The Angel on the Roof

Quality Time

Tires crunch against the crushed stone driveway, and a flash of headlights crosses Kent’s bedroom window, waking him from a light sleep. But he wasn’t asleep, he tells himself. Merely resting, eyes closed. Listening. Just as, when Rose was still in high school, he lay in bed after midnight and listened for the sound of a car — his, or the current boyfriend’s, her girlfriend’s father’s car, sometimes even his ex-wife’s car — bringing Rose home to his house, where she spent the weekend, Kent’s every-other-weekend, or her spring-break week, or her two-week midsummer visit. In his house in his town, his turn to be the custodial parent.

Quality time, they called it. He would greet her at the door and make sure she wasn’t drunk or high or sad, and when she was suffering from any of those conditions, he tried to treat her condition rationally, calmly, realistically. Kent was a physician, a trained scientist, as he thought of it, and also a man of the world. He knew what kids were dealing with out there. He sympathized. Even today, a decade later and more of an administrator now than a physician, Kent still sympathizes.

He hears the thump of Rose’s clunky Doc Martens against the front deck, the jingle of the house key, and the slammed door. In three months Rose will be thirty, and she still slams the door when she comes in, no matter how late the hour. And Kent still checks the car for scratches and dents the morning after she borrows it. Especially this car, his brand-new Audi, silver and sleek — his sixtieth birthday present to himself. He’s already reminding himself to examine the car in the morning before he leaves for the office, so he won’t discover the ding in the fender or the broken taillight late in the afternoon in the clinic parking lot, which is where she’ll insist it must have happened, since she has absolutely zero recollection of any fender-bender occurring on her watch. He’ll accept that. He’ll have to. He turns on the bedside lamp, gets out of bed, and walks to the closet. But she’ll be lying. Or worse, she won’t really know one way or the other how it happened, and won’t care, either. He pulls his bathrobe over his pajamas and pads barefoot down the hall to the kitchen.

“Hey, babe. Nice time?” he says and plucks a bunch of purple grapes from the fruit bowl on the breakfast table. She’s sprawled at the table, thoughtfully drinking milk from a half-gallon container. Kent likes this kitchen, the only truly up-to-date, architect-designed room in the house. It’s an orderly arrangement of stainless steel, ceramic tile, overhead pot racks, and butcher-block islands. He had it renovated top to bottom back when he first got serious about gourmet cooking and enjoys telling people that the kitchen is state-of-the-art. The rest of the house is more or less the way it was when he bought it fifteen years ago, the year after the divorce. Since then, though he’s enjoyed several long-term romances with women, good women his own age, marriageable women, he’s not shared his house with anyone — except his daughter. Hasn’t wanted to. A nineteen-fifties, midlevel mafia capo’s suburban ranch, is how Kent likes to describe the house to strangers.

He pops the grapes one by one into his mouth. He’s been unmarried now for nearly as long as he was married, and the fact freshly surprises him. He drops the grape stem into the trash compactor.

“I wish you’d use a glass,” he says evenly. Julia, his ex-wife, gave her that habit — drinking orange juice, milk, whatever, straight from the carton.

“Sorry, Pops, I forgot. It’s been a while,” Rose says. She shrugs and smiles up at him, sheepishly, or maybe mockingly, he’s not sure which. It hasn’t been that long since she last visited him, has it? Barely half a year.

She stands and crosses to the glassware cabinet, where she takes out a tumbler and fills it, leaving the carton on the counter. Rose is a tall, large-boned woman with burgundy-colored, shoulder-length hair. Her skin comes from her mother — skin so smooth and strikingly pale it seems washed in a hazy blue light. When Julia was Rose’s age, he remembers, she tied her hair back the same way and in summer favored sleeveless, V-neck blouses. Julia then, like her daughter now, showed as much face, throat, and arms as possible. If you’ve got it, she used to say, show it.

Kent doesn’t know how Julia does her hair now or if her skin is still as beautiful — he hasn’t seen her close-up in over seven years. He imagines that she’s changed in that time as much as he and in most of the same ways. In seven years your whole body replaces itself, cell by cell.

He picks up the milk carton and returns it to the refrigerator. “So how was it tonight, with your old pals?”

“Okay,” she says. “It was fun.” Then, “Not, actually. Not okay. Not fun.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Eddie and Jeanette and Tucker and Sandy? They’re not my old pals. Not really. And they’re married, they’re couples, et cetera. And they’re definitely on the boring side. Tep-id.”

“They are?” he says in a low, sad voice. He wants to let his disappointment show without having to say it.

