Piper (22 page)

“It was a misunderstanding.”

He managed a weak smile. “I liked your style.”

After he left, I sat there staring at the pulsing cursor. The thought occurred to me to delete the whole file, but it wasn't the file that was the problem. It was my dad's heart.

14

On Christmas Eve morning, there was a note from Dad propped against the green tomato salt shaker on the kitchen counter. I'd slept in and my eyes felt glued together as I rubbed them clean and read it again:

Good morning Piper/Hello Willard
,

Can you make a salad or something for tonight's dinner? I'll take care of the rest of it. Maybe dress up a little. We have company
.

Love, Dad/Tom

It wasn't eloquent, but it was intriguing. Eating at home with Dad was a rarity, but the prospect of company was downright radical. We hadn't had any since Mom died.

I thought it might be Dad's brother, Seamus, who Dad had been trying to get out here since Mom died. Seamus was unemployed again, laid off from his grounds keeping job with the New York City Park Department, but I was sure Dad would have offered to pay his way out to Stampede. It would be just like Seamus to not say anything and just show up on our doorstep Christmas Eve.

“It's gonna be that little patootie from down at the cafe,” Willard said.

“Marge?”

“The cook.”

“Marge
is
the cook. No way.”

We argued while eating our Cheerios on what to make for our dish. Willard wanted a potato salad, German style, with the potatoes cut in big chunks and rings of onions. I told him that was a summer salad, something to fix with hamburgers and hot dogs.

“That's what I want,” he said. “Hamburgers.”

“You can't have hamburgers for Christmas.”

I convinced him we had to make a cranberry salad. I'd never made one and didn't particularly like them, but it was traditional and I didn't want to disappoint the company. I found a recipe in the
Good Housekeeping Cookbook
that had a cranberry thumbprint I guessed was Mom's on the same page as the recipe. She made as big a mess as Willard when she cooked. I looked at the print closely to see if the whorls bore any resemblance to my own. Even though I knew I was adopted, I'd spent my life searching for likenesses between us. If a husband and wife could
grow into each other
to the point where they ate the same foods, enjoyed the same TV shows, and laughed at the same jokes, why couldn't we? I'd seen doddering older couples who I thought could have passed as brother and sister. Given the myriad possibilities, there had to be something we shared. But the thumbprint was too blurry to tell.

“That's it?” Willard said when I had wiped the slop from the side of the copper fish mold we'd poured the salad into.

“We chill it.”

“Cold salad?”

“What are you talking about? Potato salad's cold.”

“But you cook the potatoes.”

Each time we checked it during the day, I tipped the mold to see if it had set, but the cranberry gluck sloshed back and forth. “Damn. What's wrong with it, Willard?”

He bent over and studied it for the longest time, then dipped his finger in and licked it. “It needs corn syrup.” I'd heard him recommend the same thing to stop car engines from pinging.

Corn syrup was a stupid idea, but it gave me another one which wasn't. I dragged a chair over to the cupboards and rifled through the cake mixes and puddings on the top shelf until I found a raspberry Jello. I poured a trail of Jello along the spine of the fish mold and then stirred it in with a spoon.

Willard just shook his head. “I want my name off it.”

Dad came home around three o'clock with a produce carton full of champagne and snack foods that he set on the kitchen counter. Then he went into the dining room and fooled around with the radio until he found a station playing Christmas music, turning it up loud enough to be heard throughout the house. It was the first time I'd seen him since going through his files at the office, and his mood disarmed me. He hummed along to the “Drummer Boy” while he put away the groceries, spread fresh linen on the dining room table, and arranged a pine bough centerpiece with little Christmas balls and cones. His eyes were wide and lively like the dogs' were when Willard asked them if they wanted to go for a walk.

“What about candles?” I said.

There was an electromagnetic nimbus swirling around him as he hurdled the stairs two at a time and disappeared into the attic, singing “Adeste Fideles,” exaggerating each measure in his Dennis Day tenor's voice until it was nearly operatic. When he came down again, he was carrying the white beeswax candles from our emergency kit, one in each hand.

