up trying to ground itself, and I am left with that rush of abandon that is one small part fear and the rest sheer ecstasy. I hear myself shrieking along with other shriekers. There are moments on the Tilt-a-Whirl when you can raise your head and look briefly around before you are sent into another vortex. At one point I look up and see Neal Caffrey on a bench watching me. The next time he is gone. When the ride ends I stumble along its edge to give the operator more tickets and go back to my red seat. While I am spinning it’s impossible to think about Jonathan or Oliver Raskin or the cottage with the yellow door.

When I get off, I only have twenty minutes left. I want to ride the Scrambler, the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, and the Ferris wheel. I can’t decide which, so first I get some more fried dough. This time I shake out the cinnamon sugar and the powdered sugar until it is tick-gray. Delicious. Then I get in line for the Ferris wheel, which is on a long ramp leading up to its base. Two little girls and their mother are ahead of me. The girls are trying to decide which color compartment they hope to get. The compartments are round, with a column in the middle that holds up a matching metal umbrella. The girls are hopping with the same mix of sugar and excitement that I feel. I wish I could ride with them, and am almost on the brink of asking when Neal taps my foot.

He’s on the ground below. “Hey.” He looks like he’s forgotten the rest of what he was going to say.

The girls and their mother get into a green compartment. One of the girls is crying. She wanted blue.

I look at the long line behind me. “Are you trying to cut?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well, you’d better hurry,” I say, and he hoists himself up by the metal railing and threads his body through the bars.

Our basket arrives. It’s blue and the little girl is howling above us. I give the man enough tickets for both of us then we crouch down to fit beneath the rim of the umbrella and sit on opposite sides of the circular compartment. The man drops a bolt through three rings on the door. We rise up a few feet and stop. I have no earthly idea what to say to Neal Caffrey. And really, I don’t want to talk. I want to go up high and look down at the town and out across the pale water.

“Oh Jeez,” Neal says as our basket rises again, much higher. It stops close to the top and swings a bit. “Oh shit.”

“Don’t tell me the winner of the Renaissance Cup is scared of heights. Look how gorgeous it is from up here.” I turn to see the harbor spreading wider and wider below us as we ascend, and then the open ocean beyond, dotted with islands, and the beginning of night lying flat against the horizon.

“Please don’t do that. Please don’t move around.” He is leaning forward, gripping the circular bar.

“You mean like this?” I shift my weight the slightest bit, a little forward, a little back.

“Please don’t,” he whimpers.

I’m a little shocked by what a baby he is.

We move and stop again, right at the very top. All the color is gone from Neal’s face, and his eyes are clenched shut.

“It’s beautiful up here. The harbor is full of boats and the water is so still.”

We begin to move again, dropping down.

“Okay,” he says, exhaling. “Okay.”

“Do you want to get out?’

“No. I’ll get used to it.”

“Are you sure? They let kids off all the time if they start freaking out.”

“No. I can do this.”

We circle down and around several times. He keeps his eyes closed. He says he’s sorry a few times. He tries to smile. I can still see the boy in him if I squish up his features, darken his freckles, thicken the hair slightly. When he smiles I see the same square teeth, the gap between the front ones gone. He must have had braces sometime after eighth grade.

Very carefully he leans back in his seat. “I thought you were leaving. I thought you were already gone.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe Berkeley is a little overrated after all.”

“Unlike fried dough and the Tilt-a-Whirl.” He smiles and I see his teeth again, and the gap, even though it’s been closed up.

“Exactly.”

“Seriously, Daley. What happened?” He is squinting, peering out at me through tiny slits.

“Seriously, the chair of the department won’t give me an extension. I had to be there Wednesday or not at all.”

“I thought your father was doing okay.”

“He is. But he needs help getting where he needs to go.”

He doesn’t say anything. I can’t tell what he’s thinking or what he knows about my father. There’s probably a lot I don’t know.

“How long have you been living here?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “A long time.”

“How long?”

“Nearly ten years.”

“Jesus.” I thought he was going to say one or two. Ten years means he dropped out of college. I don’t do a very good job disguising my horror.

He laughs. “I know. I’m Ashing’s own George Willard.”

We read Winesburg, Ohio in eighth grade. I’m smiling, but his eyes are sealed tight now. “So aren’t you going to tell me to get out while I can and follow my dreams?” I say.

“No, I hate advice,” he says, then adds, “Live your life. There. That’s my advice.”

“Are you living your life?”

“No.”

I laugh. “You didn’t have to think very hard for that answer.”

Our compartment stops and swings. Neal groans. People down below are being let off. We will be one of the last.

“I wrote an essay about you in graduate school.” There is something about his eyes being shut that makes me able to speak my thoughts.

“What?”

“You called my chest concave, and I wrote that that moment was my initiation into the world of the male gaze.”

“I never called you concave.” He sounds like he knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“Not to my face. But Stacy told me.”

“I didn’t. That’s not what I said.”

“Well, I got an A on the essay.”

Our compartment stops suddenly at the base of the wheel and the man slides open the bolt and swings the little door wide. “Great ride,” Neal says to the man.

We head back toward town. The way he walks beside me, a sort of long bounce, reminds me of his performance in The King and I. There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know, I can hear him sing. I laugh out loud.

“What?”

His eyes seem abnormally large now that they are open, and I laugh again.

“Jesus, what?”

“Nothing. Or, rather, too many things.”

“I think I liked it better with my eyes closed.”

“Why?”

“I feel like every time you look at me you’re asking, Why are you here? Why are you here?”

“I’m not. Honestly, I was just thinking about what a good King of Siam you were. That’s all.”

“Same thing.”

When we reach his shop he pulls out keys from his pocket.

“You’re going back to work?”

“I live here. Up top.” He points to a few dark windows on the second floor.

“I thought you lived with your parents.”

“I’m pathetic, but not that pathetic.”

I worry for a moment that he’ll ask me up, but he says good night and disappears into the dark store. A few seconds later a light goes on above, though I can only see the ceiling from where I’m standing. He doesn’t come to the window. I’m not sure why I thought he would. I start walking again. When I pass the sub shop, three teenage girls are coming out, still drinking their sodas.

“C’mon,” the first one says, tugging the next one by the sleeve.

“No!” she says jerking her arm away. “I told you it’s not true.”

“C’mon. He lives right down there. We’ll go ask him and find out.”

“No!” she shrieks as the other begins to run down the sidewalk. The third girl is doubled over laughing. But she is all talk, the first one, and when she gets to Neal’s door she only pretends to knock. Eventually the other two drag her toward the carnival.

My father is outside the church, smoking a cigarette with the man in work pants from the first night. This man looks a little like Garvey, the way he holds his cigarette backward, pinches it between thumb and forefinger, the lit end hidden by his palm. I wave and get in the car. Next to him, my father looks old, his hair no longer sprinkled with gray but an even silver. His stoop is more pronounced, his neck angling away from the back collar of his blazer, leaving a gap. His sidewalk conversation is always jocular; he speaks to people, men and women, as if they are about to go out onto a field. Take it easy, he always says upon leave-taking, take it easy, says the man who has never taken it easy. But right now with this guy my father is listening, nodding gravely, looking up over the top of the library across the street and then saying something serious. They speak for a few minutes after their cigarettes have been pressed out on the walk-way, and then they pat each other on the arm and separate.

My father gets in the car and lets out a long breath.

I start the engine and pull out into the street.

“I tell you, no one’s got it easy, that’s for sure.”

I look at him. There is pain on his face, pain for someone else. My father is feeling compassion.

The dashboard starts beeping.

“What the fuck is that?”

“It wants you to put on your seatbelt, Dad.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Is it going to tell me when to piss, too?”

He leans toward me to snap in the buckle — it’s tricky, you have to go in at just the right angle. He groans, then gets it, then says, “What’s that smell?”

“I don’t know.” The Datsun is old and has lots of smells.

“Food or candy or something.”

“Fried dough?”

“Disgusting. You’re eating that crap before dinner?”

“Two fat slabs of it.”

“Just like your mother,” he says. He’s right. I’d forgotten that. It’s just like her.

We pass Neal’s lit windows, then the carnival. The Ferris wheel makes its big turns. A feeling is pooling inside me, flooding my chest and up into my throat and down the backs of my calves. It’s a minute or so before I recognize it. Happiness.

16

My father plings across the linoleum in his golf spikes. He can’t find his five-iron.

“That goddamn Frank musta swiped it.”

He goes to look in the mudroom again.

“That kid was never any good. I don’t care what kind of snazzy job he has now or how many zeros he gets in his paycheck. He stole my fucking golf club!” He clenches his fists. His face is bright red. The dogs dance around him, misunderstanding his excitement.

I know I’ve seen the striped rubber handle of a golf club somewhere. Then I remember. “It’s in the poolhouse.”

“What?” he says, but he’s remembering it, too.

He marches across the grass and returns with it. I can tell he wishes he hadn’t found it. It makes him madder. “Now I’m late. Now I’m really late.” But in fact he’ll still be early to the club. Tee off isn’t till nine.

When the dogs have returned from chasing his car down the driveway, they clamber around me while I unload the dishwasher, waiting for our walk. Just as I’m about to fasten on their leashes, the front doorbell rings. The dogs jerk away from me, howling and scrambling as fast as they can toward the sound, barking even louder once they get there. No one but the mailman ever comes to the front door, and he rarely has reason to knock. The dogs are going crazy. It’s someone very unfamiliar to them. Neal Caffrey? I go to the door.

But it’s not Neal through the windows. It’s Jonathan.

For him to be standing right here now, he’s been driving since he hung up the phone yesterday morning. He’s wearing one of his better shirts, the striped one he defended his dissertation in. I quickly drag the dogs by their collars back into the kitchen and shut them in, then run back to yank the sticky front door open.

I am ashamed about the barking, ashamed that he looks different to me here on the front terrace of this house. “You’ve gone in the wrong direction, Mr. Magoo.” It comes out funny, like I have a frog in my throat, because I’m already crying.

“I know it,” he says, and he wraps his arms around me. He smells like coffee and Doritos and, when I press my nose into the side of his neck, our life in Michigan. I try not to shake.

When I trust my voice, I say, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I called from Des Moines, kept going as far as Omaha, and turned around.”

I feel weak, as if I haven’t eaten for a while, though I just had cereal. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to have to say anything more. I kiss him and he kisses back. I feel him growing hard against me and I press into him, but he pulls back. And then he drops his arms and we are separate again.

I’m still holding the dogs’ leashes. He stares at them in my hand. His eyes are red and his mouth doesn’t seem to be able to hold a shape. I’ve never seen him not in full possession of himself.

“Come in.” I step toward the door.

He shakes his head.

“My father’s not here.”

“I’m not afraid of him. Do you think I’m afraid of him?”

“No.” I feel very small, very young. I want to say something that will return him to me. I flail for the first thing that comes to mind. “I saw this raccoon the other day. It had knocked over our trash can, torn into the bag, and was sitting on top of the barrel eating a piece of Swiss cheese, just holding it in two hands like a newspaper and nibbling at the top.”

He smiles at my effort. He takes both my hands. He’s about to say something serious, then changes his mind. “What’s an elk? I might have seen an elk. Right beside the highway. In the median strip. It had these antlers.” He drops my hands and spreads out his arms. There are huge round sweat stains under each one. “They went out to here. It was absurd. I don’t know why he didn’t just fall over.”

I try to laugh.

“You need to come with me now.”

“Jon.”

He looks up at the house, which seems its largest from this spot on the front terrace, fanning out with rows of old windows and shutters on both sides and up three stories, and then the dormer windows on a very tiny fourth floor that’s just storage but makes it seem absurdly tall. “I don’t understand one thing that has happened in the last two weeks.”

“I need to stay a little bit longer.”

“No, you don’t. You need to leave now.”

“I can’t be the next person who gives up on him.”

“You would not be giving up on him. Daley, you’re his grown daughter. He knows you need to live your life.”

“He’d feel abandoned. And he’s already come so far. He likes AA. He likes those meetings.”

“Why are we talking about AA? What does AA have to do with our life? Daley—” He steps away and presses his lips between his teeth.

“He won’t go if I leave. I know he won’t.”

“Then he’s not really doing it for himself, is he?”

“Not yet, not entirely. But he will, when he gets stronger.”

“How can he grow stronger when you’re here letting him be weak? That’s not how people grow stronger. He needs to do it on his own.”

“He needs something to lean on right now. I’m like a splint for his broken leg.”

“At what cost, Daley? The splint eventually goes in the trash. Has it occurred to you that your mother and your stepmother tried for years and years to be splints, too?”

“But they wanted more from him than I do.”

“Oh, Daley, you want so much more than they ever did. You want the daddy you never got. You want him to make your whole childhood okay.”

“This isn’t about me. It’s about him.”

“I know it doesn’t look like it’s about you. You’ve got it nicely cloaked in a gesture of great sacrifice.”

“Jon, we would be stronger if I had a better relationship with my father.”

“This is what I mean.”

“I’m just saying it has its advantages.”

“Daley.” He takes me by both shoulders. His eyes are bloodshot and sad. “You can’t stay here. Everything is at stake for you. Don’t you get that? You lose this job and—”

“And I lose a job. That’s all. I will be a person who lost a job.” Across the street Mr. Emery has come out of his house and is standing in his driveway looking at us. Jonathan doesn’t notice. I shake off his grip on my shoulders. “I have this window of time, right here, right now, to help my father. It’s the only window I’ll ever get. And I’m the only one who can do it.”

“It must feel good to play God.”

Why do people keep saying this? “He has been sober for eleven days.”

“I know a lot of people I could try and save, and it would be futile for me to try. You know that.”

“This is my father, Jonathan.”

“Why was having a father never important to you until right now, right when we’re about to move in together?”

“Please don’t make this about us. It’s not about us.”

“What the hell is it about then? A week ago it was you and me and California, and now it’s this creepy town and a house built by the goddamn pilgrims and the bigot in residence.” He moves toward the steps, to his truck parked in the semicircle below. And then comes back. “Have you already called Oliver Raskin?”

“Yes.”

“And this is fine with him?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s giving the position to someone else.”

Somehow this is the thing that makes it real for him. I watch his eyes fill up. “Why are you sabotaging your life like this?”

Julie cried for my joy, and now he is crying for my loss. But I feel very little. All these words feel like mashed-up cardboard in my mouth. Mr. Emery, I see, has gone back inside.

He pinches the tears off the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. Then he laughs. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Jonathan.” He is on the other side of the terrace now. “Nothing has changed. I want to be with you. I want a life with you.”

“Not enough. You don’t want it enough.”

Can he not understand that this is not my choice? Wouldn’t he do the same in my position? “What is wrong with you?” Anger snakes its way up. I don’t care what Mr. Emery hears. “Why can’t you get this? Why can’t you see that I don’t want to do this but that I have to do it? Yes, we had a plan. And now I’ve changed the plan slightly. Why can’t you adjust to that?”

“Slightly? You have not changed the plan slightly.” His voice is deep and bare. “You said you were going to work at Berkeley. I turned down Temple to be with you. And then instead of going to California, you came here. For two days, you said. And then you said, six days more. And now you’ve given up the job. Why should I trust that you will ever come to California?”