“Yeah. I didn’t even know them, you know, till after the divorce. I mean, I knew them, we hung out a lot when we were teenagers, but it was mostly summers, Dad. A few weeks at a time.”

He understands. It has to be hard for her, five hours on a Trailways bus to visit the old man every six months or so for a long weekend or maybe a week. Then being alone with him at his house (her house once, as he often points out, but, as she insists, not hers anymore), until he fears he’s holding her against her will, so he starts pushing her to go out on her own, go ahead, borrow the Audi, visit some of her old pals. Most of the local people her age, because they’ve not left this small, upstate town for more promising climes, have married one another and have settled for much less than Rose wants for herself. She’s right. They are boring.

Rose is an artist, a sculptor who has already had two one-person shows of her work, the first at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, where she went to college, and the other at a small gallery in Litchfield, Connecticut, where Julia lives. Julia and her second husband, Thatcher Clarke, the executive director of the clock and watch museum there, helped arrange it. When Julia first met Thatcher, a few months before her divorce from Kent became final, he was the director of the Adirondack Arts Council and had already been hired to run the clock and watch museum down in Litchfield, one hundred twenty miles to the south. Within weeks of the divorce, Julia followed him there. Rose went with her. Because of the schools. That’s when the need for quality time arrived.

Kent honestly believes that Ol’ Thatch, as he calls him, is perfect for Julia, and he’s been a good stepfather for Rose. He’s a hale fellow well-met, in Kent’s words, and a liberal New England Republican. Kent, on the other hand, is proud to be neither. He spoke with Ol’ Thatch briefly at Rose’s high school graduation, renewed their slight acquaintance when she graduated from Skidmore, and saw him a third time last fall at the Skidmore show.

Julia didn’t attend the opening. She was at a health spa in New Mexico, Rose explained. Was she okay? Health-wise? “Oh, sure,” Rose assured him. “It’s about weight. As usual.” Julia had mailed the spa her fifteen-hundred-dollar deposit months earlier and didn’t want to lose it, so Rose told her to go, for heaven’s sake. She could see Rose’s new work on her own anytime. Two months later, Rose had the show in Litchfield.

Rose kisses her father on the cheek, says good night, and saunters down the hall toward her room, flipping off lights as she goes. Her bedroom is situated on the opposite end of the house from Kent’s master bedroom. It was originally meant to be guest quarters, but the first weekend Rose spent with him in his new house, when she was fifteen, Kent turned the guest bedroom, dressing room, and bath over to her. He did it casually, as if it were something that occurred to him only when it was happening, but it was long-planned and for him a memorable event. It was his first chance to feel like a father, a real father with a house large enough to give his teenage daughter her own bedroom suite, where she could play her music and watch TV and talk on her own phone without interfering with his music, TV, and phone. He was no longer a middle-aged single guy subletting a semifurnished garden apartment in a complex filled with young professionals. He’d hated that. He was a proper family man now. His house, his daughter’s rooms, and her regular, ongoing presence at his house proved it.

He needed that visible evidence of paternity, and he believed that Rose did, too. The divorce was harder on her, he feels, than either Julia or Rose herself is willing to acknowledge — Julia because she still feels guilty for the several careless little love affairs that led up to the divorce and ostensibly caused it, and, too, because she was the one who afterwards moved away; and Rose because she doesn’t want her parents to worry about her any more than they already do.

It wasn’t Julia’s dalliances, though, that caused the divorce, or her removal to Litchfield that heightened the pain of it for Rose. And Kent knows it. As the years pass, some things in life do get simpler, and Kent’s divorce from Julia was becoming one of those things. No, it all came down to the simple fact that he grew up, and she didn’t, and then wouldn’t. And because she had plenty of inherited money, she’s never had to. She didn’t need Kent’s money or proximity to raise their child, she could do it on her own, and, mostly, that’s what she did. There’s no way, of course, that he can tell this to Rose or Julia. Not now. They’d think he was criticizing them, and he wasn’t.

Kent washes Rose’s milk glass in the sink, places it into the dish rack, and switches off the overhead light. He steps into the darkened sitting porch just off the kitchen — he can’t remember if he locked the door to the backyard. The flagstone floor is cold against his bare feet, when suddenly it’s as if he’s walking on gravel or broken peanut shells. Popcorn, maybe. Beads from a broken necklace? He gropes beside him in the dark, until his hand finds a floor lamp.

