by Lily King
“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.