“I will, Jon.”

“I don’t believe you. You know, you can poke fun at me and my plans, but I have no options. If I want to eat, if I want a roof over my head, if someday I want to support a family, I have to have a plan. But there are no real consequences to your choices. Because you can just set a match to everything and your daddy will pay the bills. Grad school wasn’t just pretend for me.”

I’ve been on my own for eight years. I had a smaller stipend at Michigan than Jonathan. We were impoverished together. And now he’s twisting it all around. “You know what? Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.” I’ve never seen his mouth so tight, so mean.

He turns and drops down the stairs. Such a base ending. No better than an exchange between my father and Catherine.

I hear the truck start up, old and loud, and then the tires in the white gravel, and then silence as he reaches the pavement and is gone.

My father comes home from golf well after lunch. For a moment I think he is drunk. For a moment I see a mirage, a flashback to his drinking face, a slackness around the mouth, guilt in the yellow eyes. But as he gets closer and lifts his eyes and catches me watching from the kitchen, he changes back.

“We took no prisoners,” he says when he comes in. Then he looks at me closely. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Just tired.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go out to eat tonight. Anyplace you want.”

17

July passes.

In the mornings, if he doesn’t have a tennis or golf date, my father is full of industry around the house. He mows the grass on his tractor, cleans the pool and gives it its chemicals, or weeds the vegetable garden and goes to the dump. He likes to putter, to play with his tools in the garage, to walk back and forth from house to garage to shed to poolhouse with a purpose I can’t always discern. Occasionally he sits at his desk in the den with his reading glasses on and pays bills. He seems not to miss work in the least. I try to appear industrious too, though I am tired of industry. There is a thick caul of inertia around me. I walk the dogs to the beach, around to Littleneck Point, downtown to Neal’s store. I have begun an essay for lay readers about poverty and community in the Sierra Juarez, but I can’t find my bearings. I can’t get past the second page.

If I’m not careful, my father will have us on the tennis court most afternoons, so I have to come up with alternative activities. At the beginning of August, when my father has a yellow thirty-days-sober chip in his pocket, we drive a half-hour north to the Hook’s Island ferry, which is a glorified raft with flaking green railings and a few benches. Neither of us have ever been to Hook’s. We stand at the stern and my father looks out at the water, at the small white wake and the lobster pots and the handful of Whalers and sailboats moored close to shore, at the gulls who are squawking and diving into the same churning patch of water. The temperature drops as we pull farther from land. The ocean lies in strips of color: pale lavender, powder blue, cobalt, navy. My father looks but he does not comment on its beauty. It may be the first time he’s seen the open ocean all summer.

“My mother rented a house on an island one summer,” he says. “Reminds me of this.”

“I thought you always went to Boothbay.”

“That was after she married Hayes. He had that house in Maine.”

“Where was the island?”

“I’m not sure. Duck Island, I think it was called. Or Buck Island. I was only five or six.”

“Just you and her?”

“And Nora.”

The ferry jerks suddenly and we turn to the bow and the island is right there, all beach at its edges, a hillock in the middle. There are no houses. The whole thing is a wildlife reserve. The boat slides into its slot. The August heat returns.

The tourists hoist their backpacks and wait for the ferryman to unhook the chain. We let a family go ahead of us, a squat man, a willowy wife, two kids with mountain bikes. They smile at us. I can see they recognize that I am a daughter on a picnic with her father. I feel a small swell of pride. I smile back.

The best beach, said the woman who sold us our ferry tickets, is on the other side of the island, and we follow the path she told us about through the woods. It is dim and cool, the ground sandy.

“We played a game with a white handkerchief,” my father says. “It rained a lot. There was a little box for kindling by the fireplace and I hid the handkerchief there every time. Every time. Because it made my mother laugh. I think it was in Canada,” he says.

Prince Edward Island? Campobello? But I don’t want to waste a question on place. I stay silent. I wonder if what they speak about in AA is making him look back. I don’t pry about his meetings; I don’t know if he has a sponsor or if he is doing the steps.

“Nora got sick and stayed in bed. And my mother had to play with me.”

Through the break in the trees I can see the crests of the dunes, overlapping, blown to sharp peaks by the wind.

“All my life I heard about how smart my mother was, how she won some big prize at Smith and wrote articles about her travels in Egypt for The New York Times even before she’d graduated. But you know what I saw most of the time? A woman sitting in a chair staring at nothing. Even before my father died. Maybe you’d hear her complain that the steak was overdone or her glass had spots or that I was making too much noise. But that was about it.”

“She sounds angry.”

“She was angry. Why? She had a comfortable life. Her parents left her plenty to live on.”

“Maybe she didn’t want a comfortable life. Maybe she wanted a challenging life. You’d shoot yourself if you had to be a smart woman in Dover, Massachusetts in 1930.”

We climb up between two high dunes. The ocean is darker over here, facing directly east, the waves more dramatic. I have read that at sea level the horizon is always only three and half miles away, but right now this seems impossible. I am stunned by the great empty blue enormity of it. After we’d had sex in my car that first time, Jonathan and I sat on the small gravel beach and debated why large bodies of water are so alluring. I said it was all about color, and he said it was space. No one could pave it or build on it or sell anything on it. It’s just a huge relief for our eyes, he said. But for me it’s something more. The water always seems to be saying something to me, urging something from me, though I never know exactly what it is.

“Why do you always do that?”

“Do what?

“Do what you just did with my mother.”

“What did I do with her?”

“Make it all be about her being a woman. It’s like what happened to that kid in Garvey’s class, David Stevens. You remember him? You probably wouldn’t. He wasn’t there long. Came in fifth grade, and then in seventh he cheated on a test and was given a warning. Next test, cheated again, and got kicked out. Parents made a huge deal about it, said it was because he was Jewish. No one knew he was Jewish! His name was Stevens, for chrissake. But for them, that was the reason. That poor kid never had to take responsibility for what he had done.”

I have a vague memory that there is more to the story, that there were two boys cheating and the other one had just been suspended, not expelled. But I don’t want to argue about the politics of Ashing Academy. “So you want me to just say, Wow, your mother was a basket case, and not look at why she might have been unhappy?”

“Don Finch’s mother was an appellate court judge. Shep Holliston’s was a doctor.”

“They were the exceptions.”

“So be an exception. Life’s not fair. It isn’t fair for you and it’s not fair for me. But if you say her life was awful because she was born a rich woman in the early twentieth century, I’m not going to shed any tears. Your generation seems to think men forced women to marry and shoved them in the kitchen. Let me tell you it wasn’t like that. We were the ones being railroaded into marriage.”

“Oh, come on, Dad.”

“It’s true. If you wanted to have sex with a decent girl.”

“From a good family.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“A girl you could take to the club.”

We’ve slid down the dunes and now walk along the beach, looking for a good spot.

“Listen, I don’t like all the whining your generation gets into.” He laughs. “Like that black woman last year who testified against the judge.”

“Anita Hill.”

“Anita Hill. What a beauty. Here she had an opportunity to see one of her own become a justice of the Supreme Court, and she threw herself down on the tracks. She comes out of nowhere to destroy him. First of all, do you really think an important fellow like that, a guy who had been working towards something like this his whole life, is really going to talk about a pubic hair on a can of Coke? And supposing he did, what would you do?”

“I have no idea.”

“I hope, I just hope, that you would get back to work.”

“Dad, Anita Hill didn’t come out of nowhere. When judges are nominated to the Supreme Court, they need references just like the rest of us, people who have worked with them and can answer questions about their character. So she told them what she knew. You could tell she didn’t enjoy it. But she had the courage to speak up and tell the committee that he consistently used his power over her to abuse her and oppress her with a barrage of pornographic language.”

“Sticks and stones.”

“Words are just as damaging, Dad.”

“People shoot the shit at work. If women can’t handle it, they should stay home.”

“Sorry. We’re not going to be herded from the workplace anymore. Women have been kept at home as slaves long enough.”

“That all sounds pretty, but are you a slave? Are your hands bound?”

“Not—”

“Just answer my question. Are you in chains right now?”

“No.”

“Do you have the right to free speech, to vote for the candidate of your choice, to pursue the career you want? Did you have trouble excelling in school because you were a woman? Did you get passed over for that professorship because you were a woman?”

“No, we’ve made progress but—”

“All right then.” He stops walking. “What’s in that picnic basket?”

We eat everything I’ve packed: chicken sandwiches, potato chips, watermelon slices.

“I tell you, Daley. Everyone’s always talking these days about advantages and privileges. Well, it only gets you so far. You know who’s had all the advantages and privileges I can think of?”

I know, but I shake my head.

“Garvey. He’s had ‘em all. Good schools, good breeding, good everything, and look at him.”

“I don’t want to talk about Garvey.”

“All I’m saying is that the guy will be lucky to get into the Rotary Club someday.”

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Garvey and I think you know that. It’s too bad you had such a specific idea of who he should be.”

My father sits on his towel, tall pointy knees up near his shoulders, pouring sand onto a piece of cellophane. A family nearby has gone swimming and the gulls are pecking at their open box of saltines. “You know,” he says, “when Garvey was in the fourth form, he won a prize for a short story. Your mother and I went to this big event and all the runners-up read their stories and then Garvey gets up there last. His tie is crooked, his shirt untucked, and he reads the most boring godawful thing you’ve ever heard in your life about these people going to a cocktail party. Somebody passed around a flask of gin and thank God for that.”

“What happened in the story?”

“Nothing! I couldn’t understand for the life of me how it won first prize.”

“What did Mom think?”

“Oh, Garvey was the Christ child to her. He could do no wrong.”

I smile. She would have understood that the story had been a satire.

“Did you like St. Paul’s, Dad, when you were there?”

“Yeah, it was all right. Except for the religion. Chapel every five minutes.”

“Do you see any of your friends from there?”

“No. They all went to New York or someplace. I was in touch for a while with my tennis coach, who was also my history teacher, though I didn’t do so well in his classes. He was a friend, young guy at the time. But then I saw him in Boston once and that was it.”

“What do you mean?” I picture a sexual advance, a hand placed on my father’s thigh.

“He called me up and told me to meet him at a fancy French restaurant and when the check came he just let me pay. A hundred bucks for two people, which was a hell of a lot of money then. He calls me, chooses the restaurant, and then has me pay for the whole thing. I never spoke to him again. He was a good guy, though. Great player. But that whole thing was a setup.”

I can feel how open he is. It’s like I could ask him anything. “Did your mother drink?”

He nods. “Even though Nora was sick that week on the island, every night she had to get up and help my mother to bed.”

“Do you think it started when your father died?”

“No idea. But it didn’t improve when she married Hayes, that’s for sure.”

“Was he a drinker, too?”

“I think so. But with him it was harder to tell. He was a big guy. I was a little pipsqueak next to him.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, he never hit me.” I notice a slight emphasis on me.

“Your mother?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Yeah. Well,” he says, pushing the cellophane down deep and smothering it with sand. “They’re all dead now. Good riddance.”

He lies down then, tips his face away from the sun, and very soon his hand twitches twice and he is asleep. I walk down to the water. The sand is loose and cold and a wave breaks and rushes at my ankles, then pulls away hard, sucking the sand beneath everything but the very center of my feet. The outdoors always brings Jonathan so much closer. He’d stand here with me and feel the sand get sucked away, feel the thin line beneath each foot you were left balancing on. I can feel his fingers on my arm as I start to walk back to the towel. Wait, he’s saying, one more time. Why didn’t I take him to Ruby Beach? Why didn’t we go right there? I’d had the dogs’ leashes in my hand. We could have watched the dogs sprint down to the water in their clouds of sand. We would have said different things there. We never would have been so cruel to each other. When I think of our exchange of fuck-yous I feel like someone is lighting my stomach on fire.

I read The Gate of Angels on my towel. I dab sunblock on my father’s nose when it begins turning red, and he barely wakes up, just murmurs a thank-you and drifts off again. Eventually I put my book down and try to rest, too.

But I can’t. Resting and sleeping have become harder since Jonathan was here. My mind churns. It wants to pore over what happened on the terrace, and then it wants to go back. It wants to relive everything, as if in the process it can change the ending. Now we’re on his bed, the first time I ever spent the night at his place. We’ve been touching and talking for hours. It’s 3 A.M. and he’s lying against me sideways, his head on my stomach, the backs of his fingers running along the inside of my arm. He’s telling me about Wicker Street.

“I was surprised the first time someone referred to my building as ‘the project on Wicker Street.’ Projects were something else. The projects weren’t where we lived.” When he entered fourth grade he had to go to a white school they were trying to integrate thirty minutes away. To get inside the school from the bus, they had to walk through a thin space between two lines of white parents hollering at them to go home. “We would have liked to go home, let me tell you.” Their parents told them to keep their heads down and keep walking. They put their fists in their pockets. “There’s a photo of it my mother cut out of the newspaper. If you look really closely you can see the outline of my friend Jeff’s middle finger flipping them all the bird.” Once they got into the school they were fine. It was the parents who gave them the most trouble. His first white friend was a boy named Henry. Henry had a cat, and whenever they went to Henry’s house this cat would be curled up on the couch and Henry would give it a stroke and then Jonathan would give it a stroke and it would leap five feet in the air.

The worst thing he could be called by one of his older brothers, he told me, was white. “They’d see me playing with my friends and they’d say we played white. This brown pair of shoes my mother bought me was white. The way I took off my shirt was white. And then my mother would knock me upside the head and say I was acting like a nigger.”

When his mother got her nursing license, they moved into their own house. They had a backyard with one tree. “I remember sitting alone in the evening on the grass one of the first nights we lived in that house and looking up at that tree, just a slender little tree with smooth bark, and I got this feeling about the tree, that I liked it and it liked me. And it occurred to me that the tree didn’t care if I was black or white. Really, honestly, didn’t care. It didn’t matter to the tree. And for a few seconds I kind of felt like I was floating. I think that’s the first time and maybe the last time I felt free, truly free.”

“From being black?” I asked.

“From being anything but what I really was.”

“Get away, you fucker. Get the fuck away!” My father is swatting at a seagull. It has hopped out of reach but is still looking intently at the corner of plastic wrap sticking out of the sand. “Oh for God’s sake, take it.” But when he throws it, the seagull isn’t interested. “I don’t know what you want, then. I can’t help you.” He sits up. “Let’s get out of here.”

I think we can make the four o’clock ferry, but we hear it pull out while we’re still in the woods.

“Jesus H. Christ,” my father says, his fists clenched tight.

“It’ll come right back. They leave every half-hour.”

He looks at me as if I’ve arranged it all on purpose. He’s a little boy who’s woken up from his nap in a terrible mood.

“Take a few deep breaths, Dad.”

“And you take a long walk off a short pier. Christ, I need a drink.”

“Very funny.” But I see he wasn’t joking. He’d forgotten. I watch the rage pour into his face.

“You know what, Daley?” Day-lee.

