Father of the Rain (11 page)

“So you’re taking care of the pipsqueak.”

“We take care of each other.” She smiles at me. I hear her accent—
each otha
—more distinctly with Garvey in the room. She comes every day after school until my mother gets home at seven-thirty, and we laugh a lot. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have Nora. She’d moved in with her sister in Lynn and came sometimes to take me out to Friendly’s and didn’t seem to be working at all, but my mother thought I should have someone younger, and less expensive. Pauline is in tenth grade and her boobs are growing so fast they pop the buttons off her shirt. We’re always finding buttons and cracking up. I see my brother taking all this in.

We eat the macaroni on the sofa. Garvey drills Pauline with questions: where does she live, what’s that neighborhood like, does
she have siblings, did her parents grow up here, has she done much traveling, where would she like to go most? Maybe we’ll all take a trip there, to California, one day, he concludes.

And then Mom comes home and Pauline leaves.

“Wow,” my brother says, smoothing down the back of his hair. “Va va voom.”

“She’s barely fifteen,” my mother says.

“She’s not going to be able to balance on two feet if she grows any bigger.”

“She’ll manage just fine.” My mother hangs up her coat and gives my brother another hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” she says through gritted teeth. She always grits her teeth when she’s feeling affection.

“It’s good to be here. Nice pad, Ma.” He swings his head around. “You got some serious loot from the big house.”

My mother eats the rest of my macaroni standing up. We’re all still standing up. I’m not sure why.

“How’s it going there?” she asks him.

“Oh, fair to middling.”

“Yeah?” Meaning she wants to hear more.

“I’ve been in school so long.”

“Garvey.”

“I’m just saying. I was in boarding school for four years before this. Everyone else runs around like they’ve been let out of a cage, and I feel like it’s just another cage. A less interesting cage, actually.”

“Three and a half more years. That’s all. Then it’s over forever.”

“Yeah.” He slumps to the sofa and puts his boots up on the coffee table. Mom doesn’t tell him to take them off. He pulls out a new pack of cigarettes, smashes both ends into his palm a couple of times, unwraps the cellophane, then slides one out and lights it. “Then I get to go out and find my perfect career that will swallow up the rest of my promising life.” He blows out a long stream
of smoke. “It all may be quite moot. I wasn’t able to register this week for next semester’s classes. Dad’s a little late on the payments, it turns out.”

My mother sits down on the couch beside him. “You’re joking, right?”

“I am not joking.”

“You need to talk to him about that. Tomorrow.”

Garvey taps the ashes onto his jeans and rubs them in. My mother brings him an ashtray but he doesn’t use it. “I don’t need his money.”

“Garvey, you need this degree.”

“I can pay for it myself. Brian Foley pays his own way. He works in the library I think. I visited him a few weeks ago.”

“UMass only costs three hundred dollars a year. Of course he can work it off. Harvard is several thousand.”

“So I’ll go to UMass. Harvard is a bunch of self-inflated morons. They all walk around in tuxes on the weekend. I’m not kidding. I met this bartender last weekend and he’s starting a moving company, furniture and crap, and he asked me to do some jobs for him. Might have to miss a few classes, but it’s good money.”

“Please talk to your father.”

“No.”

“I’m worried now.”

“I’m worried too.”

My mother gets up and rinses off the plate in the kitchen. She takes her time. Eventually the dishwasher squeaks open and the plate is slotted in. I know there’s nothing else for her to do in there but she stays in there, thinking.

I watch Garvey smoke.

“Dad and Mrs.—I mean
Catherine
—are married now,” I say.

“I heard. A little Nassau combo platter: divorce, wedding, and a nice golden tan for the holidays.”

“Frank’s got your room.”

Garvey snorts. “I’ll have to show him my
Playboy
stash.”

“He already found it.”

“Really? Cagey bugger.”

“He’s weird. “

“With a mother like that.”

“How’s Heidi?”

“Who?”

I give him a look.

“She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s very dependable.” He says the word
dependable
with nunlike primness, tilting his head, pursing his lips.

I laugh and that eggs him on.

“He shows up at precisely the right time, he says precisely the right things, and he always, always has a condom.”

Frank has condoms. When we’re really bored, Patrick and I sneak them out of his room and fill them with water and lob them at Elyse. She calls them greasy balloons and shrieks whenever she sees one.