He wouldn't say who the company was, but whoever it was, I knew that his mood had more to do with them than with us. Somehow, he was just better in the presence of other people. He had the ability to turn it on for total strangers, to render them defenseless in the face of his full-court Irish press. Me, I was the opposite. I shrunk. Whatever modest confidence I might generate one-on-one evaporated in the face of a crowd. That's probably why I could count my friends on the prongs of a tuning fork.

When I'd read what Dad had written about Mom, I almost took the hammer to the lyre I'd bought for him at Monkey Shines. “Rarely do we get a musical instrument in such mint condition,” the woman had told me. At first I thought it was a guitar, but she straightened me out quickly. “Honey, this is what the Greeks played when they recited poetry.” That did it. Dad had always bemoaned the fact he'd never learned to play an instrument. It had cost me more than I figured on spending, but if he hadn't given me the job at the paper I wouldn't have had the money anyway. Besides, I was too old to get away with something homemade, like the collection of “Famous Sayings By Irishmen” I'd penned into one of those books with blank pages last year. I made up half the quotes, trying to work in things I could imagine Dad saying, like “The difference between puffery and the Pulitzer is squeezing the ticker and feeling the story pulse in your hands” and “The poet reads what isn't written.”

Dad's cheerfulness had somehow shaved the peak off my anger. Maybe his Carlisle apologia was just a diary of weird ideas he never intended to publish. Personal therapy. I could hardly condemn him for his thoughts, even though that was basically the Roman Catholic system. If I could be damned for every covetous thought I had ever entertained, I might as well put my hands over my head and surrender now. I preferred the system that made inside the head out of bounds. Hang a man for whom he stabs but not for whom he dreams of stabbing. At least, it was a good theory.

The doorbell rang at about five after six. Nobody ever rang our doorbell. The custom in Stampede was to crack the door and call out a
Yoohoo
! or
Anyone home
? as you entered. Dad floated into the room from the kitchen in a mossy green turtleneck with a pendant hanging around his neck, effervescing with a limey cologne.

“I'll get it.”

I stuck a stick pretzel into the book I was reading and stood up to see who was coming for Christmas dinner. Dad disappeared out the door and I heard a man's voice. There was some shuffling and wiping of feet and Dad re-emerged carrying a shopping bag, trailed by John Carlisle. Our company wasn't a they; it was a he.

“Hello, Piper.” Carlisle extended his hand and I couldn't help looking over his shoulder, hoping someone else would be joining us. Maybe his new paramour. “It's just me,” he said.

I shook his hand, which was cold and smooth with lotion. His hair was plastered down with pomade and I could smell the fragrance of freshly sliced apples. Dad gave a nervous laugh and went into the kitchen with the shopping bag.

“Can I hang your coat?” I said.

He seemed taken aback and touched the wing of his bow tie to adjust it. “That would be nice, Piper.” He turned and let the coat slip off the back of his shoulders. It was full length and heavy, with a fuzzy liner and a broad belt.

I took my time schlepping his coat. I knew without looking that there wouldn't be any free hangers in the closet.
Hang your coat
in our house was a euphemism for dumping it on the master bed. I tried it on for kicks, and although it was the right length I swam in it. My hands slipped into the pockets and I found one of those breath atomizers and a half-used roll of Tums.

I figured Carlisle would drift into the kitchen with Dad, but he was still in the living room studying the family pictures on the mantel when I returned. I wished Willard had come up so there'd be someone else to talk to. Carlisle was holding the picture of me and Mom on the rocket ship slide at Klah Hah Ya Park. The first time we'd slid down it together, I was four and Mom held me around the middle from behind while Dad snapped our picture. Mom liked the picture so much she'd had it blown up and framed. For fun, I dragged her over to the park the summer after my first year of high school and we duplicated the pose, with the same scaredy-cat look on my face, the same knee in the air, and the same desperate grip of Mom's arms around my middle. In both photos, which rested side by side on the mantel, Mom was looking skyward, her neck arched back, and laughing.