Before he can tell me what, I say, “I don’t want to hear it. Just keep it to yourself. You’re in a shitty mood and I’m in a shitty mood so let’s just get on the ferry and go home.”

“I’m not going to that goddamn meeting tonight.”

I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve even rehearsed my calm response. “Okay.”

“I am so sick of those people and their problems. I don’t have anything in common with them. Nothing.”

“Except that you want a drink.”

At quarter of seven that night he calls up to my room. When I come down into the kitchen he’s showered and dressed and standing by the door.

18

When I was little my father loved to surprise people. It was not uncommon for him to go upstairs during a dinner party and come down in a Marie Antoinette wig and my mother’s underwear. Once he gave us all presents on his birthday. At Christmas there was always something unexpected: a kitten, a drum set, a new car in the driveway. But if the surprise was revealed prematurely, look out. Garvey never received the Ping-Pong table he found in the shed two days before his birthday, and my father never spoke to Mr. Timmons again after he told my mother to have a good time in Hawaii — which was to be a surprise for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Apart from their abrupt departures, neither my mother nor Catherine had been much for creating surprises themselves, and I doubted his unhappy mother or even Nora, who was kind but not playful, had done much in the way of the unexpected for him. So I decide to throw my father a surprise party on the twenty-ninth of August, which is both his birthday and his sixtieth day of sobriety.

I stop by Neal’s to ask if he knows any caterers. He gives me the number of someone named Philomena. His shop is empty so we sit on the stoop. The town is fogged in this morning, the air so wet and briny it’s hard to inhale, as if salt and seaweed have been ground up into it. Even without the sun, it’s already hot. Neal is wearing shorts, which look funny on him and he seems to know it. He keeps covering his pale knees with his hands. His hair has curled into ringlets around his ears.

“How do you know her?”

It would be just like Neal to have a girlfriend named Philomena.

“She’s an old friend of the Dead Girl.”

“Who?”

He looks down at his hands. “A girl I used to know.”

“But she’s not really dead.”

“No.”

“Bad breakup?”

He nods. I wait to see if he’ll say anything more about it.

“You ever had your heart smashed to pieces?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I mean really broken. Everybody walks around saying they’ve had their heart broken, but they mean they went out on two dates and they really liked the guy and he never called back. Or they’re like my brother, who went out with this truly awful girl for two years and all he did was complain and make fun of her and then she slept with someone else and he said his heart was broken in two. And then he had a new girlfriend by Tuesday. I’m not talking about that kind.”

“You’re talking about waking up every morning feeling like someone has beaten you up and you can’t quite take a regular breath.”

Neal shuts his eyes. “Yes.”

We sit there. Cars goes by. There’s a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in the window now. I read it last winter for the first time. One morning I was reading it on Jonathan’s couch while he vacuumed. He was much neater than I was. I’ve never owned a vacuum cleaner. “I’m the third sex,” he said as he went by. “But ain’t nobody written a book about me yet.”

“What happened?” Neal asks.

“I lost the job and the guy. No deferments for either.”

“He’ll come around.”

“I don’t think he will. I would have heard from him by now.” I still jump every time the phone rings, still feel hopeful when the mail arrives. I’ve called information, but there’s no listing for him on Paloma Street or anywhere else in the Bay Area.

“What’s his name?”

“Jonathan.” It hurts to say the syllables. I need to get off the subject. “And your Dead Girl?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t say it anymore.”

“What happened?”

“Too long a story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“I don’t.”

“Just give me a detail.”

“Started freshman year of college and ended six years later in a Pottery Barn at the Chestut Hill Mall.”

I lean back against the doorjamb. “C’mon. A few more.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t get all settled in for a good yarn. Girls are always like that, always trying to leech everything out of you.”

“No, girls are not always like that. Women—those are people of the female sex eighteen and over — aren’t either. I happen to be interested because I am a behavioral anthropologist. Or was. What happened at the Pottery Barn?”

“She was going to move in with me. Here.” He points upstairs. “I wouldn’t pay for half the bed we were buying. I had the money; I just thought it should be clean — she buys the bed, I buy the couch. Just in case. And she turned it into this whole big thing about trust and commitment.”

“Which it sounds like it was.”

“Yeah. I’ve had a few years to replay the scene about ten thousand times. It was.”

“Where is she now?”

“I’m not sure. Vermont, maybe. Your turn. Tell me something about Jonathan.”

I wish I hadn’t told him his name. It feels like I’ve given him a gun with bullets.

He leans back on his elbows.

“Don’t get comfy.”

He laughs. “Just go.”

But there is no story yet. It’s just a tight searing knot.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, giving me the slightest shoulder nudge.

A woman and her daughter come up the steps with a long summer reading list. “We’re a little late, but she reads fast,” she says, handing the sheet of paper to Neal.

“Ashing Academy,” he says, waving it at me.

“Renaissance Cup, 1978,” I say to them, pointing at Neal who’s heading inside.

“Really?” the mother says, impressed.

He points back at me. “You do that again and you will be banned from this store.” And then he is all business, gathering the books for them, and I rouse the dogs from their naps and we go home.

I mail invitations to my father’s closest friends, the ones who have not sided with Catherine, the ones he speaks of more or less fondly. I buy tiki torches and hide them in Neal’s storage room. In the thrift shop I run into the bohemian woman who is often late to the meetings, and she tells me her name is Patricia and that she’s enjoyed getting to know my father, so I invite her, too.

If I could make my father deaf for two weeks I would. I am terrified someone will slip and mention the party. When we are downtown together, I feel quite ready to lunge at the throat of anyone I suspect is about to blurt out the secret. Every time he comes home from the hardware store or the dump or a meeting, I wait for him to tell me he does not want a fucking surprise party. And when finally, very casually, I ask what he might like to do on his birthday, he says, “Nothing. I hate birthdays.”

I reassure him that we’ll have a quiet dinner at home with the dogs. And when the night comes I tell him I want to make a special meal and ask him to drive himself to his meeting. It’s the first time I haven’t accompanied him, but it feels fine. It feels like it’s time. As soon as he’s gone, Philomena and her team arrive and we begin quickly setting up tables and chairs on the lawn beside the poolhouse. Mrs. Bridgeton comes early with several big pots of hydrangeas that she puts around the pool, and helps me arrange the flowers and candles for the tables.

“I remember you in a fuzzy pink bathrobe passing out hors d’oeuvres at all the parties your mother used to have. You were such a precious little thing. And now here you are, throwing a grown-up party all by yourself.”

The pale blue hydrangeas look beautiful. It’s exactly what my mother would have done.

Neal has volunteered to waylay my father outside the church. I told him to ask my father if he’d seen Billy Hatcher, the Red Sox outfielder, steal home a few weeks ago. That conversation will last a good half-hour. My father cannot stop reliving the moment.

At seven-thirty my father’s old friends begin appearing around the pool. I asked them to park well beyond our driveway so they come on foot. They come in summer attire, cotton prints in bright colors. They are a clean, well-groomed generation. They smell of flowers and spices and booze. I warned them in the invitation that no alcohol would be served, so they’ve come well lubricated.

Mrs. Keck takes hold of my hands and won’t let go. She is much more frail than I remember her. “This is a wonderful thing you’re doing for your dad.” Her head wobbles. Parkinson’s. She looks around at the tables covered in white cloths, the delphinium in jars and the torches lit and flashing in the dusk. “A very wonderful thing.”

And then the phone rings in the poolhouse. It can mean only one thing. Neal didn’t find my father outside the church. He is AWOL. I pick it up.

“The eagle has flown.” I can tell he’s smiling. And then he hangs up.

I am scared. I’ve lost most of the feeling in my hands. My father’s car turns up the driveway. I can see it through the tree trunks, slowing as he makes the turn and sees the pool and the tables and the torches. He comes to a full stop before the poolhouse. His window is down.

“What the hell are you people doing here?”

“Surprise!” everyone says in unison, though I never suggested anything of the sort.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, and drives on into the garage.

When he comes across the lawn, people call surprise again and he shakes his head. People go to greet him. His face is red. I can’t tell if his smile is fake or real. One of Philomena’s helpers approaches him with a plate of smoked salmon on crackers and he takes one and nods his thanks.

“Where’s Daley?” he says with his mouth full. “Daley, get over here!” But he is coming over to me, pointing a finger. “You do all this? You plan all this?”

I nod.

“But when I left you said—”

“I know. It’s a surprise party, Dad. I had to lie a little.”

“But none of this was here. And who are those people in aprons?”

“Caterers.”

“Caterers.” He says the word like he hasn’t been to thousands of catered parties in his lifetime. “Jesus Christ.” He turns around and looks at the tables set with china. One of the servers is filling the water glasses. “Everyone’s staying for dinner?”

I tell him they are. “Prime rib,” I say, because I know he wants to know.

“Just like Sunday nights at the club.”

He seems a little in shock. People come up and speak to him, and he is buffeted around on the grass. He makes responses, but all the while he is looking around like he’s never seen the place before. My mother had plenty of parties like this, fundraisers for so many different candidates and causes.

“Let me get you a club soda, Dad. Then we can eat.”

We’ve set up a table with juices and sparkling water near the diving board. It’s too far away and not many have found it. The glasses are still spread out neatly, the bottles full. I have no idea what my father is feeling, so I have no idea what to feel myself. I pour the soda and feel scared to turn back around.

“Boy, you were right about Billy Hatcher. He had a lot to say.”

It’s still strange to hear Neal’s voice again. I don’t understand why it’s soothing to hear a remnant from my past when my past was not soothing.

I smile and watch my father over his shoulder.

“You can relax now,” Neal says. “You did it.”

“I don’t know if he’s enjoying himself.”

“It doesn’t matter. You did something kind for him. You can’t control his response to it.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Now have a cranberry fizz.” He hands me a cup and knocks his own against it. “Cheers.” I wonder if Neal is a drinker, if he gets plastered every night upstairs in his little apartment by himself. I wonder if he, too, had something before he came.

Not surprisingly, I’ve had my share of alcoholic boyfriends. The last was a Brit who hid his addiction well for a while and then, when I was safely smitten, flaunted it like something he was vastly proud of. He was sharp and sexy and always horny, no matter how much he’d put away. I had fast, intense orgasms when he was drunk. And then he hit me, at a party. It wasn’t a hard blow and didn’t even leave the proof of a bruise on my face. After that I learned how to spot even the very sly ones. Dan was one, and I figured it out before I saw him drink anything at all, knew it the minute he started pounding on the steering wheel. Jonathan and I liked the taste of red wine, but neither of us enjoyed the feeling of being drunk or even buzzed, and an open bottle could hang around his apartment for weeks. Drinking was something neither of us remembered to do very often.

“I need to give this to him. And there’s Patricia.” I pour another cranberry soda and take one to my father and one to Patricia at the edge of the lawn. Thinking she’ll need to be introduced I lead her toward the party, but she seems to know nearly everyone.

I feel like my mother, greeting, kissing, directing the servers, integrating the guests. Now and then I sense Jonathan watching me, angry, cynical, shaking his head and muttering, And so another Ashing socialite is born. Or maybe it’s Garvey. Jonathan would just be shaking his head, still in shock. You gave up me and Berkeley for this? In California it is still afternoon. Whoever has my job has already begun the fall semester. The urban kinship project is well under way. But with the last of my own money I have thrown a catered party in the suburbs.

“When I left the house she was making a nice dinner for two!” I hear my father say. “She got me good, I tell you. She got me good.”

I manage to get everyone seated at a table, and the servers come immediately with salads. My father and I sit with the Bridgetons, the Utleys, Neal, and Patricia.

The sky has gone quickly black. The five tables are close together on the lawn, a candle on each that lights our plates and faces but nothing beyond. It feels very intimate, exactly what I imagined. For the first few moments it is quiet. No one is drunk. No one is squawking. Everyone seems to be taking it all in, as I am.

Mr. Gormley at the table next to us breaks the silence. “Well, we haven’t been to such a classy event at this address in years. Usually you go over to Gardiner’s for drinks and you end up on the roof wearing a hula hoop!”

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” my father says.

The main course arrives. I check my father’s plate: a thick slice of prime rib, very rare, bathed in jus, very few vegetables, exactly how I asked Philomena to prepare his plate.

“Hey, hey,” he says looking down at it. Then he looks at me. “You are something, you know that.”

“No, you are something, Dad.”

“Yeah, something awful.”

“No, Gardiner,” Barbara Bridgeton says. She is on his other side, patting his hand. I see Patricia lift her head. “You are very special to all of us.”

“Hear, hear!” Mr. Utley says, raising his plastic cup of soda water. Mile High Mr. Utley, Garvey and I used to call him, because he’s at least six-five.

“How’s that shop of yours doing?” Mr. Bridgeton asks Neal.

“Let’s just say I don’t think my gross profit will outdo IBM this quarter.”

Mr. Bridgeton, who works for IBM, looks momentarily confused, then laughs. “If you’ve got anything in that store as good as Shogun, I’ll come and get it tomorrow.”

“I remember reading that the author had been a prisoner of war in Japan,” Patricia says. She is mothlike, thin and slightly translucent. “And that he was treated very badly and nearly starved to death.”

“Is that right?” my father says. I wonder what they know about each other. Like my father, she goes to the meeting every night.

“But then he wrote this sensitive portrait of that country, which in the end made the English look like the barbarians.”

“Huh,” my father says.

They recommend in AA that if you’re single you do not get into a romantic relationship until you are sober a year. It seems like good advice. I hope Patricia will still be around by then. I like her, and I think she likes my father, though he seems entirely oblivious.

“I’ve never had a better prime rib,” he says, putting down his fork, vegetables untouched.

After the cake is served I stand and tap my glass.

“As many of you know, my father is a man of surprises. All my life he has surprised me with gifts, live animals, lectures, highly inappropriate jokes—” People laugh. “But nothing has surprised me more than his strength and determination these last two months. I couldn’t be more proud of him. Or more thankful. I love you, Dad.”

There is applause as I kiss his cheek and he hugs me and says something I can’t hear.

People start chanting “Speech, speech,” and my father who, despite his desire for attention, dreads all forms of public speaking, stands up.

“Well, you all outsmarted me, that’s for sure. Ben telling me he was going fishing with his son this weekend, and then Neal there pretending that he hadn’t seen Billy Hatcher steal home when he was actually at the game, the lucky bastard. So thank you all for showing up here tonight. I need to raise a glass to my daughter now because she did all this for me. She has given up so much for me—” The next word comes out as a squeak and he shakes his head and their are tears in the cracks of his skin around his eyes. He raises his cranberry soda and then sits down quickly and his napkin shakes in his fingers as he lifts it to wipe his face.

I pat his leg. He takes my hand and holds it tight. If Jonathan hadn’t thrown that party for me in June, I wouldn’t have given this night to my father. I wish he knew how grateful I am.

