Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  “Tell me your joke today,” I said.

  Jane Marie, my wife, had been keeping on me to vet the jokes Todd was learning, for since it was known that Todd was telling jokes, people all over town were happy to tell him new ones, and Jane Marie worried some were not appropriate for all audiences and Todd would get himself in trouble. There had been an incident a few years ago when a little girl was crying outside the swimming pool, and she asked Todd if he could take her in to help her change into her suit, and he said he couldn’t and that he was sorry, and when the little girl asked why, Todd explained that the locker room was for women only because, “Vaginas were generally considered private and were only really comfortable being exposed to other females in situations such as locker rooms or some public restrooms.” Well, the lifeguard on duty heard the last of this, and there was a small-town kerfuffle about his choice of language, and Todd couldn’t go to the swimming pool without me for a while, and it caused Jane Marie some heartburn in the joke department.

  Todd took a deep breath and straightened his glasses. “A little boy was sitting on the curb in town eating a big handful of chocolate bars, one after another, and an old man comes up to him and says, ‘You know, young man, you really shouldn’t eat so much chocolate. It’s not good for you,’ and the little boy says, ‘I don’t know, my grandpa lived to be one hundred and three.’ The old man said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, did your grandpa eat a lot of chocolate?’ and the little boy said, ‘No but he learned to mind his own fucking business.’”

  By this time, we were through the roundabout and to the only stoplight downtown, and the wind was hitting us straight on without obstruction from the east. Todd’s glasses were now a haze of mist, dotted with raindrops. Though we could have crossed without danger to get undercover on the opposite corner, we waited in the soaking wind because Todd honors all laws.

  “It’s a good joke,” I said. “If you tell it with anyone under twelve years old around, just change the ‘fuck’ to ‘damn.’ You’ll be fine.”

  Todd nodded. He had taken many similar notes and understood the F-word problem.

  “Cecil?” he asked.

  “What?” I responded.

  “Why was the little boy eating chocolate bars sitting on the curb of the street?”

  The light changed but just before we stepped down off the curb I considered his question. I never like to brush him off or give him the impression I’m not giving his inquiries full consideration.

  “It’s just funnier. I guess.” We hurried across the street.

  By the time we got home the house was in a full frenzy of pre-dinner homework bickering: Jane Marie was stirring a pot of boiling red sauce, and Blossom was standing at the head of a bare table staring into her phone.

  “Cecil, will you talk to your daughter?” was my wife’s greeting as I topped the stairs to our living room/kitchen, which looked out over the channel. Todd ducked into his room. Blossom did not acknowledge my existence.

  “Mi familia!” I said as happily as I could. “Daughter, is there trouble in paradise?”

  “Mom is being a bitch,” Blossom said, without raising her heavily mascaraed eyes from her phone, which she appeared to be drumming with her thumbs.

  Jane Marie slapped the spoon into the sauce and started to make a move around the stove like a professional wrestler about to climb the turnbuckle to go for a body slam.

  “Now hold on . . . Every one. Hold on.” I moved in front of Jane Marie to gather her up in my arms. “You are such a bitch. I knew that the first time I met you.” I kissed her on the lips.

  “She can’t call me that, Cecil.” Jane Marie’s eyes were tired and sad, but every muscle in her body was coiled. She was ready to break.

  “Listen,” I said, “let me set the table. Blossom, would you please pick some dinner music that will not cause us to slit our wrists, and could we have a meal that does not involve having the police called?” Blossom grunted and sat down and started scrolling through her music.

  “You are such a tool,” she muttered.

  “Thank you sweetheart,” I said.

  The advantage of asking Blossom to provide the music for dinner was she had to place her phone in a cradle beside the stereo system. She chose the Mountain Goats album All Hail West Texas because she knew I had once said that I liked it, but she set the volume far too high, knowing it would irritate the shit out of her mother, particularly the chorus of “Hail Satan!” in the first song. Jane Marie sat gritting her teeth as I scooped the sauce on her plate, and I signaled Todd to turn down the volume.

  To give a little more background to the tension in our family, about nine months ago a girl from the high school had dropped out and then gone missing. Her name was Melissa Bean. She had twin baby girls. We had known her and had helped her with her children. We still took care of the babies when the grandparents were overwhelmed. Melissa had fallen away in the last few months before her disappearance. She had been sullen and quiet, angry most of the time. “Drugs,” her parents said. She was never home; then there were new friends and strange calls. She was always tired, seemed scared of something but got snappy if you asked her about it. Her mom was worried that her daughter was growing so thin. Finally, after the Permanent Fund checks, our oil money payments, came out she was gone. No rumors. No body. It was a nightmare for Jane Marie and the many mothers of sullen teenage girls.

