“And why not? Firstly, I am a Japanese! And then what is so awful about being amenable and liked?”
“Well, no one in Bedley Run really gives a damn. You know what I overheard down at the card shop? How nice it is to have such a ‘good Charlie’ to organize the garbage and sidewalk-cleaning schedule. That’s what they really think of you. It’s become your job to be the number-one citizen.”
“I am respected and valued in this town. I’m asked to comment at all the critical council meetings. You have little idea what my position is. People heed my words.”
“That’s because you’ve made it so everyone owes something to you. You give these gifts out, just like to that policewoman, Como. She can’t stand to cross you because you’re this nice sweet man who’s given when he didn’t have to or want to but did anyway. You burden with your generosity. So even when I’m being troublesome, they can’t bear to upset you. It was even that way with Mary Burns, wasn’t it? You made it so that she couldn’t even be angry with you.”
“There was nothing to be angry about,” I replied, trying to remember what it was that Mary Burns had finally said to me, after I had asked for one more chance to convince her of my feelings. You always try, Franklin, but too hard, like it’s your sworn duty to love me.
“I never gave her any cause.”
Sunny shook her head and walked past me to leave but I caught her by the arm.
“Let me go!”
“I don’t want you sleeping at that house!”
“I’ll sleep where I want,” she said bitterly.
“Then I won’t have you living in my house anymore,” I told her, my blood rising. “I won’t allow it. It disgusts me to think of what you’re doing there. You cannot degrade yourself and expect for me to provide you with things.”
“Whatever you want,” Sunny answered, shaking herself loose from my grip. “I’ll go right now and get my stuff from the house.”
“You’ll also lose the allowance I give you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to open the door and walk her bicycle out at the same time. “I can get by.”
“Sunny…”
She turned around to face me, her eyes moist and fierce, a hundred-meter stare. “I don’t need you,” she said softly, and without remorse. “I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way.”
6
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I didn’t see Sunny. Not for nearly three weeks. One would think that in a small town, I’d catch sight of her, coming and going into a shop on the main street. But not even that. I did call the school and subtly inquire whether her attendance was satisfactory, and the school counselor told me it was. He seemed to know Sunny somewhat and spoke glowingly of her exploits last fall on the field hockey team, though he wasn’t sure if she was playing again this year. I told him she’d decided to concentrate more on the piano, that she was afraid of injuring her fingers and hands, all those players knocking the hard ball about with sticks. I could say this with confidence because I knew Sunny had in fact quit all her activities at the start of the fall, including the piano, and that really the only thing she had continued to do, strangely enough, was study, particularly her history books and world literature, piles of which always littered the surfaces and furniture of her room. She never ceased being the most avid reader, and I knew she was truly gone from the house when I got home that night weeks earlier and found the stacks removed, the shelves emptied save those books from her childhood, the ones I’d read to her when she first arrived, nursery and bedtime stories in a language she didn’t know.
As I suspected, she was living now in the Gizzi house, on Turner Street, an unpaved dead-end road on the far east side of town, near the village line of neighboring Ebbington. I knew where it was from Officer Como, who was the only one I’d told of Sunny’s leaving the house. I didn’t want her officially listed as a runaway, as I was afraid the designation would remain indefinitely on her personal records, and I knew I could count on Officer Como to keep a watch on the place and its frequent visitors — mostly men in their twenties and thirties, many, according to her, known troublemakers and felons — and be publicly discreet about Sunny’s habitation. Of course it was fairly common knowledge that she often hung out there, but most of my fellow merchants and colleagues thought she was simply wayward and difficult and not completely gone from me. I wanted to hide the real depth of the trouble, put it away not (as Sunny always contended) for the sake of my reputation or standing but so I could try to forget she was my daughter, that she had ever come to live with me and had grown up before my eyes.
But late one Friday evening I drove the station wagon down to the main road and followed it until it crossed the river, taking a smaller, unlighted road east past the bare land of the power switching station and the scrap-metal yard, to a large older subdivision called The Orchids that had never been fully developed, where Turner Street is. The neighborhood is more like one in Ebbington than in Bedley Run, a mix of cheaper apartments and small one-story houses, and had been left the way it was to satisfy a county requirement for lower-income housing units in towns like ours. Mostly decent people live there, the few entrenched working-class of Bedley Run and new younger couples who are always fixing up the charming old cottages and the tiny treed lots they sit on. But fifteen years ago there were a number of boarded-up places with weeds and saplings overtaking the porches, the ivy growing through the broken panes of the windows, and among these were the derelict places owned by the likes of Jimmy Gizzi.
It was already late in the evening, and I don’t think I would have found the house on my own had not the lights been on and loud music playing, various older-model pony cars parked in a bunch at the end of the dead-end street and up where the curb should have been. I knew it was the Gizzi place from the way Officer Como had described it, a squat high-ranch house with a bulging bedroom addition over the garage, the sole access to which was an exposed stairwell attached to the side of the building.
I parked halfway down the block and walked up to the property. From the soft light of the house I could see piles of trash and bottles and things like old shoes and undershirts scattered across the filthy yard, wrecked parts of appliances and cars in a heap in front of the open door of the garage, which itself was filled with junk. There was the decrepit, mixed-up scent of engine oil and stale beer and animal spray, the waft of which always seems to overrun certain locales and neighborhoods. And yet with all the lights on and the music and the silhouetted figures behind the curtains moving around dancing, there was a strange festivity to the warm autumn air, as if the place were the site of a favorite seasonal fete, as in those old English novels of Sunny’s that I would glance at from time to time. This, of course, was no manor, but I suppose a house rife with any human activity has something over one unsettlingly spacious and silent.
There were two young men sitting on an old sofa on the front lawn, passing a bottle of liquor and a strange-looking pipe between them. One would tip back the bottle while the other lit the short pipe, and from the smell I knew it was probably marijuana they were smoking. The heavy sweetness of the odor was reminiscent of the time I was stationed in Burma during the war, when some of my comrades would hang certain giant leaves to dry and then cut them up to smoke. Everyone preferred real cigarettes, of course, but there was never enough of them (and toward the end of the conflict, none at all), and the leaves provided a bit of mirth and laxity to our spirits, if also a seizing headache at evening’s end.