After dinner I change the music in the poolhouse to Glenn Miller, and when I come out people are already dancing in the grass and along the edge of the pool. Eventually nearly everyone gets up and bounces around. Only a couple of my father’s old friends, men who need a few drinks in order to dance, sit on lawn chairs and watch. My father, who has never needed even music to dance, spins me around. I see Neal dancing with Patricia, Mike dancing with Mrs. Keck, William with Philomena. Every time I look I see a different combination of people. When I’m dancing with Mr. Utley, Dad cuts in on Mr. Keck for Patricia. He spins her. Then he runs into the poolhouse and comes out with a lifesaver ring around his waist. The music turns slow and my father takes her hand in one of his and puts his other in the hollow of her back. Mr. Utley does the same with me. He is so tall my arms are reaching straight up, as if I’m climbing a ladder.

“I’ve never seen your father quite like this, Daley. You’re a good influence on him.”

Particia looks uncomfortable now. She is leaning away from him, and when the song ends she leaves the dancing area. She goes directly to her purse, shoulders it, and heads for her car.

I catch up with her before she reaches the driveway. “I’m sorry, Patricia. Did my father say something that offended you?”

“No, no. That’s not it. I’m just not feeling very well.”

“Please tell me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Please. I need to know what he said to you.”

She looks down at the keys in her hand. She just wants to leave. “He’s drinking, Daley.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know my father when he’s been drinking. I know exactly what that’s like.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I let her disappear into the darkness beyond the torches. I walk slowly back to the party. My father is dancing with Philomena, perhaps even more ridiculously than he danced with Patricia, still in the white ring, strutting like a chicken, a snorkel in his mouth like a rose. I see how she could have thought he was drunk. So much of him is still a child. But he isn’t drunk. He’s just himself, and he’s happy.

“Now that was a party,” my father says as we sit on the porch steps afterward while the dogs take their last pees before bed.

“What did you think when you pulled in?”

“Fire. I thought there was a fire.”

“The torches.”

“And all the people. I swear I saw some of them carrying buckets.”

I laugh.

“You probably don’t remember, but your mother used to have these kinds of parties, just like this: round tables, white tablecloths, waitresses. But they were never for me. It was always for some Democrat. She never even wanted me there. I hope she’s watching right now. I hope she saw what you did for me tonight.”

“How did you hear that she died, Dad?”

“We were playing paddle at the Chapmans’. Herbie Parker told me just as we were walking onto the court.”

I see the Chapmans’ paddle tennis court in the woods behind their house, the heavy stumpy paddle racquets, my father’s head bent to listen. I need my father to talk about her death. The party has brought her back for me too, all night long.

“And what did you feel?”

“Oh, God, I think I probably felt everything in the book. I didn’t play very well that day. I remember that.”

“And then what’d you do?”

“Went home. Catherine already knew. It was a shock. She was the first one of us to go.”

“Did you ever think about how I was feeling? Or Garvey?” This is hard. Everything in me starts quivering. “Because you never called or came by.”

“I guess I just couldn’t acknowledge it.”

“What? Her death?”

“No.” He looks down at his hands on his knees. “Your attachment to her.”

“Because it felt like a betrayal?”

“Something like that.”

“I wish it didn’t always have to be a competition.”

“Me too. “He puts his arm around me and kisses my forehead. It reminds me of Grindy. “I’m sorry, Daley.”

He’s never said that, not once, ever, for anything.

The dogs rustle around in the woods. It’s close to two in the morning. I feel heavy and tired.

My father stands up and the dogs come racing up the steps. “Well, I’ve had a lot of surprises in my life,” he says. “Most of them bad. But this was a good one.” He puts out his hand and pulls me up. “You’s a real keeper, you know that?”

He is steady on his feet. He smells like prime rib. Patricia was wrong. He is perfectly sober.

19

I can’t help calling Garvey the next day.

“Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’ve met a venture capitalist from Marblehead and the wedding’s next Saturday at the Episcopal Church.”

“He’s doing well, Garve. Day sixty-one.”

“It’s creepy the way you count the days like that.”

“It works.”

“It’s all going to end in tears. Remember how Mom used to say that whenever we were having fun? It’s all going to end in tears.”

I ask him how plans for the new branch in Hartford are going and he says he’s been interviewing “cuties” for the office manager position.

“You’ve heard of sexual harassment laws, right?”

“I’m not going to harass them. I’ll leave them alone afterward. Seriously, I did meet someone. This doctor who was moving out of her place, getting a divorce. We have a little sizzle going on. She’s having a party Saturday night.”

“You going?”

“I might, if I’m not too tired.”

He had a bad breakup a few years ago and now claims love is not worth the ugly ending.

“Come visit us.”

He laughs. “Not a chance.”

“What’d he say to you that morning, Garvey?”

“Nothing new.”

“He was in a lot of pain then.”

“And now with your magical anthropology PhD wand, you’ve erased it all.”

“What if he’s still not drinking at Thanksgiving. Will you come for that?”

“No.”

And then, that same morning, I get a phone call. My father hands me the phone and my heart is racing but the voice is female. It’s Mallory.

“I hear you’re throwing big parties,” she says.

“Only for people sixty and over,” I say. “Where are you?”

“Here, but we’re leaving this afternoon. Can you meet me at Baker’s Cove in an hour?”

I hitch up the dogs and grab the little bag with my notebook in it. It’s where I keep notes for a letter to Jonathan. I have fifteen pages of them already, fragments with no structure, like a bad freshman essay. I don’t know where to send it, if I ever manage to write it. I don’t know where he is. He terminated the lease on the cottage. The landlord sent me back the first and last months’ rent but not the security deposit. And when I called the philosophy department at SFSU, the receptionist had never heard of him. She was new, she said, but there was no one on the faculty with the last name Fleury.

It’s high tide so the cove isn’t too smelly. I climb out over the rocks to a little pool of water with its own tiny beach. The dogs find shade behind me and I sit for a long time with the notebook open, writing nothing.

I hear a thud, and a child’s pail with a white braided handle appears on the top of one of the rocks. And then a little girl, not more than six, crawls up, sees me, and sits down abruptly. She has inch-long pigtails just behind each ear. She scoots down the rock, her bucket bumping behind her. When she reaches sand, she drops the bucket and goes right to the water. The pool is no deeper than her knees. She wades in then stands still, bent over, hands on chubby thighs. She is wearing only the bottom of a red bikini with white bows on either side. She remains completely still until her hand shoots into the water and stirs up a cloud on the bottom and then quickly carries something with thrashing claws to the bucket.

“Gracie! My God. I asked you to wait on the rocks until I caught up.”

I only need to see the long O’s of her knees above me on the rocks to recognize Mallory. She climbs down carefully, a baby in a plaid pouch on her chest, beach bags in both arms.

“Which ones you got,” I say, “your mom’s Larks or your dad’s Winstons?”

She lets out one of her big laughs, deeper now. “Can you believe what delinquents we were? That one is starting to read now so I’m thinking I have to throw out all my old diaries so she doesn’t get any ideas. I was just telling her this morning about how we used to argue about whose dog was better.”

I hug her sideways, not wanting to squish the baby, who is so small and sound asleep. In grade school Mallory towered over me and was the kind of girl people called “big-boned.” But now she feels small in my arms, with bones no bigger than mine. Her hair is shorter, but her face is just the same.

“Mine was,” I call to Gracie. “Hers was boring.”

“That’s exactly what you said! I was so mad I didn’t speak to you for days. Her white dog was always filthy, Gracie.”

“Gray. The dog was a gray dog.”

“He needed a bath.”

“You’ve reproduced.”

She laughs again. She has a great laugh, like it comes all the way up from her feet. “I’m a factory. I’ve got a two-year-old boy back with my mother.” She scrunches up her face. “The challenging middle child.”

We laugh because that’s what Mallory is.

“I cannot believe it.” I’m about to add that I didn’t know she’d gotten married but then I have a flash of a memory of an invitation that most likely arrived after being forwarded a few times and right in the middle of some crisis: an overdue paper, 200 exams to be graded. Had I even responded? I can’t remember. Is it possible that I didn’t even RSVP to Mallory’s wedding? A small parade of wedding invitations flashes by: Ginny, Stacy, Pauline. I’m not sure I responded to any of them, certainly never sent a gift. It made no sense to me, why people wanted to get married.

She glances over at where I’ve been sitting in the sand with the notebook. “Can we join you?” she asks, and then she sees the dogs panting in the shade behind us. “What’s this? More dirty dogs?”

“You be nice. You’re a role model now.”

“God help us.” She spreads out two enormous beach towels and erects a little tent for the baby when it wakes up. She attaches a toy to its ceiling. “He blisses out on this hanging chicken thing.” From her cooler, she offers me a selection of juices in small bright boxes and a box of animal crackers.

“Those are mine!” Gracie calls as she drops what looks like a small lobster in the pail. “But you can have them.”

“She’s pretty fearless, isn’t she?”

“She’s obsessed with crustaceans. Whenever we come to Ashing we spend all our time at the water’s edge.”

“How far away are you?” On the phone she said she lives in New Hampshire now.

“About an hour and a quarter. We’re near Nashua.”

Nashua. It was the kind of name we would have made fun of when we were kids, the kind of place whose racetrack was advertised on channel 56. Nashua, we would have said in our pretend Boston nasal accents. Naaashua, New Hampsha. I expected Mallory to be living somewhere glamorous.

“The rumors are flying around town about you.” She laughs hard. “I even heard you were dating Neal Caffrey.”

“No dates, but he is my only friend here.”

“So you really are living in Ashing?”

“My father had a bit of a breakdown when Catherine left.”

“I heard she left. In June, right? Just like your mom.”

“Spring with him must be hell, I guess.”

Gracie howls and Mallory leaps up. Something pinched her finger. Mallory holds the baby’s head as she bends over Gracie in the water, but the baby wakes up anyway. By the time she returns to the towel he’s red and bleating and kicking. She unfastens a series of snaps and pulls out from the cup of her bathing suit an enormous veined udder with a wide brown center and an inch-long nipple which the child seizes in his mouth, sucking the skin up into pleats around his pumping lips. Jesus.

“I was always a little scared of your dad,” she says, then asks if I remember the time we missed the train and he and Catherine came to get us in Allencaster. I didn’t. She says she has a long diary entry about it, how I calmly told them there was a mistake in the schedule but they didn’t believe us. “I cried when they kept yelling at us, but you were so cool and controlled and never cracked.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Really? I swear, once you have kids — Gracie!” She jumps up again, baby still attached and sucking, and sprints to the water. She splashes in and plunges her left arm to the bottom while the right keeps the baby in position, and hauls up Gracie, whose face has momentarily lost its confidence.

“Breathe,” Mallory shouts, and whacks her on the back. And I watch as the color comes back into the child’s face. Then she looks down at the sandy bottom and up at her mother and bursts into tears. “It’s all right. You’re fine.” Mallory tries to wipe her wet hair out of her eyes but Gracie swats her away.

“I almost had an eel and you scared it away!”

Mallory smiles. “There are no eels here, honey. There’s never been an eel.” Which makes Gracie even more furious.

When Mallory comes back I want to compliment her on her patience but I feel like that might be insulting Gracie. The baby’s meal has gone on uninterrupted. His legs and most of the blue pouch are soaking wet but his eyes press tighter shut each time he sucks.

“You’re thinking, and that’s not even the complicated child.”

I laugh.

“She has no interest in learning how to swim. And she wants to be in the water all day long.”

I’m curious to know what she’d been about to say about having kids. “So, you’ve been reading your old diaries recently?”

“Yeah, I have. It’s funny—” she winces, then yanks her nipple out of the baby’s mouth. It doesn’t look easy. The skin stretches an inch before he releases it. He wails as she lifts him up and out of the wet pouch, and he keeps wailing until she slides him in the tent with the hanging chicken and he stops short. “He starts to bite when he’s done. Drives me crazy.” She pushes her boob back in her suit. I see the long nipple fold in half to fit. Mallory got breasts before me, like everyone else, but they had been normal, not these pale raw tubers. She doesn’t seem to remember, again, what she was about to say.

We watch Gracie dredge the bottom of the pool with both hands, occasionally taking in water and croaking it out. She has elements of Mallory at that age, the straight dark-blonde hair, the strong thighs, but her square slightly squished face is someone else’s. Her focus, her fixation on a thing, is from her mother, too. And yet that seems to be gone from Mallory now. She can’t follow through on a thought. Her snacks are neatly packed, though. She brings out thinly sliced apples laid carefully in a plastic container with a lime green top. Gracie grabs a few and then hurries back to the water.

“Plumber’s butt,” Mallory says, and Gracie pulls up the droopy back of her suit. “Remember the hours we spent in your mother’s closet? All her fancy clothes. And that wall of shoes! Oh, she was like a real live princess to me.”

The words are familiar. She was at the funeral, I’m remembering now. I sobbed in her arms. And she sobbed too. And then I didn’t see her again until this moment.

Gracie totters slowly toward us with her bucket. Water sloshes at the sides. “I’m thirsty and hungry and thirsty,” she says. She puts the bucket down and takes a little box of juice from her mother. She puts the straw in her mouth and it turns purple. She sucks it all down without stopping, her breathing growing louder and her belly pushing out, then hands the shrunken box back to her mother. “More,” she gasps. But the baby has started fussing in the tent and Mallory is on her knees changing his diaper.

I reach in the bag for another juice box.

“Say thank you, Gracie,” Mallory says without looking. She’s lifting the baby up by his feet with one hand like a plucked chicken.

“Thanks,” Gracie says and hands me back the box half full.

I offer her some crackers but she shakes her head.

“Wanna see my collection?”

I get up and peer into her bucket. Snails, crayfish, starfish, and crabs are piled on top of each other. The crabs are fighting, two against one. I ask her what she’ll do with them, and she says she’ll put them all back. She asks if I’ll help her.

“I’ll carry the bucket,” she says, and lugs it back to the edge of the water. The little white bows on her red bikini have come untied. “Don’t drop them all out together. You need to find the right spot for each one.” She wades in. “Here. Here’s a good spot for a crab.”

She wants me to reach in the pail and get one. “You’re going to have to pull them apart first.”

“Easier said than done,” I say.

“I know!” Her laugh is just like Mallory’s. I feel like I’m playing with Mallory again, only I’ve grown up and she hasn’t yet.

I stick my hand in the cold water and grab one by the sides of its body and shake but they all stay stuck together.

“Here,” she says, and her little fingers go in and all the crabs shoot apart. I don’t even know how she did it.

We place each crab in different parts of the pool.

“Off you go,” she says quietly each time. We watch them float to the bottom, then scramble furiously beneath the sand to hide.

Before she puts the snails back, she puts one hole-side-up in her palm. “Did you know they come out of their shells when you hum to them?”

“What?’

“It’s true. Watch carefully.”

She hums one note over and over but the hole stays dark. Then she hums the first few bars of “Edelweiss” and a little bit of water seeps out and then a brown tube inches out of the shell like a periscope.

Up on the beach, Mallory is putting the baby back in his carrier. They have to go. “I’ll call you when we come down again. Will you still be here?”

“Maybe.”

Gracie is swinging her empty bucket around in a wide circle. “Will you come here tomorrow, Daley?”

“I will, but I don’t think I’ll see you.”

“I know. I’ll be in my home. But will you come say hi to everyone for me? You don’t have to take them out of the water. You can just wave.”

