Her mother lowers her face to her husband’s back. She lifts a hand, but it hesitates. She dares not touch her husband at this moment. And Kelly is suddenly sharply aware of the river behind her. The river is very close behind her, the wide, fast-running river.
“Lenny,” her mother says. “Put Kelly down now.”
He does not. Kelly looks across the slope to where Katie is still standing at the picnic blanket, watching all this but keeping her place, waiting for things to go on in the only way she has decided they can. Kelly closes her eyes and waits too, trying not to move, trying not to cry out and flail her arms and legs. She must be reconciled to this or she will lose him utterly and that would be worst of all.
And now she is falling. Slowly. She touches the ground, and she opens her eyes and her father’s face descends as well. He crouches before her, looks her in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Kitten,” he says. “I was a million miles away for a minute there.”
Kelly lunges forward and she throws her arms around him and she knows not to say anything and she knows not to expect him to say anything, but she tries very hard to hold him close. And with that embrace of her father, Kelly stops on the Moonwalk beside this other river. The image of the embrace has flashed into her mind as if out of nowhere, for the afternoon by the Alabama River has for all her adult life been merely a few scattered fragments. But the embrace carries with it another memory of her father that comes upon her now in its fullness. Almost twenty years ago. She and Michael stand just inside the open veranda doors of the best facility she and her mother and Katie could find, a good place, a converted, sprawling Queen Anne on wooded acreage on the edge of Montgomery, where the ones with means can come who survived, who didn’t quite mean it, who everyone thinks have a chance to put this all behind them. They all wear jogging suits in muted colors. They sit in the dim parlor where she and Michael now stand. They walk the grounds. They sit on the veranda. Her father is on the veranda, sitting alone at a table, unaware of his daughter and son-in-law. His jogging suit is the color of rust.
“Go ahead,” Michael says softly. I’ll wait here till you want me.”
“He really likes you,” Kelly says.
“You two need some time alone, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” The last thing she needs right now is time alone with her father. “Yes,” she says.
Kelly steps through the doors and crosses the veranda. Her father’s face is lowered, as if intently examining the white wrought-iron tabletop. She arrives before him. “Hello, Daddy,” she says.
He looks up. And it is, of course, the same as it ever was, the very same, the eyes upon her and no way in the world to read them.
She sits in a chair opposite him. “Are you doing okay?” she says.
“Sure,” he says.
For a moment she can think of no more to say. His eyes do not move from her. She needs to will this to happen, this conversation, this small talk, this enormous small talk. “Mama misses you,” she says. “We all do.”
“That’s good,” her father says.
She will not even try to figure out what exactly he means when he’s sounding ironic. “How’s the food?”
“Delicious,” he says. “Never better.”
In the brief moment she takes to get past still more irony, her father does another thing as he has ever done: a sudden softening. And because the softening is rare and always abrupt and because it always comes in the context of his impossible impenetrableness, she is, as ever, inordinately grateful for it, even as the softness, as ever, yields nothing but a minor connection. His eyes come alive and his voice goes gentle and he says, “That’s a joke, Kitten.”
“That’s good,” she says. “You’re joking.”
“It was hilarious from the beginning,” he says.
She’s at a loss again.
He reads it. “You know what I’m talking about,” he says.
He means the suicide attempt. She stifles the urge simply to stand up now and say good-bye and go. But she plays the role he is so good at maneuvering her into. She cannot banter with him at moments like these. She must be the tight-ass daughter, which will allow him to be disappointed with her.
“Not hilarious, Daddy. Not for us.”
He tilts his head in mock astonishment. “‘The Ride of the Valkyries?’ ‘I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning’?”
She goes utterly blank. She might as well be the one sitting here drugged up in a jogging suit.
“I didn’t actually play the Wagner?” he says.
Somehow this question sounds sincere. “Not that we knew,” Kelly says.
“Sorry,” he says, low, looking away. “Then it was all in my head, the joke. It’s funny in there most of the time.”
They both fall silent. It gives Kelly an opportunity to gather herself for what she has come here to say. “Don’t do this again. Okay?”
“Okay,” he says, instantly, quietly.
And this is a thing she has vowed not to press, but she’s suckered yet again by his sudden softness. “I love you, Daddy,” she says.
He says, “Your grandfather didn’t have a sense of humor about it.”
“Daddy. Did you hear me?”
“I did,” he says.
And for a moment she feels a little ripple in her from the acknowledgement. It doesn’t last.
“And I promise,” he says. “Funny’s better.”
He meant he did have a sense of humor about killing himself.
“I can just laugh and leave it at that,” he says.
Kelly can’t do this alone any longer. She looks toward the doors into the parlor. Michael has already taken a step onto the veranda. He stands waiting for her. She loves him very much in this moment, her Michael. She lifts her chin and he instantly starts this way.
“Look,” she says. “Michael’s here.”
Her father turns around and stands up at once, offering his hand, and the two men shake, Michael two-handed, her father putting his other hand on Michael’s elbow.
“Lenny,” Michael says, “what the fuck?”
“I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning,” Kelly’s father says.
Michael laughs loud. Leonard Dillard laughs too, just as loud. They hear themselves and glance at the muted others around them on the veranda and they choke off their laughter, which makes them want to laugh even more. They are now locked in the club room of a private male world. Kelly has vanished. She should be grateful to have this burden taken off her. She should be grateful her father is joking. But she feels tears wanting to form and this is the last thing in the world she wants from herself now and so she finds — easily finds, though it surprises her — a quick, hot swelling of anger in her at both of them. She lets that take her, and the tears vanish, and she leans back in her chair and folds her hands together in her lap as the two men sit.
Her father says, “If I was more of a hunter, I might have tried that. But I’m a terrible shot. And I couldn’t figure out how to do enough damage with a trout fly.”
The two men laugh again, though quietly this time. Kelly stands up and walks away, toward the parlor. If she is to be in the company of those who wish to kill themselves, she prefers them to be strangers. And it took him fifteen years to eventually get the job done. And then all of them are standing beside her father’s grave. Train tracks and water nearby. Escambia Bay. Mama and Katie with their arms around each other, Mama crying quietly, Katie hardly at all. Kelly and Michael are next to each other, not quite touching. Samantha a little apart. Sam with her father’s eyes. Twenty now, and how can that be? Ready to go away to try to become somebody famous. Everyone else is off getting into cars. The last few moments for the family before the hole seals up.