It’s birdseed! A wide trail of sunflower and wildflower seeds and cracked corn spills from the pantry behind him, where he stores a hundred-pound bag of mixed birdseed in a large galvanized trash can. The trail crosses the porch to the door leading outside. Mornings over his second cup of coffee and evenings over his first Scotch and soda, Kent often sits out here on the glider and watches the birds flutter greedily over the three large bird feeders hanging from the maple tree. There are finches, both purple and gold, pine siskins and grosbeaks, cardinals and phoebes. Once he saw an indigo bunting and was so excited he shouted, “Look!” but he was alone. His shout, even through the glass, scared the bunting, and it flew away and didn’t return.

He stares down at the birdseed scattered over the slate floor, and he feels his neck and ears redden. She must have refilled the feeders sometime earlier tonight, and instead of bringing the feeders into the pantry and filling them there, which is how he does it and has demonstrated for her any number of times, she carried the seeds, scoop by scoop, across the porch and out the door, spilling as she went. That’s so damned typical! And, of course, since she never sees disorder anyway and didn’t see the stuff scattered across the floors of the porch and pantry, she didn’t think to clean it up. Never crossed her mind. He strides down the hall to Rose’s end of the house, snapping on lights as he goes.

He knocks firmly on her door. Not with anger, for while he is exasperated, he’s not angry. He’s confused. He can admit that much. After all these years, he still doesn’t understand why she can’t or won’t remember what he tells her to do, what he asks her to do, what he wants her to do, when she’s in his house. When she’s in his life, for heaven’s sake. She acts as if, for her, his life doesn’t exist, or if it exists at all, it doesn’t have any meaning. He can’t bear that.

She opens the door. She’s wearing green-and-blue-plaid flannel pajamas and has her toothbrush and toothpaste in hand. “You haven’t gone to sleep yet, have you?” he asks evenly.

“I haven’t made my evening ablutions yet,” she says, smiling. Then she sees his expression. “What’s the matter?”

“The birdseed, Rose. You spilled it all over the porch floor.”

She wrinkles her brow and stares at her father’s face, not quite getting what he’s after. “I did?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry. I… I wasn’t aware…,” she trails off. “The bird feeders were almost empty. You want me to clean it up … now?”

“If you don’t mind.”

She sighs audibly. “O-kay.”

Kent turns and walks purposefully back to his side of the house, not stopping until he’s inside his bedroom and has closed the door, extinguished the light, and has got himself under the covers in bed. He’s breathing rapidly, as if he’s just climbed three flights of stairs. His heart is pounding, and adrenaline is rushing through his body. He knows what’s happening to his body, he’s a doctor, after all. But why is it happening? Why is he fuming over such a trivial offense? Why even view it as an offense in the first place? Must he take personally everything his daughter does wrong?

In the morning, Kent leaves for the office before Rose wakes. There are no dents or scratches on his Audi. He feels guilty for last night, not because he did or said anything to hurt her, but because he was angry, when clearly something else was called for. He’s not sure what, but he knows that anger was useless to them both. Useless and therefore offensive somehow. Around ten, he telephones the house, and she picks up. “I wondered if you’d like to meet me for lunch downtown,” he says, a little shy and stiff.

“Sounds great!” She’s chewing food, he can tell, and is probably still in bed in her pajamas, flopped in front of the TV, working her way through the lox and bagels he bought especially for her visit.

“Want me to come by the house and pick you up?”

“No, I’ll ride the bike! It’s gorgeous out, and I need the exercise. I’ve been a lump all week.”

They agree to meet at his office at one. At a quarter to one, Kent walks out the door of the clinic, leans against the railing of the front steps, and looks along the street uphill to his right, where he knows that Rose in a few moments will come into view pedaling her old bike, the blue Raleigh three-speed that he bought for her the summer she turned fourteen. She already owned a bike, a present on her twelfth birthday from both Mom and Dad, but he bought her the Raleigh himself so that, after the divorce, she could ride from her mother’s house to his whenever she wanted. Then Julia moved. Or from his house to the office, he assured her, where they could meet for lunch on Saturdays when he had to work. She rode from his house on Ash Street to Main and then cruised ten blocks along Main to the long, curving hill that flattened and straightened where it passed in front of the clinic. He remembers October leaves skidding across the sidewalks and streets, and the sky was deep blue. He liked to wait on the steps outside, just as he is doing today, and every time he saw her pedal around that far curve with a wide, excited grin on her face and her auburn hair flying behind her in the rippling sunlight, his chest filled with joy and with an inescapable sadness, and he could barely keep his eyes from flooding with tears. He knew what gave him the joy — she did; he loved her, and the joy proved it — but he did not know what caused the sadness.

Here she comes now, a beautiful young woman in jeans and mint green sleeveless T-shirt, wearing sunglasses, and smiling broadly at the sight of her father. He stands on the clinic steps with arms folded, still a hundred yards away from her, and she lifts her right hand high in the air and waves.