“I can do that.”

“Thanks.”

I stroke the little patch of fine hairs on the baby’s head. They are light and soft as milkweed. And the skull beneath feels spongy, like it hasn’t hardened all the way yet. I stand on the rocks and watch them move slowly around the cove, Mallory’s shoulders weighed down by the beach bags, the tent, and the cooler, and Gracie skipping through the water, and Mallory telling her she is going too deep. I should have offered to help them back home. I never learned the baby’s name, or how old he is. My chest is burning for all three of them.

In my notebook I write: Mallory. Gracie. Baby with fat legs kicking in his pouch. I want that. I do want that, J.

He gave me a blue silk robe for my birthday. We were on his bed, and he’d brought me breakfast and a wrapped box.

“My first choice of outfit is this, of course.” He pulled the sheet all the way off me and kissed my bare belly. “But short of that, here you go.”

I opened it. He knew it was my favorite color, and my favorite fabric. I slid my arms through the sleeves and tied the sash. It was scandalously short.

“Now you are one sexy white girl.”

“Woman.”

“Sorry, but if I’m using the modifier white, it’s got to be girl. When I say white woman it makes me think of Edith Bunker or Maude.”

“I learned about menopause from Maude,” I said. “I’d never heard of it before.” Jonathan was one of the few boyfriends I’d had who’d watched as much TV in the seventies as I had.

“Please, please let’s not talk about white women in menopause.”

“Another twenty years and that’s me.”

“Really? Only twenty? We better get going.”

I shook my head.

“You don’t want babies?”

I’d never been asked by a guy about babies before. I’d never wanted to be asked about babies. It was like being asked if I wanted a polar bear.

He undid the sash of my new robe and traced his finger along a hip. “You’ve got some good baby-making hips.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You really don’t want kids?”

“Not anytime soon,” I said finally.

“Ever?

“I don’t know.”

“Two years, four years?”

“I’m not really a long-range planner.”

“Just tell me. When are you going to have your white babies?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about.”

“What?

“My white babies.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did. You said, When are you going to have your white babies?”

He grinned. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

“It’s all very loaded, this topic.”

“Everything’s going to be with us. Black and white is loaded.”

“I mean the whole baby thing. I don’t know if you’re trying to tease out some maternal desire in me and then get freaked out by it. Or if you’re insinuating that I’m nonmaternal. Or if you’re testing to see if I’m averse to having a brown baby come out of my white vagina.”

He raised his eyebrows with his eyes shut. “Okay, easy now, Miss A, B, and C. We don’t need to be quite so graphic at this moment. Or suspicious. I think I’ve made it clear that this is a big serious deal to me. I had to rewire my mind to go out with a white girl.”

“Woman.”

“Maude. So I want to know if said girl-woman wants babies. Because I do. I want kids, and it’s not complicated for me to say it.”

“So many things are less complicated for a guy to say.”

“True.”

“I need think about it. Maybe you can ask me again in California.”

“All right.”

“Don’t forget.”

“Won’t.”

I can’t sleep. I keep seeing Gracie, her small fat hands, her untied bows. She’s like an infatuation, a song you can’t shake.

I get up and put my clothes back on. My father sounds like someone heaving up a chicken bone when he snores. It’s so loud in the hallway, loud enough that the dogs in his room don’t hear me pass by. I get into my car and drive. I drive past the lobster shack, over the tracks, past Neal’s, which is dark upstairs and down, and through town. There is a cluster of Fords and Chevys outside Mel’s Tavern, and a few sporty foreign cars outside the Captain’s Table. Town and gown, the way it has always been in Ashing. I pass the apartment on Water Street and wave. There are lights on behind the curtains in my mother’s room. I sometimes slept in her bed when we first moved in there and I couldn’t fall asleep. I’d watch how she rocked herself to sleep, one hand around her waist, the other around her neck, a close embrace, the rocking short and shallow, a little rowboat. And then I’m on the highway. There are only trucks. I turn off when I see Howard Johnson’s orange roof.

As I cross the parking lot there is a great clamor above me. I look up and a long thin slanting V of birds is moving just above the restaurant’s cupola, talking all at once. Canada geese. Jonathan and I taking turns with the binoculars. They pass directly over me, their voices raucous, deep and certain, excited for the trip. The sound is still thundering in my chest long after they’ve flown behind the trees.

Inside the Howard Johnson’s, a few people are at the counter, ordering ice cream. The older woman at the register glances up and tells me to sit anywhere I like. She wears the orange and turquoise sailor cap pinned to her hair. I take the booth at the back on the right. This is where we sat. We ordered fried clams and a club sandwich. She wore her kerchief and her nervous smile. We had my bike and eight-tracks and the television in the car.

A waitress comes and takes my menu and brings me french fries and a garden salad. Four cops come through the door. The woman behind the counter greets them easily. The people getting ice cream give them more room than they need. They drink their coffees standing up. Their walkie-talkies beep and hiss at the same time. And then one of them puts his cup on the counter and walks over to my table.

I panic. Registration? Inspection sticker? Unpaid fine? I hate cops, hate being stopped by them, can never be natural or easy around them like the waitresses are. I have no idea how people charm their way out of a ticket. I can never be anything but sullen and humiliated when a cop appears at my car window.

“Daley?”

I manage to raise my head and nod.

He laughs at my guilt, my deep blush. “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?”

It never occurred to me that I could know him personally, an armed, barrel-chested, meaty-faced man in full uniform. There were two Ashing cops when I was little: the rangy one who looked a little like Gilligan and dated the girl at the Mug, and the redheaded one who came to the house whenever the alarm system was set off accidentally. This guy is neither. He is amused by my complete bewilderment.

“Jason Mullens,” he says finally. “Patrick’s buddy.”

“Damn.” While I remained in school, other people were going out and growing up and getting real jobs and wearing uniforms, for chrissake. “I cannot believe I know a cop.”

He laughs again, and I stand and give him a hug. He is very hard and bumpy with his oblong chest and badge and buttons and buckles. I am used to slender, unshaven, underexercised men in flannel shirts. It’s like being introduced to a different species.

He slides into the seat across from mine and puts his thick forearms on the table. My waitress brings him a coffee cup and fills it.

“Thanks, Amy,” he says quietly, as if he is aware that he’s a cliché, like something out of the Andy Griffith Show, but can’t help his good manners.

“I’m stunned. You became a cop. I am sitting here across from a cop.” It is so preposterous that wily little Jason Mullens has grown up into this that I feel completely comfortable, as if it isn’t really happening. “Why on earth are you a cop?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” He glances over at his buddies. They’re talking to an older couple, their backs to us. “I was planning to be a lawyer but then my dad’s friend got me this job in a law firm for a summer during college and I watched these guys spend their time trying to get around the law for their clients. It really bugged me.” He looks down at his hands; then he looks up, surprised that I’m waiting for him to say more. “I realized I wanted to uphold the law, not try to bend it.”

“But you were such a rule-breaking hellion.”

He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling. “Especially at your house.” His perfectly shaven cheeks are round and shiny.

“How is Patrick? I’ve been wanting to get in touch with him, but—” I don’t know how to finish.

“Yeah, I heard about your dad and Catherine. I’m sorry. Patrick was here a couple of weeks ago, helping her move into her new place.”

I heard she’d rented a carriage house north of town. But Patrick was here in Ashing and I didn’t see him? Why hadn’t I called him months ago?

“I didn’t see him either,” he says, seeing my disappointment. “I was away that weekend.”

One of the other policemen is at the door, the other two already on the sidewalk outside. Jason holds up a finger and the last cop gives him an indulgent smile.

I can’t believe he actually thinks Jason is trying to hit on me.

Then Jason says, “I’m off at midnight. You wanna do something?”

“At midnight?”

“Mel’s is open until two.”

So we meet at Mel’s. I wait in my car until I see him pull up. He looks even broader in civilian clothes. He smells clean, his thick hair damp and combed straight down. Everyone knows him at the bar. He introduces me around. I watch Jason joust and parry reluctantly with the crowd. He’s in his element but he worries about me. He tries to include me. He doesn’t understand that it feels good to hold a beer bottle in a bar with people my age who are all a little too buzzed to care what I’m saying. It’s been so long since I’ve had any alcohol that the beer takes full effect and pulls me away from myself just a little. Normally I don’t like the feeling, but right now it’s a relief. People crowd around Jason. Someone offers him a shot and he looks at me and turns it down. Someone says something quietly to him and he laughs until his face gets red. “I’ll explain that one later,” he says to me. Like Garvey, Jason has changed socioeconomic groups, and I’m interested in this. I hope we’ll stay till closing, but instead of ordering another round he steers me out the door.

We go to his apartment, the second floor of a house on South Street. It smells like a gym. He runs around picking up the balled-up clothes and dirty glasses. He opens the windows and turns on a fan and hands me a beer. We sit on a red velour couch and he pulls off his shirt as if wearing it was causing him pain. It is truly a rippling torso, wide and deep, with very little hair and tiny tight nipples, tapering down into a narrow taut stomach with a deep clean belly button. He takes my hand and lays it on his chest and I cannot pull away. I have to know how it all feels. My fingers trace the skin across his chest, pausing at the dip in the center, then moving to the far side and over to his right arm which he is not flexing but is solid as steel, wrapped in veins. And then I am kissing his hard warm stomach, pressing my tongue in the taut belly button, and he is hard immediately and sighing and I feel his lips on my neck before he lifts me in one quick motion right on top of him and we kiss, hard, our teeth knocking, and then I hear Jonathan, slightly bemused, taking everything in, the gun he surely has in the house, the uniforms, the absurdly inflated pale chest, saying, “What do you think you are doing, tweet?” Jonathan, tracing my hip with his beautiful finger, talking about babies. I stop kissing and rest my head on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Jason. I’m so sorry.”

His hands are moving all over me. “It’s okay.”

On one vacation, when I was in high school, I had a room right next to my father and Catherine, separated by a very thin wall. “So now you don’t want it,” I heard him say to her in the middle of the night. “I thought you wanted it, but now you don’t want it.”

A vast heaviness weighs down my body.

“Really, it’s okay, Daley.”

He helps me find my shirt and shoes.

“It’s my fault,” he says when I’m at the door. “I took it too fast. I misinterpreted the signals.” It sounds like a line from some educational video on sexual communication. “I always had a little thing for you.” He’s lying now, poor guy. No one had a thing for me back then, not even a little one. He tries to hold my face in his hand to gauge my distress, but I turn and get out the door.

20

I didn’t have a boyfriend until college. Before that, the only time I can remember even the possibility of one was when Patrick came home from boarding school one weekend with a friend, After dinner that first night, Patrick asked me if I liked Cole. I said I thought so. He told me that Cole liked me, then teased me about how fast my face turned red. I waited for something to happen, but it never did, even though I liked him more and more. He was very funny and smart, quick but not mean. The three of us played Ping-Pong, saw a movie, went to the Peking Garden. I laughed at Cole’s jokes and he laughed at mine, but nothing else happened. They took the train back to school on Sunday. The next time Patrick came home I asked him, jokingly, trying to hide the hours I’d agonized over it, what had made Cole change his mind about me, and Patrick looked at me oddly.

“It’s like you don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“After I told you he liked you, everything you did said stay away.”

I was stung and stunned by this. Stay away. I somehow said stay away with my outside while my inside was yelling come here.

“I cannot believe you made out with a cop. You really do have a thing for uniforms,” Julie says.

“Please don’t tell anyone.” I mean Jonathan. If she is in touch with him. Which is a question I never ask. It’s better for me not to know.

“So what are you doing on the Thursday before Columbus Day weekend?” she says.

“Not much. No, actually,” I say, pretending to look at a calendar, “it’s a very hectic day. The dogs are going in to have their toe-nails clipped.”

“I cannot get there too soon.”

“What?”

“My father’s birthday present. A night in New York to celebrate my grandparents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, then a trip up the New England coast. Give me directions to your house.”

“Whoever that was put a smile on your face,” my father says.

“My friend Julie. She and her father are coming here next Thursday.”

“To stay with us?”

“No, just for lunch. I think we should take them to the Lobster Shack.”

“What’s this we shit?”

“Oh, Dad, please join us. I want you to meet her. She’s my very best friend.”

“Is she your vewy vewy bestest fwiend? Bester than me and Maybelle?”

“It’s a three-way tie,” I say, rubbing Maybelle’s little head.

“Where’re they from?”

“Brooklyn. But he lives in San Francisco now and she lives in Albuquerque.”

“San Francisco. He a fag?”

“Dad.”

“I’m just wondering.”

“He’s had three wives.”

“Jesus.”

I don’t bother to remind him that he is not far behind.

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a doctor.” I didn’t want to tell him that, either. He doesn’t like being around strangers with successful careers. At least I was careful not to say Jewish psychiatrist.

On Thursday he is cranky all morning. The tractor isn’t working properly. The new guy at the hardware store is useless. He screams at the dogs. I see him glance at the clock, like he used to, waiting for it to be drinking hour. I think he does it to get a rise out of me, but I don’t react.

And then they are here, Julie leaping out of the car even before her father cuts the engine, dodging the dogs up the path, reaching me at the bottom of the porch stairs. She’s cut her hair straight across at the jawline. She told me but I forgot. She’s wearing new clothes. She looks different, older. She’s a full professor now. It’s disorienting, seeing her here in my yard. She is Michigan and card games and all-nighters and Jonathan on the floor with us because we never did get a kitchen table, all of us eating his $3 spaghetti. Her hug is tight. There are so many things I can’t have back.

“This town is so cute! I’m not sure I ever knew it was on the water, I mean right on the water. I always pictured it so gloomy and sinister. And this house is enormous. It’s like a B & B.”

Her father comes up the walkway, tucking in the back of his shirt. “I’m starting to understand why even Berkeley might have paled in comparison.” He kisses me on the cheek.

“It wasn’t really a choice of geography, per se.” I hear the sudden peevishness in my voice and soften it. “Thank you for making the detour for me.”

“Hardly a detour. You were always part of the plan,” he says.

I haven’t seen Julie’s father in a couple of years. He looks the same, a medium-sized man with a full head of silver hair he wears cropped square, a grown-out buzz cut. I wonder if he remembers the diamond-in-the-rough comment and what he will say after this visit. There’s always the expectation on Julie’s part that we will get along instantly. But it has always hurt a little to be around them.

My father comes out on the porch. I lead them up to meet him.

“You found us,” he says, and puts out his hand. “Gardiner Amory.”

“Alex Kellerman.”

There’s always tremendous subtext when two men of their generation shake hands. It’s always a power grab. I watch my father accentuate his height advantage while Alex stands with his thick legs too far apart, as if he might need to crouch and spring.

“And this is Julie, Dad.”

My father’s shoulders soften and he bends his elbow as he takes her hand. “Great to meet you. I know Daley misses you a lot. Her housemate now isn’t much fun.”

I’ve never in my adult life introduced my father to anyone.

Alex peers in the house. He wants to have a look around, as I would in his place. But I only have a few hours with Julie and do not want to spend it in the New England WASP Museum. I suggest a walk on the beach and then lunch in town. Alex asks if he could use the restroom.