“Do you have a new girlfriend?”

“Not really.”

“What about Deena?”

“Who?” This time he really doesn’t know who I’m talking about.

“That girl in your apartment in Somerville.”

A grimace, as brief as a gust of wind, passes across his face. “I never had anything to do with her.” He’s a bad liar. He keeps talking to cover it up. “She’s a very fucked-up young woman.”

That’s what she said about you, I want to say but I don’t. I don’t want to push him any lower than he already is.

“And you, my little hermitoid. What is going on in your sixth-grade world?”

I knew he’d ask this and I know just the kinds of thing he likes to hear so I prepared just the right story. “Funny you should ask,” I
say, warming up. He smiles and I continue. “There’s this new boy, Kevin.”

“Kevin what?”

“Kevin Mackerel.”

“Mackerel? Like the fish?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Oh, Kevin Mackerel,” he begins to sing. “Is he a fish or a man? I can’t tell and nobody can!”

My mother comes in then, all fired up with new reasons why Garvey has to stay in college and how she will talk to Al about how to proceed, and I never get to tell my story about how Kevin Mackerel got suspended for farting so much.

No way, my brother would have said.

Yes, way, I would have said, he did so. He just kept doing it really loudly and really stinkily and wouldn’t stop. He got warnings, demerits, a note home but nothing stopped him. So now he’s out of school until December first.

No way! I can hear him, his hands pulling at his hair, his face full of real laughter.

The next morning we get ready to go up to Dad and Catherine’s. We’ll have lunch there and dinner with Mom. I wear a black velvet dress. It has white lace cuffs and a white lace collar.

“Oh look, it’s the first pilgrim!” Garvey says.

He’s wearing the same jeans and a faded flannel shirt with a ripped pocket that flaps around. His hair is matted in the back. Because we’re going to see Dad, I notice these things. So does my mother. “The shower’s free,” she says.

“Oh goodie,” he says, and lights another cigarette.

We drive up in Mom’s car. I know this is a mistake. We should have left earlier and walked.

My father comes out on the back porch. He’s laughing and shaking his head.

“I thought,” he begins, fake chuckling, waiting to make sure we’re in earshot, “I thought your mother had decided to come for Thanksgiving dinner!”

They shake hands. I haven’t seen them together since the beginning of last summer. I’ve never noticed their similarity before, the sloping backs, the narrow eyes.

“When d’you get here?”

“Me and a buddy drove up last night.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You’re looking good, Dad.”

“Can’t complain too much. Things good?”

“Yeah, things are good.”

“Good.”

I can’t bear the fakeness and flee to find Patrick.

Frank is in the kitchen, fishing through a drawer in the kitchen.

“Hey,” I say.

He grunts back, then, realizing my usefulness, calls out, “Where do you guys keep the tape around here?”

“I dunno.” I keep moving. “Where do
you
keep it?”

Patrick and Elyse are watching the parade on TV from the recliners. Patrick moves over for me. His thumb is red and shiny with little indentations under the knuckle from his teeth. He’s been sucking it, which he does when he watches TV and forgets people can see him.

A ten-story Snoopy floats down a crowded street.

I hate that parade, and get up.

I hear the screen door slam.

From the French windows in the living room, I see Garvey walking onto the tennis court. It’s the first time he’s seen it, seen
the garden gone. I can’t remember if I told him about it. The court’s surface is unblemished, a deep dark green with bright white lines. He stands at the far service line facing me but he can’t see me. He looks small. As I pass the stairs, I can hear Dad in the upstairs hallway, whispering loudly.

“It’s a disgrace. Honestly. He’s got on a filthy pair of jeans and an old shirt that smells like cat piss. And his hair.” I know my father is waving his hands around his head. “It’s a goddamn hornet’s nest. You couldn’t take him anywhere. ‘Me and my buddy drove up last night.’ Goes to Harvard and he can’t even speak English. You couldn’t take him to the club anymore. You couldn’t. And she doesn’t care. She let him leave the house like that. And then she lets him drive up here in the car I bought her! He has the nerve to bring that up here to my house!”