He waves back, smiles, and feels his chest tighten and buckle with emotion. He has never felt as proud of Rose as he does at this moment. It’s the simplicity of her beauty and her sincerity, he decides. That’s what makes him proud of her. They are qualities of body and character, qualities of self, that for unknown reasons have been invisible to him until this moment. He doesn’t ask why he never saw them before. Instead, he wonders why they should have suddenly become visible.

Because she is at hand, yet still far away, is his answer. But coming nearer by the second, and nearer, when suddenly, to avoid hitting something on the road that he can’t see, a piece of broken glass, perhaps, she swerves the bike out into the middle of the street and puts herself between an oncoming UPS truck and a Volvo station wagon bearing down behind her. Kent reaches toward her with both arms, his mouth wide open as if to shout, but he can’t break his silence, he can’t even say her name, and she swerves a second time, this time cutting in front of the UPS truck and off Main Street onto a narrow lane on the opposite side, where she disappears.

The UPS truck passes Kent nonchalantly, as if the driver has noticed nothing out of the way, as if he’s not seen anyone in danger for a very long time, and the Volvo station wagon passes in the other direction as normally as cars have passed all day, the woman driver chatting with the passenger, her husband, perhaps, or a client to whom she’s about to show a house. Then, on his right and across the street, Rose emerges from behind a high hedge on the corner of Main, pedaling her blue Raleigh with ease and obvious pleasure. She’s still smiling and is close enough now to call to him and be heard. “Hey, Dad! What a day, huh?”

Kent rushes across the street and grabs her bicycle by the handlebars and stops it dead. Rose’s face drops and tightens. Her father is panting, red-faced, sweating.

“Jesus, Dad, what’s the matter?” she asks, her voice rising in fear. “Are you okay?”

“Why? Why do you do this to me? To yourself! Why do you do it to yourself?”

Rose lets go of the handlebars. She reaches forward and places her hands on her father’s shoulders, as if she is the parent and he the reckless child. “Dad,” she says. “Stop.”

“Why?”

Then, calmly, patiently, with a detachment that’s incomprehensible to him, she explains. “I do it because what you do is violent, and it makes me violent, too. That’s why.” The two of them stand there with the blue bicycle between them, traffic whizzing by in the background.

“What? It’s my fault?”

She sighs, and then she tells her father what he needs most to know, but has always seemed incapable of knowing: that his kindness and intimacy draw her close to him, but only for him to reject her — because of her sloppiness, her carelessness, her disorder. She reminds him of last night’s confrontation over the spilled birdseed. She tells him that he should have let it go till morning. “I’m twenty-nine, Dad. Leave me a note. I’d have cleaned it up this morning.” He spoiled their earlier moment in the kitchen, she says, which, if he had left her alone, would have helped her deal with her little failure later in a useful way. “In a way that wouldn’t have scared you. You don’t know, but it’s what I’ve been doing for years,” she says.

“What have you been doing for years?”

“Things that would scare you, Dad. Only this time you saw it.”

Side by side, they walk along the sidewalk, uphill away from the office. Rose keeps one hand on the handlebars, steering the bike, and the other on her father’s slumped shoulder. “I’m not angry at you,” she says, sounding distant and almost scientific. “Not anymore.” She understands his needs. Her needs, however, are different, and it’s her mother, she says, who’s shaped her needs. Not him.

“Your mother?”

“Dad, Mom is like my hollow double,” she says. “My absent self. Not you. You’re my father.” All these years he’s treated her as if she were like him, she explains, instead of like her mother. And consequently he’s dealt with her as if she had his needs instead of her mother’s. Rose smiles at him, but from a great height.

It’s only a flash of awareness, as if a darkened room were lit for a second and then dropped into darkness again, but Kent sees how vain and cruel he’s been. He sees that he’s been a man completely opposed to the man he thought he was. And as surely as he lost her mother fifteen years earlier, he has lost Rose now, and for the same reason. He knows nothing of his daughter’s needs, because he knew nothing of her mother’s.

He says to Rose, as they turn off Main Street onto Ash, “Was I wrong, to divorce your mother? To leave you?”

“No,” she says. “You weren’t. But you shouldn’t have tried to keep her through me. And me through her,” she says. “Now you’ve lost us both.”

“You’ll never come to visit me again, will you?”

She shakes her head no. “I’m sorry. I think this has been the end of everything between us. But we’ll see.” She tells him to go on back to his office. She’ll leave the bicycle in the garage and call a cab to take her to the Trailways station.

He stops, and she continues on.