I walk him through the pantry and dining room to the bathroom off the den.

“The light’s a little tricky,” I say, punching the round black cylinder hard.

“Whoa,” he says, noticing the team photographs. At the feet of the boys in the front row was always the same black board with white letters and numbers identifying the team and the date. 1940–1949 were the years accounted for at St. Paul’s, and I knew that wouldn’t slip Julie’s father’s notice. Two great-uncles of Julie’s had died at Treblinka while my father was at a fancy boarding school.

“Which one is your dad?” he asks, tapping the glass of the Football Thirds, 1941.

I put my finger on the smallest boy in front, looking warily ahead but not at the camera.

“He looks scared, doesn’t he? Imagine having been shipped away from your mother at such a young age. Hey, here he looks about twelve and already on varsity,” he says, tapping another picture.

“He was always good at tennis.”

“He’s half the size of his teammates.”

“He was really small, and then he shot up. Look.” I point to a photograph on the other side of the bathroom, near the sink. In it my father is on the far right, his hair darker and his face much narrower, holding one of the oars, the tallest man on the team. He looks as if he has better things to do than stand around having his photograph taken by some moron.

“It’s a real slice of history, isn’t it?” he says.

“One privileged sliver of it, I suppose.” All the St. Paul’s boys stare at me, fresh cut grass on their cleats. Then I remember Alex wants to go to the bathroom and I quickly leave him to it.

On the porch, my father and Julie seem to be talking about pool vacuums. He’s making an effort with her. He’s facing her directly, not looking off somewhere like he often does with people, and bending toward her to make sure he hears her response. He asks if she’s made some friends in Albuquerque yet, and she says she thought in a warmer climate people would be more approachable, but the people in her apartment building are always rushing downstairs with mountain bikes on their shoulders, no time to chat.

“You’ll have to get yourself a mountain bike, I guess,” my father says.

“Yup. Right about when hell freezes over.”

My father laughs. Julie, I see now, is the kind of woman my father would call a real pistol.

We get in their rental car, the men in front.

“So here we are with our fathers,” I say quietly.

“Just another regular day,” Julie says.

We look at the backs of their heads and laugh.

I point out the Vance sisters’ driveway.

“The ones who called each other mother and father,” Julie says, as if it’s from a book she read a long time ago.

I show her Mallory’s parents’ house, and then, quietly, Patrick’s old house. The beach lot is full so we park in the driveway of a summer house that has been empty for years. All the green shutters have been pulled closed.

“It’s like the Ramsays’ house,” Alex says, getting out of the car.

“‘Will you fade?’” Julie says. “‘Will you perish?’”

“‘We remain!’” Alex bellows.

My father flashes me a look: They’re not playing with a full deck, are they?

The ocean is across the street, booming with waves. Alex stops before stepping onto the sand. “Magnificent.”

Julie and I take off our sandals and let the fathers go ahead of us.

“So who’s the guy with the mountain bike?” I ask.

“What?”

“The guy who won’t talk to you.”

She crosses her arms. The wind is blowing her short hair into a short funnel. “Damn. How’d you know?”

“I’ve never heard you complain about people not being approachable.” Julie could make friends with a barnacle.

“He lives in the apartment above me. Alone. But I haven’t been able to speak to him.”

“What?”

“I know, it’s weird. I just get all — bashful.”

I laugh into the wind. “We need to track this. This is a first. He’s bringing out your tortoise side.”

“It’s so good to see you.” She slips her arm through mine, and I squeeze her to me. “I’m trying to get a sense of your days here.”

“My father marked his ninetieth day in AA two weeks ago. It’s a big deal.”

“I was talking about your days,” she says, but the men have stopped to wait for us so I don’t have to answer. What could I tell her? That in three and half months I’d written less than three pages of a nonacademic article?

“I love the proportions of this beach.”

“The proportions, Pop?”

He shrugs. He likes to be teased by her. “Some beaches are too long and skinny, some you have to walk a mile to the water. This one is just right.”

“The Platonic ideal of beach?”

“Exactly. And see that island out there, slightly off center? There always has to be something asymmetrical within the concept of perfection. Like Julie’s nose.”

“Daddy!” she says, covering it. It bends slightly to the right.

He wraps his arm around her and kisses her on the forehead. “Asymmetrical perfection, my love. Nothing more, nothing less.”

My father and I walk back to the car behind them.

“Nice guy,” my father says. “Did you know he was a shrink?”

“I did.”

“He told me a story about a guy who came to see him for a few years. Passionate fly fisherman. He’d bring his box of flies to every appointment, and that’s what they’d do: go through each fly, what it caught, what time of the year you could use it. The guy can’t ever say why he’s there, can’t answer that question. Two years go by, and one day the guy holds up a fly and says, ‘This is the fly my son tied the day before he died.’ Christ, that’s a story, isn’t it?”

At lunch we all order lobsters, except my father, who ribs Alex for wearing his bib.

“This is a decent shirt,” Alex says.

“I just hope we don’t see anyone I know.”

“You can tell them I’m your retarded cousin from Akron.”

“Daddy!”

“Excuse me, Jules. So how’d you end up here in Ashing, Gardiner?”

“My wife told me we were moving out of Boston, and the next thing I knew the vans were at the door.”

Alex laughs. “It’s like that with women, isn’t it? They know what they want.”

“And what they don’t want,” my father says, looking down at his paper plate.

I ask whom they’re visiting in Maine, and Alex tells us about his friend from med school who has set up clinics in war-torn areas. They’re lucky to be catching him in the country. He describes his own visit to the clinic in Guatemala and the experience of using a translator for therapy, how he was able to be much more aware of the person’s emotions as they were speaking to him because of the delay in meaning. Julie and I have many questions for him, about the conditions and the civil war, and his answers just stir up more questions. My father eats his hot dogs and nods and says, “Is that right?” several times, but he’s not listening. He has a hard time relaxing. His leg jiggles continuously beside me. He’s like a boy in school waiting for the bell to ring, or, if you look closely, like an animal who’s not certain there’s not a predator nearby.

After plates are cleared and fingers cleaned with lemon-scented wipes, Alex gets out a small set of watercolor tubes and a small black notebook with thick pages. He looks over my shoulder at the harbor and hastily dabs paint onto a page. My father insists on paying the bill.

He and I sit in the back on the way home to Myrtle Street. The maples along both sides of the road are old and flourishing, impossibly tall, their leaves just starting to turn. My father rubs his thumb on a seam of his pants.

I invite them in, but Alex says they have to be in Wiscasset by five. It’s Julie’s turn to go to the bathroom, so I take her in the house and wait for her in the kitchen while our fathers talk in the yard.

When she comes out she says, “I thought if I came here and saw you it would all make sense, what you decided.”

“And that didn’t happen?”

“That man is doing just fine. You don’t need to be here, Daley.”

“He puts on a good act. And he is getting better. He’s growing.”

“I’m worried you’re waiting for something from him that he can’t ever give you. And if that’s not it, I just hope you understand that your life and your growth is every bit as important as his.”

I can’t bear another parting lecture at the door. “You need to think of me now as a sort of Charlotte Brontë figure, the unmarried daughter of the town vicar.”

“Please don’t say that, even in jest. I don’t know why you’ve thrown everything away.” She looks like she’s about to cry.

“Tell me you wouldn’t drop everything to be with your father if he needed you.”

“He wouldn’t let me.”

“If your father broke his back and couldn’t get out of bed, you’d be right there for him.”

“He wouldn’t let me stay. It would break his heart if I lost something I’d worked for my whole adult life because of him.”

“Your father must have a lot of people he could lean on, but my father has no one but me right now. I’m it.”

“I understand that it’s important to you to believe that.”

“Spare me the therapy-speak. I am fixing something with my father that got destroyed when I was eleven years old. What job title could ever compare to that?”

“I’m not talking about the job, Daley. You can get another job. I’m talking about Jonathan. You two are what all the rest of us are looking for.”

“Don’t idealize us. It was a flawed relationship, obviously, if he couldn’t understand my decision.”

“I can’t understand your decision. No one understands what you’ve done.”

“But you are still speaking to me. Jonathan has disappeared.”

“I think for some reason you’re scared of what you have with Jonathan.”

“He’s gone, Julie. It’s over. Use the past tense.”

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“You really haven’t heard from him?” My heart is slamming now.

“No.”

I realize I was counting on her to tell me today where he’s gone and how he’s doing. The big fist of pain shifts and forces up a few tears. She puts her arms around me and makes it burn even more. She’s leaving and Jonathan is really gone.

“Let’s make you a plan,” she says softly. “How much longer do you think you’ll stay here?”

“I don’t know how long he’ll need me.”

“Then you’ve got to decide how long you want to be needed.”

Alex calls from the porch. He’s worried about traffic.

“I’ll call you tonight,” she says.

I wipe my eyes and walk her to the car. My father says goodbye, telling them to stop by whenever they’re in the Northeast again. He looks spent. I know he’ll go right up for a nap after they drive away.

I hug them both. Alex hands me a watercolor. It’s not of the harbor as I expected, but of me and Julie with her shorn hair. We’re leaning in, talking. There’s little I recognize in his rendering of me, but he’s captured Julie’s mouth and her perfectly imperfect nose with only a few brushstrokes.

That night, after AA and supper, we watch the Red Sox play Cleveland. My father is pissed at Clemens, pissed at the announcers. He thinks they talk too much. At the seventh-inning stretch, he takes his glass in for more soda. He lets the dogs out and then back in. He returns, and when the players are back on the field, he watches in silence, his breathing heavy. Mo Vaughn makes a double play, and he says, “Now that’s how you do it.” There is something slightly self-satisfied in his voice that makes me turn. He meets my eye, raises his eyebrows slightly. He’s been on his best behavior all day, and he hasn’t said a mocking thing about Julie or her father since they left. But honestly, I don’t know anymore if he is fucking with me.

21

By November, Neal is still my lone friend in Ashing, but I only see him when I go to his shop. The rest of his life is a mystery to me.

“Are you really as reclusive as you seem?” I ask him.

“Pretty much.”

“Were you always?”

“Not so much.” He’s particularly preoccupied today, watching the cars through the door, fidgeting with a pen cap. The skin under his eyes looks bruised. I’m probably not looking so well myself. The cold has brought on doubt and fear. I cannot seem to make a plan. The dead star feeling has taken hold. It makes everything feel struck, as if my whole body is a big bell that won’t stop ringing. I sleep less and less. I roam the house at night. I look for hidden bottles. I am ashamed of my lack of trust in my father, when I always thought the problem between us was his lack of trust in me. I write more fragments in my Jonathan notebook. My heartbeat is too fast and too heavy. What will become of me? At times it seems there is only a paper-thin wall between me and permanent full-blown panic. Neal calms me. If I described how I felt I know he would say he feels that way too.

“I heard you had a drink with Jason Mullens.”

I laugh. “Two months ago.”

“You gonna go out with him again?”

“No.”

“Has he called?”

“He’s left a couple of messages. He keeps calling himself Officer Mullens on the machine. My father must think there’s a warrant out for my arrest.”

Neal pretends to laugh. Then he stands up and says he has to go. He’s going to close the shop for a lunch break.

Two days later I’m in Goodale’s parking lot, loading groceries into the car, when a station wagon pulls up next to me, a bright red French armoire strapped to its roof.

Neal’s mother, who usually drives a Volkswagen Fox since she gave up the Pinto, leaps out. “Isn’t it just divine?” she says, and hugs me hard. There is an awful stench to her, pungent, animal. “Isn’t it to die for?”

I give the armoire the attention she requires. I stroke its unpainted feet, marvel at its size. I can’t picture such an enormous and loud piece of furniture in their small house on July Street. “Wow,” I say.

“It has about a thousand shelves on the sides. It is crucial to getting things organized chez moi.” There is something extra-intense about the way she is looking at me, as if I am just about to reveal a great secret. She’s got the wrong person. I’ve been cleaning bathrooms all morning. I have very little to impart.

“It’s been the most amazing day. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a day like it, Daley. I discovered something. Something about stockings.”

“Stockings?”

“It’s really a miracle. And no one ever talks about it. I don’t think anyone else knows. You can just piss. Did you know that? You can piss in your pantyhose and it doesn’t leak. It just sort of evaporates. I’ve been doing it all week. Nobody can tell! But I’ve got to get home now. I promised Neal I wouldn’t go out and I did, and now he’s going to be furious with me.” She looks delighted by the idea. “You know he won the Renaissance Cup, don’t you?”

“I do know that.” I smile. “I remind him of that more than he’d like.”

“Oh, he is such a pill, isn’t he? You have no idea until you have a son what they put you through. But they’re better than a husband, that’s for sure. My husband just disappeared. Poof. Gone.”

“Really?”

“He does this on occasion. Huge drama queen. ‘I just can’t abide this and that’ sort of thing. You know that store almost didn’t take my check, for crying out loud. They are a bunch of asses on sticks. Filthy French mongrels.” She looks at me as if I’ve just appeared. “Oh, Daley, it is so good to have you back home.” She pulls me to her again and, now that I know what the smell is, it’s worse. “We need your youth and beauty and inspiration in this tired old town.” She is hollering in my ear. “See?” she says, pulling away, looking at the ground between her feet. “I did it again and nothing came out.”

After she leaves, I drive straight to Neal’s. The shop is closed and he doesn’t answer his upstairs bell. I wonder if he is out trying to find her. This is what my father meant when he said Neal has not had it easy. I go back in the afternoon and he still isn’t there. I leave a note. The next day I leave another. The shop is closed every day that week. Neal’s upstairs lights are never on. I wonder how bad it gets and how it ends.

Now that the evenings are shorter, my father goes to bed earlier. The first night Neal comes over it’s just past nine and my father is already asleep. He taps on the back door quietly. At first I think it’s the wind, and the door isn’t shut all the way. But there is Neal’s face, bending to fit in one of the panes of glass.

“I see you, Shirley Temple,” I say, before I open the door. I’m surprised by how relieved I am to see him.

“Hey,” he says softly, his voice gutting out. He has his hands in his pockets.

I step onto the porch to hug him and he falls into me. His breaths are deep but not smooth.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“She told me she saw you. I work so hard to keep her away from town when she’s like that.”

“Where is she now?”

“McLean’s. She always ends up there. They pump her back up with lithium and give her a good talking to about taking it regularly even when she feels she doesn’t need it, especially when she feels she doesn’t need it. And then they send her home.” He doesn’t lift his head from my shoulder. I touch his hair, too gently for him to notice. “My dad couldn’t handle it. He’s never been able to handle it. Her mania ignites some sort of terror in him. Now I just tell him to get out, and I call him when it’s over. I don’t know how she was when you saw her, but she can get viciously angry. It’s crazy. And then she can become a puddle of syrupy sickness, on and on about how you are the most sacred, the most perfect being ever to be put on earth. I remember once when I was little she tried to convince me that I was Jesus Christ. I was so scared. I didn’t want to be Jesus. I didn’t want all those holes in my body.”