And then he’s downstairs, at the bar, rattling in the ice bucket, cracking the paper on a new bottle of vodka. I go and stand beside him, watching him carry out the motions. On top of the vodka he pours a few drops of vermouth. He puts the tops back on the vodka and vermouth and then, with a small spoon, slides out four tiny onions. I put out my hand and he drops one into it. He puts the rest in his drink, which he stirs with a finger. He straightens the line of bottles, the line of glasses, wipes off the spoon and the counter with a paper towel. Only when he is sitting in his chair does he close his eyes and take his first sip. The clock above him says 11:35. The turkey is on the stove, pale and pimply. Catherine hasn’t put it in the oven yet.

I sit beside him on the floor. At some point during the day, I have to tell my father that I’m going back to my mother’s until Saturday morning, until Garvey leaves. “You have a good week at school?”

“Yeah,” I say, stunned by the question, wishing I prepared for it. Then I realize I can tell my Kevin Mackerel story. This time I won’t
use his distracting name; I’ll get right to the point. “A kid in my class got suspended for farting.”

He’s bent over his drink. He drinks and shakes his head. It seems like he hasn’t really heard. On another day he might jerk up, eyes big and delighted, and say, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Then I remember Patrick will have already told him.

“So who’s coming for lunch?” I say.

“No one, thank God.”

All my life we’ve had old Mrs. Waverly who had her voice box removed and buzzes out her words with the help of a little silver gadget that looks like an electric razor that she presses to her throat, Mr. Harris who owns the garden shop, and Cousin Morgan, Grindy’s cousin who lost a leg and most of an arm in a war. They are all Mom’s people and they’ll never come to this house again.

My father lifts his lighter to his neck and speaks in Mrs. Waverly’s robotic rhythm. “Hel/lo/Da/ley. Are/you/en/joy/ing/school/this/year?” My mother never found his imitations funny, even when he pretended to be Cousin Morgan insisting on passing the heavy gravy boat with his one hand and spilling it in my lap, which did happen one year. My mother’s disapproval always made it hard not to laugh, but without it, it isn’t as funny. Even my father isn’t enjoying it. He starts to pull his arm out of his sleeve to do the gravy routine and then stops and looks at me like he’s wondering where he is. Then he smiles and shakes his head. “Jesus Christ. Good riddance to all of them.”

He goes back to the bar and I go into the dining room. It’s set with Catherine’s china, green and brown. I go to the sideboard my mother didn’t take and open the top drawer. There they are, the place cards with the painted wooden fruit glued onto a corner and all the names in my mother’s big handwriting:
Olivia
(Mrs. Waverly),
Donald
(Mr. Harris),
Cousin Morgan
. There is also
Gardiner
,
Meredith, Garvey
, and
Daley
. And way in the back are
Dad
(Grindy),
Mom
(Nonnie),
Judy
(my mother’s sister), and
Ashley
,
Hannah
, and
Lindsey
(Judy’s daughters). I scoop up every place card and stuff them in my pockets. Then I go out to find Garvey.

He’s still on the tennis court, with Frank. They’re playing in bare feet. I’m not sure if Garvey has met Frank before. They aren’t playing by the regular rules. The alleys are in and you get two extra points if you hit the other person with the ball. Four extra if you ace your serve. And you can serve from anywhere on the court, even right at the net, which Garvey is doing when I come down the old rose garden steps and stand at the green netting that goes around the whole thing. He whales on the ball and it nicks Frank in the shin before skidding off.

“Hit and ace!” Garvey says. “Six points.”

They both crack up.

“Shit,” Frank squeaks. He’s bent over, his hands on his knees for support, laughing hard. I’ve never seen him laugh before.

I go around and sit on a lawn chair at the side of the court.

Garvey holds his racquet out to me. “Wanna sub in?”

I shake my head. I want him to be friends with Frank. If he’s friends with Frank, maybe he’ll come up here to Myrtle Street with me more often. I like having him here.

Frank serves the next one and Garvey returns it, a lob that Frank lets bounce as he prepares for an overhead slam. Garvey says, “Oh fuck,” and bolts off the court, through the netting, and into the brown leaves beyond. Frank’s slam bounces just inside the baseline, then flies up over the netting. To reach it, Garvey runs through leaves and brush and, with a yelp of delight, lobs it back. Frank is laughing too hard to finish the point.