  I was worried about Blossom as well, but I always worried. I’m now a fifty-six-year-old father of a teenager. I’m always tired too. I don’t see any of the obvious signs of drug use. Blossom is smart and bookish. She reads a lot. She makes films with her phone. She stays up late watching movies and talking to her nerdy friends. She likes to argue and cares passionately about the things she likes. The druggy people I knew—and I knew a lot of them—didn’t give a whit about John Darnielle, or whether he sounded better solo or with his band, or if the whole “lo-fi” phenomenon was bullshit or not, but for some reason Blossom did. Now, is she in danger of becoming of becoming a pretentious thirteen-year-old hipster? Probably, but Your Honors, cut me some parental slack here. This is Sitka, Alaska, and being a tad pretentious or being a lot pretentious when you are thirteen is a far cry from being a meth head swallowed up by the drug underworld, and preferable to that as well.

  But Jane Marie worried about it, night and day particularly since Blossom’s dear little playmate Emily dyed her hair blue, and, in a twist on her best friend’s name, changed her own name to Thistle.

  “Cecil, can Thistle spend the night tomorrow?” Calling us by our first names was another new development that drove Jane Marie crazy.

  “It’s fine with me.” I looked at Jane Marie and she nodded down at her food. “Is it okay with her mom?”

  “Ah . . . she doesn’t live with her mom anymore. She lives someplace else, with another family, I think.”

  “What?” Jane Marie put down her fork. “Honey, what happened with Emily?”

  “I don’t know. She just moved out. It happens.” Now they were both looking at their food.

  Todd asked for some more spaghetti, and I dished him some in silence.

  “Blossom . . .” Jane Marie’s voice was starting to crack, “when did this happen?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jane Marie said softly and a tear traced down her cheek.

  “Why are you mad at me? I didn’t do anything,” Blossom said.

  “No one said you did, honeybunny,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane Marie said. She got up from the table and put her half-full plate of crab pasta in the sink and walked back into the office. John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats were singing “Color in Your Cheeks” as Todd asked if he could have another piece of French bread, and I told him he could.

  Your Honors, you know from the previous briefing that I have a criminal history. You know that I am an alcoholic. At the time
of this incident I had not had a drink in twenty years. All of my earlier offenses, the offenses that caused me to lose my driving privileges and tarnish my record were all alcohol related. What you may not know is that I was also a child of alcoholics, though my parents were not as extreme or as dramatic in their drinking as I turned out to be. But as a child of an alcoholic, I grew up with a need to please, and a need to try and to set the chaos right, to sweep up the broken glass, and smooth over the arguments. Some have suggested that was the reason I became a criminal defense investigator. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure it helped when it came to being the father of a teenager.

  So I knocked on Blossom’s door and when I didn’t hear anything, I said her name. It wasn’t until I heard her small voice say, “Come in,” that I opened the door. Her room was tiny, not much more than a closet really; it only had room for a bed and a chair and a dresser, but it had a window that looked over the commercial channel of Sitka’s harbor. Below the water slapped against our boat launch at high tide. The gulls mewed almost all night every season of the year, and even in the rain they sat in the calm water like bars of soap.

  “Why does she hate me so much, Cecil?”

  “She doesn’t hate you, baby. You worry her, that thing with Melissa scares her so much.”

  “I don’t do drugs. She knows that. I want to be on the debate team, and you can’t be on the debate team if you smoke pot. Maybe after that . . . you know . . .”

  “Okay, fair enough,” I brushed back her hair. She had washed her face. There was none of the badly applied makeup or the mascara. There, once again, was the girl I knew. “Look at me, sweetie,” I said softly. She lifted her head. “Do you love her still?”

  She looked down at her quilt, which had whales and birds woven into the fabric. I looked around the high ceilings of her room at her childhood mobiles, which had been a gift from her mom. On the walls were the pictures of research trips, shots of Blossom photographing whales out at sea, and one of her shooting a crossbow to collect DNA samples from killer whales. Her shelves sagged with glass balls we had found on the sandy beaches offshore.

  “Sure . . . sure I love her. She’s my mom, but she’s not fair to me all the time.”

  “Ah baby . . . that is the truth and probably the source of all great music.”

  Blossom squinched up her teenaged face in recognition of some more adult “wait till you’re older” bullshit.

  “When Thistle comes over, can I talk with her? I want to find out what’s happening with her family,” I said.

  “Don’t interview her, Cecil, and don’t give her any crap about where she’s staying okay?”

  “B., can you for a second not talk to me like you are a cop? I’m your father for Pete’s sake. I’ve known her a long time, and I want to help her, okay?”

  “Yes, Cecil.”

  “Good night, honey pie.” I kissed my only daughter, then turned out the light, as the gulls rose on soft white feathers, some of them settling on our roof for the night.