I hold him tight.

After his breathing has smoothed out, I ask him if he wants to come in for some tea.

“I’ve been inside for so many days. Do you mind if we stay out here?”

I get a jacket and we go over to the lawn chairs by the pool. The pool is covered now by a taut green sheath, but we haven’t put the chairs in the shed yet.

Neal sits in one of the recliners and pulls me down with him. We lie sideways, his chest against my back, his breath in my hair. It feels so good to be held.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I hate seeing her strapped down. I don’t care what she says. I can tune that out. But the look on her face. And her body all cinched up.”

“How often does it happen?”

“The longest she’s gone between episodes is two and half years. But normally it’s a shorter cycle.”

“I had no idea.”

“People have been discreet. It’s a good town in that way.”

“And this was happening when we were in school together?”

“All my life. They used to pack me off to my aunt’s in Maryland for the summer.”

“Every summer?”

“The bad ones.”

He comes most nights after that, tapping at the windowpane, lying with me on a lawn chair in the dark. When the nights grow colder he brings a blanket. We look up at the autumn stars and can only name a few. We spoon, and sometimes we push against each other slightly, but we never kiss.

His mother comes home from McLean’s and he opens his shop back up. “No one even noticed I was closed,” he says.

We talk, but it’s more like thinking aloud. I’m often not sure what I’ve actually said. On clear nights the stars pierce a million holes in the darkness. Jonathan said once that the stars made him feel powerful.

“That’s weird,” Neal says. “They make me feel minuscule.”

“Me, too. Maybe it’s an Ashing thing.”

“Do they make you think of God?”

“No.”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“If there is a God, we haven’t been introduced yet.” I stare at the dark vault above, the little pinpricks of light that are really balls of fire, many bigger than the earth. All these things we’re meant to believe. “Stars just make me think of death.” I tell him about the first time I had the dead star feeling. I don’t say I have it now, that it seems to have set up camp in my chest.

He says he likes the theory that the universe expands and then contracts, over and over, that your life comes around again, every sixty billion years or so.

Another night I ask him, “Are you writing a novel that begins freshman year of college and ends at a Pottery Barn?”

He doesn’t answer and I start laughing.

“I hate you.” He squeezes me harder. “I hate being a cliché.”

He has three different jackets, his brother’s old leather one, a brown canvas one, and a red-and-black wool lumberjack one. The lumberjack one is an extra large. He wraps it around me and buttons me in, my back against his chest. Sometimes I see him during the day on the street in that jacket and I smile.

“Is she like your mom?”

“Who?”

“The Dead Girl.”

“No. Yes. I mean she’s not cuckoo crazy, but she has a lot of energy.”

“My mother always thought it was important to be bubbly.”

“I like bubbly. But it has to come with some gravitas.”

“And the Dead Girl has gravitas?”

“Being dead helps.”

“Tell me her name.”

“No.”

I make guesses: Megan, Susan, Leslie. He says no to all of them. “Good. I hate the name Leslie. No, that’s not true. I hate the name Less lie. Lez lie’s fine. But if you ever call a Less lie Lez lie look out. It’s spelled the same so how are you going to know?”

He takes his hand off my stomach and puts it over my mouth. “Her name’s not Leslie.”

“Molly?” I say, through his hands.

“Nope. No more guesses. You’ve used up your weekly ration.”

The next night he says, “I didn’t say you were concave. I said I wouldn’t care if you were concave. Which you weren’t. And certainly aren’t now.”

“Now he notices,” I say.

And then there is the night we hear the geese, just a few, not even in a V. They are flying too low and at first they make no sound. And then I hear it, a thin frail cry and then another one, more dire, starving maybe.

“They’re too late,” Neal says. “They’re not going to make it.” And then says, “Hey, hey,” but I can’t stop crying for those geese.

One night when I’m buttoned into his red and black jacket he asks, “What would happen if you rolled over and faced me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” The smoke of his breath drifts past my ear up toward the stars.

Then he doesn’t come for three nights in a row. I stop by his shop. It’s only four-thirty but it’s nearly dark. Streetlights and headlights are all on. It’s cold enough to snow. I’m wearing my old Michigan parka. I got it at the secondhand shop for ten dollars. It’s orange and slightly misshapen, and Jonathan called me the UFO when I wore it.

Neal is with a customer when I push open the door, their backs to me, looking up at a shelf near the ceiling. They turn at the same time. Neal grins at me, apologetic, grateful, happy. The woman’s cheeks are flushed. There is a suitcase near Neal’s desk.

“The Dead Girl,” I say, before I can stop myself.

“The Dead Girl,” he says.

“What?” she says, wheeling around. She is lovely, of course, with round brown eyes and a wry smile.

“I’m Daley.” I put out my hand.

“You really call me that?” she says to him.

“What’s your real name?”

“Don’t tell her!” Neal says, but too late.

“Anne.”

“Anne?” I look at him. I could have gotten Anne.

He shrugs.

“It’s an awful name,” she says. “I hate it.”

“Not as bad as Lesssslie, though.” He looks straight at me, seeing if I understand how it is. I do. I always have.

“Not half as bad,” I say.

22

And then it’s Thanksgiving. Cold, overcast, the way I always remember Thanksgiving in New England to be. Despite weekly urgings, I couldn’t get Garvey to come. I did get him to talk to Dad. It was a brief conversation, stiff but benign. Maybe, Garvey told me, he would come for Christmas.

My father has his meeting at one that day, and then we go to the Bridgetons for lunch.

They live north of town, down a long wooded road. All the leaves are gone from the trees. Every one. When we’re almost there, my father says they talked about Grace today.

“Grace?” I don’t know who Grace is.

The car stops. The road has ended at the ocean and the Bridgetons’ house. “Patricia said that grace is accepting love, that we all spend so much more time resisting love than just taking love. It’s funny, isn’t it, to think of rejecting love. What a stupid thing to do. But I guess we do it all the time.”

“I guess we do.” I am very flat. I hate Thanksgiving.

“Yeah. Well.” He opens the car door. “Let’s eat some turkey.”

The Bridgetons have their own rocky beach below the green clapboard house. I might have said I’d never been here before, until I stand on their lawn looking down at the rocks and remember climbing on them with an older blond boy, falling down and scraping my knees. Through a window I see the mudroom with a sink in it where my mother washed my cuts and put on Band-Aids.

My father and I cooked and baked that morning: green beans, garlic mashed potatoes, and an apple pie. He can now make five different main courses, and he does his own laundry. We walk around to the front of the house with our platters of food. My father insisted I dress up a bit, so I’m wearing my interview outfit, a beige suit and boots with heels.

Carly Bridgeton opens the door.

“Uncle Gardiner!” she says, and gives my father a big hug. Carly is his goddaughter. I forgot that. She’s the oldest of the Bridgetons’ children, well in her thirties, but the quilted vest and knee socks she’s wearing take twenty years off her.

“Hey there, little peanut,” he says.

“Look at you,” she says. “You look great, Uncle G.”

And he does. His skin is a tawny pink, and his eyes clear and alert. He’s gained a little weight. He looks fit and strong and a good deal younger than sixty-one.

“You remember Daley.”

“Of course I do.” She hugs me, too. “We made cootie catchers together, remember?” But I don’t. Her narrow nose and big freckles are not familiar to me exactly, but if I saw her on a street in a big city, I would think I knew her. She looks like a lot of people I grew up with.

Carly takes our coats and leads us into the living room. On the pink chintz sofas are the two Bridgeton boys, both in coat and tie, pouring handfuls of Chex mix into their mouths. They stand when they see us, wiping their salty hands on their pants before shaking. I can’t remember which one is the one who is doing “who knows what” in Colorado. They both seem to be what Ashing Academy followed by a New England boarding school and a small liberal arts college conspire to produce: clean-cut, self-deprecating, socially agile men. Together we identify who was just a year older than Garvey (Scott) and who was just a year younger (Hatch), who had been on Dad’s undefeated Little League team three years in a row (Hatch), and who remembered Garvey winning the declamation contest with Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (all of us).

Mr. Bridgeton comes in the room then, lurching, his right foot in a blue cast, the toe of his white sock poking out. On this little patch of sock, someone has drawn a smiley face. A scotch and soda rattles in his hand.

“Holy Christ!” my father yells. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, just a little run-in with a moose.”

The boys laugh and Hatch fetches a doorstop at the other end of the room. It’s a brick covered in needlepoint, the head of a moose stitched in brown and beige on the top.

“Ouch,” I say.

“Tripped right over the goddamn thing in broad daylight. Never saw it coming.” Mr. Bridgeton is looking above our heads and smiling helplessly. He is clearly enjoying his painkillers.

I hear the pulse of a food processor and excuse myself to help Mrs. Bridgeton.

“Don’t go in there unarmed!” Hatch says.

Scott offers me the cheese knife.

The kitchen is small, the pea green color of so many Ashing kitchens in the fifties. Mrs. Bridgeton is putting pecans on top of mashed sweet potatoes carefully smoothed into a fluted pie dish. She has a cocktail on the table, too, nearly drained.

“It smells good in here,” I say. It does. It smells like our kitchen did when my mother was making the Thanksgiving meal.

“Oh, Daley, I’m glad you’re here.” She kisses me on the cheek. Her own cheek is warm and smells like baby powder. “And look at you!” I can see her struggle for a way to compliment the severe colorless outfit.

“My father made me wear it,” I say, to let her off the hook.

“He did? Well, you look lovely.” Her voice grows quiet. “How is he?”

I reach into the bag of pecans and begin another circle inside the one she is finishing. “He’s doing really well. This week he started coaching basketball with this youth group. He loves it.” Kenny, who I recently discovered is my father’s sponsor, told him about the opening.

“I just wish Hugh would take him back.”

“I don’t think he’d want to go back to an office. He enjoys this much more.” He told me a few nights ago that coaching was what he’d always wanted to do full-time, but it wasn’t considered a respectable choice of profession. “Screw respectable, Dad. Follow your passion,” I said.

“Well, he’s wonderful with children,” Mrs. Bridgeton says. “We all know that.”

“My mother used to make this.”

“I know she did. I gave her the recipe.” She reaches in the bag for more pecans. “She and I were friends, you know, before she got involved with the Democrats and all the rest.” She says the word Democrats the way my father does, as if they are a cult that whisks away decent people.

“And then you slather it with brown sugar and broil it?”

“You bake it and then at the very end you broil it.”

“My mother sometimes burned it.”

“It’s easy to burn. It goes from brown to black very quickly.”

“Thank you for having us here. It’s nice.”

“Holidays are hard alone.”

He’s not alone. I want to say. I’m not alone. I wish she were capable of appreciating his progress.

“Who’s in here?”

My father ducks to come through the low doorway.

Mrs. Bridgeton brushes back her hair and smoothes down her green dress.

“Just us Thanksgiving elves,” she says.

My father is handsome in his charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, and tie with the blue and green fish on it. “Look at this feast.” He eyes the vegetables in bowls, the golden turkey lit up in the oven.

“Same meal I’ve been making for thirty-nine years,” she says, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.

“If it ain’t broke,” my father says absently, looking out the window at the gray water. I know he wants to drink with the rest of them in the living room. I can feel it as if the craving were in my own body. I want to hold his hand and tell him it will pass. Be strong, I’d tell him. The holidays are the hardest.

“I bought a little bottle of bubbly to have with dessert. Can you have just a few drops, Gardiner?”

I feel like she’s just soaked me in ice water. I hold back. It is not easy.

My father shakes his head. “Nope. I’ll stick with my seltzer.”

I smile at him but he doesn’t look at me.

“Daley,” she says, handing me a silver water pitcher, “would you mind filling up the water glasses in the dining room? We’ll be ready to eat soon.”

In the dining room there are big bowls of orange and green gourds and place cards in the shape of turkey tails. I’m seated on Mr. Bridgeton’s right and Scott’s left. My father is down at the other end of the table, next to Mrs. Bridgeton. Everyone around him has a highball glass full of alcohol. Why were we here among people who could not see his struggle, who probably didn’t even believe it was a disease? I feel I’ve failed him, failed to find him an alternative set of friends, another way of living.

Eventually we all take our places and pile our plates with food. Scott and I ask each other polite questions. On the other side of the table, Hatch and my father reminisce about the Pirates. Mrs. Bridgeton indicates with her napkin and the word gooseberry that Mr. Bridgeton has some gravy on his cheek. They all drink steadily but no one seems particularly drunk. No one gets angry. No one’s personality changes. They tease but they don’t snipe. They seem genuinely glad to be together. When I ask how often they all see each other, Hatch says not enough, but it turns out that none of them have ever missed a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, and they spend at least two weeks together every summer at their cabin in the Berkshires and another ten days in the Bahamas in March.

Afterward we all, minus Mr. Bridgeton and his bad foot, take a walk down to the water. The tide is out on the small beach, the sand a wet dark gray. You can see more islands from their point than you can from Ruby Beach. Hatch names them for me. The others have a rock-skimming contest. Scott leans back and flicks one across the shallows.

“That’s a beauty!” my father calls out as Scott’s stone bounces across the skin of gray water. “Nine.”

Hatch tells me about the software start-up he’s been working for in Boulder. I have no idea what he’s talking about. “What about you? How long are you planning to live here?”

“Not much longer.” I feel defensive and tired. “Maybe through the holidays.” Is this true? My future is the exact color of the ocean.

Mrs. Bridgeton picks up a stone and throws it badly, though it manages to skip twice before sinking.

“Not bad,” my father says gently. “You’ll get another try in a minute.”

Mrs. Bridgeton is flushed and smiling.

On the way home we see Jason Mullens standing at the window of a cruiser, talking to the driver. He looks up when our car passes and his hand shoots up in a wave.

“You going out with that guy?”

“No.”

“Why’s he looking at you like that then? And leaving messages.”

“Oh, it was stupid. I had a drink with him one night.”

“You had a drink with him one night? When was that?”

“Last summer.”

“You snuck out?’

“I didn’t sneak out, Dad. I couldn’t sleep and I ran into him and we went to Mel’s.”

“To Mel’s. He’s a real class act.”

“He’s a good guy.”

“Oh yeah? You going to marry a cop?”

“I’m not interested in Jason.”

“Who else have you had drinks with? You’ve got me going to meetings every damn night and you’re out boozing it up all over town.”

“One night, Dad. One beer.”

We turn down Myrtle Street. It is such a grim afternoon. I have to think of something to lighten our mood. We can’t go back to the house feeling like this.

“You better watch out yourself,” I say. “I think Barbara Bridgeton is getting a little crush on you.”

“What? No,” he says. I’ve amused him. “Now you’ve really lost your marbles.”

“You better watch it, is all I’m saying, or you’ll be eating a hell of a lot of quiche and casseroles.”

The next day I call Mrs. Bridgeton to thank her.

“Well, it was wonderful to have you both here. Perhaps we can start a tradition.”

“Next year, our house,” I say. Am I joking? I’m not even sure. “I think it was good for us to be with your family. Dad’s in great spirits today.” I can see him out the window. He woke up full of energy, vowing to fix the garage door and rake up the last of the leaves, two things he’s been putting off for weeks.