“She was a joy to the world, wasn't she?” he said. There was an undeniable affection in his voice. He lowered his head and with the toe of his shiny loafer ironed a pathway through the pile in the carpet alongside his other foot. I was uncomfortable talking to him about Mom and I almost asked him about his family. Kids lit cigarettes off the gas flame that burned at his dad's monument in Klah Hah Ya Park. “Piper, you never answered my note.” His voice was soft, almost a whisper.

I was embarrassed. “Your note?”

“About college. I was serious. I can help.”

“We have money.”

“Let me say it another way. I want to help.”

Dad rescued me. With the fingers of one hand balancing a cutting board, he carried three long-stemmed glasses into the room. “I see you two are getting along. How about some champagne?”

Carlisle helped himself to a glass, still studying me.

“Piper?” Dad never offered me alcohol at home. I knew of kids whose parents had given them wine with dinner since puberty, the theory being to learn moderation. Catholics binged. Forty days of Lenten fasting followed by pastry gorging. Sexual abstinence that led to nymphomania the first time a guy touched the seam of a girl's crotch.

“Are you sure, Dad?”

“It's Christmas.”

Willard finally stumbled upstairs, his hair wet where he'd slicked it back, wearing a string tie with a sliding plastic cowboy boot for the knot. He was slightly stooped over as he headed toward Carlisle with a bead in his eye like he was going to knock him over. “I didn't know we was going to eat with the head cheese.” He stuck his hand out and shook Carlisle vigorously, like they were bosom buddies.

Everyone was caught off guard by Willard's irreverence. “Maybe Willard would like a glass of champagne,” I said.

“The bottle's in the kitchen,” Dad said, pointing.

Willard followed me into the kitchen, where there was a beautifully tossed Caesar salad in a serving bowl on the counter. I found the cupboard with the stemware and handed Willard a glass. “Here, you old patootie.”

In the refrigerator there were two bottles on their sides where we usually kept the leftovers and a third one, open, standing next to the milk cartons. The more I poured into Willard's glass, the more his hand shook. There was only a little bit left in the bottle, so I tipped it up and drank it myself.

“I'm glad I dressed up,” Willard said, stroking his tie with his free hand.

“You're overdressed. It's just Carlisle.”

“I've never eaten with the Carlisles.”

As I was putting the empty into the recycle bin, I noticed a plastic tub with dressing and pieces of lettuce stuck to the insides that had been crushed down into the garbage can. I fished it out, springing back the sides so I could read the label.

“Hey, Willard, look at this.”

Willard finished sipping his champagne and looked down at the tub in my hand.

“He
bought
it. At the QFC.”

Nothing seemed to register as he continued to lick his lips.

“Don't you get it? We busted our hump to make a cranberry salad and he bought a carry-out in Seattle.”

“Your mom used to do that.”

“Buy plastic salads? No way. Not on Christmas.” We did eat a lot of TV dinners though.

The dining room table was ablaze with the emergency beeswax candles when we sat down for dinner. I asked Dad to do a poem instead of racing through “Blessus oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy-bounty through Christ Our Lord Amen.” He shook me off and I thought we were going with the standard grace, until Carlisle leaned over and rested two fingers on his forearm.

“That would be nice, Tom.”

“If you insist. Close your eyes. This is for all the members of our families, living and dead, who couldn't join us this day.” Then he recited by heart “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” It wasn't Irish but it seemed perfect for a cold day in December. He spoke slowly enough that I could imagine the sleigh and a frozen lake in the woods on the darkest evening of the year. Then he dropped to a whisper as he gave the closing refrain, which hit home despite its familiarity.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

“Bravo, Tom!” Carlisle said.

I knew it was small of me, but I made sure Willard and I each took larger helpings of the cranberry salad than the Caesar. There had to be some reward for creativity or else what kind of plastic world were we living in? Were we going to abdicate to the fast food chains? Furnish our kitchens with pneumatic tubes connected to Burger King? I didn't say any of these things out loud, of course. I didn't have to. Thanks to the champagne, I had a raging good conversation going on right inside of me. Dad, on the other hand, took a heaping serving of the Caesar salad that spilled over onto his turkey.
Come on, Dad. You scraped it out of a plastic bucket
.