“I’m pleased to hear that, Daley.”

I feel suddenly close to her, hearing the sincerity in her voice. I think of the meals she brought over at the beginning and the hydrangeas for his party. A lot of women in Ashing ask about my father in passing, but Mrs. Bridgeton really cares about him. She might not understand about alcoholism, but she does want to help. I feel the need to apologize for my resistance to her.

“Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

“Well, we’re right here when you need us. We’ve known your dad for a long time. I knew him before your mother did.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He was Ben’s roommate’s doubles partner. He had a number of different girls, you know. And then he brought your mother to the Harvest Dance, and that was it. You never saw him with anyone else after that.”

“What was he like back then?”

“Just like he is now. Kind, sweet, honorable. I hope you find a man just like him someday soon, Daley.”

Over the weekend it snows. The snow blankets the cover of the pool and lies in raised, even stripes on top of the plastic bands of the lawn chair.

Neal has gone to Vermont with Anne.

My father comes home from coaching on Monday with a large ziplock bag of cookies.

“Where’d you score those?” I ask.

“Barbara gave them to me.”

“Where’d you run into her?”

“I stopped by their house on my way home.”

Wednesday he’s got a coconut angel food cake. Thursday a shepherd’s pie. I haven’t seen shepherd’s pie since grade school: underlayer of overcooked hamburger, overlayer of mashed potatoes, sprinkle of paprika.

On Friday my father stands with another dish in his arms and tells me that he and Barbara Bridgeton are going to be married.

I burst out laughing. “What are you talking about?”

“I asked her and she said yes.”

“Dad, she’s already married. And so are you, technically.”

“She’s leaving him.” He looks at his watch. “She’s telling him tonight.”

“Dad. You can’t break up a family like that.”

“She loves me. She told me. She wants to be married to me.”

“Ben Bridgeton is one of your oldest friends.”

“She’s not happy with him. I can’t help that.” He puts the dish down and pinches the cellophane tighter along the edges. “That’s not my fault.”

“Remember in AA they say you shouldn’t get into a relationship for at least a year?”

“AA says a lot of things. Barbara doesn’t think I ever had a real drinking problem, not like the rest of them.”

I feel the blood leave my hands and legs. I try to keep my voice steady. “And what do you think?”

“I don’t know what I think. I don’t think I’ve been able to think for myself for a long time.”

My throat and chest start buzzing. The kitchen feels very small. “Because of me?”

“There’s just been a lot of noise. Everyone talking at me. Talking talking talking.” There is a look on his face that I recognize from the early years with Catherine, a sort of predatory flush. He’d had sex with Barbara Bridgeton that afternoon. And then, like a good boy, he’d asked her to marry him. “And what does any of it matter to you?” he says. “You’re leaving after the holidays, aren’t you?”

Is that what started all this? “Do you want me to?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I just said that to Hatch because it was something to say. You need to get to your meeting. It’s late.”

He looks at his watch again. “Barbara’s going to call.”

“I think you should talk to Kenny, Dad. That’s what a sponsor’s for.”

“Fuck Kenny,” he says, but he drives down to the church.

Barbara doesn’t call. We eat a silent dinner. I go to my room and hear him yelling at the Patriots. “Don’t listen to those ass wipes!” And then, “You moron! You fucking butterfingers!” and finally, “Yes, yes, there you go, yes!” He stays up and watches the entire game and then the news.

At eleven-thirty the phone rings. He gets it before the second ring. He snaps off the TV but I can’t hear anything. I get out of bed and move slowly to the top of the stairs.

“It’s all right. It’s all right. Sweetie, it’s going to be all right.”

After a long silence, he says, “I do. You know I do. I always will. We’s gonna be okay, you and me.”

The next day Barbara Bridgeton arrives with two baby-blue hardshell suitcases. My father drags them upstairs while I make us some tea. Barbara stands near the dishwasher, her coat still on. I do everything slowly, to delay the moment when I have to turn and face her.

“I know how strange this must be for you, Daley,” she says to my back, “but I’ve loved him — I’ve loved your whole family — for as long as I can remember.” Her voice breaks, and I hear her drop into a chair. “Please be on our side. Someone needs to be on our side.” The sound of her weeping is awful. I think of Thanksgiving and her boys in coats and ties and the brick covered in needlepoint. It had been their thirty-sixth Thanksgiving in that house, Scott told me.

“Have you talked to your children about all this?”

She nods. Her crying quickens.

“They’re having a hard time with it?”

She nods again more vigorously. “Scott hung up on me. Hatch and Carly listened, but they think I’m being rash.”

“You are both being very rash.”

“We’re not teenagers. We know what we want.”

“My father does not know what he wants. You have to understand this. He has a lot of work ahead of him.”

“I don’t want him to do any work. He’s perfect the way he is.”

“I know to outsiders he appears that way but—”

“I’m hardly an outsider, Daley.”

Somehow he has hidden vast swaths of his personality from people who do not live with him. We hear him cross the dining room, enter the pantry. She wipes her face and stands up.

He hugs her and she starts crying again and he tells her he has cleaned out a bureau in his room for her. I slip out of the room.

Barbara insists on making dinner that night. She says she needs something to do with herself. There is a tenderloin in the fridge, but she has me go down to Goodale’s for cubes of lamb and some heavy cream. It’s clear she doesn’t want to go herself. Word has probably already gotten out about where she’s shacking up. She is right. I can tell by the way Mrs. Goodale greets me, her voice a bit louder, with just a hint of mischief in it.

When I get home with the groceries, they are upstairs again. They already took what Barbara called a siesta after lunch. I take the dogs for a walk to the beach. It’s freezing. I don’t like sand and snow mixed together. It seems unnatural. I don’t let the dogs off their leashes; they’ll try to swim. They strain toward the water. We are the only beings in sight.

If I move out now, my father will stop going to AA. It won’t last with Barbara. They’ll have their fling and she’ll return to her good solid family. I need to stay right here and hold his place so he won’t have to start all over again after she leaves him.

When he puts on his coat for the meeting that night, Barbara asks, “Why is it held at seven? Why right at dinnertime?”

I wait for my father to tell her that he never eats before eight, but he doesn’t. He just shrugs.

“Maybe it’s because that’s when people really want a drink,” I say.

“I see,” she says with a pout.

When he comes home she wants to know if anyone she knows was there.

“That’s the anonymous part,” I say.

My father separates the lamb from the sauce, eats a few bites, then says he’s full.

He leans back in his chair and looks at me. “You don’t wear your hair back like that very often, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s a good thing. You’ve got some big ears.”

This is the first criticism of me he’s made in a long time. It burns a little, but I don’t let him see that. “I’m pretty sure I know where I got them.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“Garvey’s got them too. We measured once. Whose do you think were the bigger, Garvey’s or mine?”

“Yours.”

“Nope. Garvey by three-eighths of an inch.”

He gets up and rustles around in a kitchen drawer. “Here we go.” He holds up a ruler to my left ear “Two and three quarters.”

I do the same to his. “Three and one-eighth.”

He raises his arms straight up. “The biggest ears in the world!”

“Don’t I get a chance to compete?” Barbara asks.

We look at her ears. They’re tiny.

“Nah,” we say at the same time, and laugh.

The next morning Barbara wants to help me unload the dishwasher. Dad is outside shoveling out the cars. I tell her to sit and finish her coffee, but she wants to know where everything goes. I don’t want to show her. I don’t want her tell me it would be better to have the mugs closer to the coffeepot. But she doesn’t. She holds up a plate with pink flowers and a gold rim and tells me it was the breakfast china my father’s mother gave my parents for their wedding.

“I remember your mother opening up the boxes of it at the shower.” And then she puts the plate on the counter. “I wish you wouldn’t focus on your father’s flaws, Daley.”

“What?”

“It’s not good for his self-esteem.”

“Are you talking about his ears?”

“Yes, that’s one thing.”

“I think it’s great to be able to laugh at your own small irregularities.”

“He has beautiful ears. And so do you. If you really want to help your dad, build him up, don’t knock him down.”

For the first three nights, my father doesn’t watch sports after dinner. But on the fourth night the Patriots are in some important game and he asks her if she wouldn’t mind if he watched a little.

“Of course not,” she says, and goes to fetch her needlepoint. My father is trying so hard to watch passively, without leaping to his feet and hurling expletives at the screen, that his hands twitch.

The phone rings. My heart does its usual throb. I’ve never quite given up hope that Jonathan will call. I reach it on the third ring.

“I’d like to speak to my wife, Daley.”

I look at Mrs. Bridgeton. She has the needle between her lips as she untangles a small knot within the small squares. The rounds of pink in her cheeks made me suspect that the phone made her heart pound, too. She’s a fine actress, though.

“Barbara,” I say, and watch her force a delay, then look up. “It’s for you.”

She stands and places her needlepoint in the hollow where her body has been beside my father. He watches her and she moves toward the little study where the phone is. I hand her the phone and shut the door on my way out.

My father’s fists are balled tight during the next play. After all the men on the field have fallen into another enormous pile, a commercial comes on.

“I’m going to have to get the number changed, you know,” he says. “He can’t be calling here.”

“Dad, you have to let them speak to each other.”

“No, she’s made her choice.”

“He must be pretty devastated right now. And if it leads to divorce, then everything will go smoother if they’re communicating well.”

“If it leads to divorce? She’s divorcing him, Daley. I think that’s pretty obvious.”

“You have to let her make her own decisions. You can’t force it.”

“You think she’s going to go back to him? Is that what you think?”

“I have no idea what she’ll do. But forty years of marriage shouldn’t be underestimated.”

When another commercial comes on, I say, “Don’t get derailed by this, Dad. Hold on and think about what you really want.”

“I know what I want. I know exactly what I want. And you need to butt the hell out.”

He clenches his furious face back on the game. Barbara opens the door and I go quickly into the kitchen and jangle the dogs’ leashes. They come scrambling in.

I hear my father blow. “You are not serious!” At first I think he’s hollering at a ref, but then I hear Mrs. Bridgeton murmuring something and my father screams back, “I don’t care if he’s turning a hundred and five!”

Before I can get the last leash hooked on a collar, Mrs. Bridgeton comes running in, wailing, “He’s my baby boy!” And then her body breaks into sobs.

I wait for them to subside. I really don’t want to be her confidante, and the dogs are scraping the door with their nails.

“I’m sorry, Daley.”

I hand her a paper towel.

“We have had Hatch’s thirty-fifth birthday party planned since last January,” she says. “We’re having this Boston band he loves come play, and some of his oldest friends are flying in, one even from Germany. Ben was just calling to see if I’d given the final numbers to the caterer. That’s all he wanted. But your father doesn’t believe me and he doesn’t want me to go to the party.” She breaks down again, her small frame trembling in slow motion.

“Of course you should go to the party. He’ll come around in the morning.” But I wasn’t sure about that. “He’ll come around to it eventually.”

“I don’t want to do anything to ruin what we have.”

What do they have? What could they possibly have built in five days? “You won’t.” I touch the white wool of her sweater. “You won’t.”

For the rest of the week there’s no more mention — in front of me, anyway — of the birthday party.

On Saturday my father’s team has a game in Allencaster. He won’t be back until six, he tells me.

At four, Barbara comes down in a navy blue dress and navy blue pumps. Above her left breast she has fastened a pin in the shape of a teddy bear. The gold plate has rubbed off of its feet and face. “Hatch gave this to me for Christmas when he was five years old. His father let him pick out anything in the store, and this is what he picked.” Her eyes fill and she speaks loudly, as if to stop the tears. “That was thirty years ago. Oh, Daley, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

“What did Dad say before he left this afternoon?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Did you tell him you were going?”

“I was afraid to.” Worry settles over her.

“I’ll explain it to him. You go.”

She smiles uneasily. “Thank you, Daley. I won’t stay long. Just through dinner. Then I’ll leave the ball like Cinderella.”

Her analogy makes me even more certain she won’t want to come back.

When my father comes home he’s keyed up. His team won by twenty-six points. “You should have seen the last play. Unbelievable. Those kids were on fire today.” He looks around. “Barbara out getting dinner?”

I can’t tell if he’s faking it.

“It’s Hatch’s birthday.”

“What?” But it’s not a question. I always thought he had to be drunk to speak with such pure bile.

“Dad, she has a family.”

He sticks a finger, the one with the pencil lead stuck in the knuckle, out at me. “She knows exactly how I felt about this. Don’t defend her.”

“All right,” I say. It’s her battle, not mine. Better she learn earlier, rather than later, the kind of sacrifices my father requires.

He goes to his meeting and then eats dinner in front of the game. It was supposed to snow tonight but it’s raining instead, a hard cold rain that pelts against the windows in the den. I go to bed early, hoping to sleep through the night.

I wake up past midnight to banging and go out into the hallway. All the lights are out, my father’s bedroom door ajar, like it used to be before Barbara moved in. I can’t hear him snoring. The banging is coming from the kitchen. I go down the back stairs quietly, keeping all the lights off.

Barbara is on the porch, both hands pounding against the panes of the back door.

“Daley!” I hear her cry out in relief. “Daley.” She rests her forehead on the glass.

I haven’t made it halfway across the kitchen to her when I hear my father hiss, “You let her in and I put you both out.”

I can just barely make out the outline of him in his pajama bottoms, fists clenched, hovering in the doorway of the pantry where she can’t see him.

“Jesus Christ, Dad,” I say, and keep moving. Barbara is pressed against the door, crying, the teddy bear brooch clanking against the glass. Behind her are her two hardshell suitcases, getting soaked in the rain. My father must have put them out there before he locked the door.

I reach the doorknob. It is cold. Mrs. Bridgeton moans, “Oh, Daley,” and I start to turn it and she screams and then my grip is not enough. I am smashed against the wall: head, shoulder, hip. And then I’m on the floor. My whole left side aches, the shoulder wrenched. There’s no one through the glass of the door anymore. It’s possible I’ve been unconscious.

I notice my father, crouched beside me. “You okay there?”

I nod.

“You sure?”

I nod again.

He helps me upstairs. He pulls down the covers so I can get into bed. He sits beside me, near my knees. My ear is throbbing. My shoulder is on fire. I don’t want him to know this. I can smell his humid metallic nighttime smell from childhood. I can smell it now, the exact same smell, coming off of him like a steam.

He pats my thigh through the covers. “Well, we dodged that bullet,” he says.

“Good night, Dad,” I say evenly. It’s important to give the impression of calm.

He doesn’t move. He strokes my thigh. I shut my eyes and, after a few minutes, make my breathing heavier. He gets up then and goes down the hallway to his room.

I wait. I keep waiting. Physical pain is a relief at this point. It blots out everything else. His first snores are weak and uneven. Soon they even out to the steady thrum you can hear all over the house.

It doesn’t take long to put all my stuff in garbage bags. It hurts and I have to carry them one at a time with my left arm to the car, but it’s all done in half an hour.

Barbara’s suitcases are still on the porch, but her car is gone.

I pass through the kitchen with my last bag. I look at the kitchen table. I have no note for him.