“Two.”
Frank and Patrick are over three years apart in age but, because they’re nearly the same height and have the same straight brown hair, people always get them confused. I never do; Frank is mean, and his meanness is the only thing I ever see.
“And now you’re here, back in your old house. Looks pretty different, doesn’t it?”
“Never ate in this room before.” I scrape another forkful of noodles together and hope he’s done with me.
“You like my mother’s taste?”
My heart begins to thud. “It’s different.”
“You think your mother is classier, don’t you?”
“Leave her alone, Frank,” Patrick says.
“Protecting your girlfriend, Weasel?”
“Shut up.”
“Well, she can’t be your girlfriend now, can she? Pretty soon she’ll be your—”
“Shut the fuck fuck up!”
Frank laughs at the two fucks.
I’ve never heard Patrick swear before.
Elyse eats. She finishes her casserole and moves on to the cucumbers. Her mouth does not reach the table so all her food has to be brought down to it unsteadily. She’s spilled all over the place. I ask her if she wants a cushion but she shakes her head without looking at me.
After dinner Frank goes outside to shoot things with a BB gun, and Patrick and I play the game Life in the living room. Elyse comes through every now and then, dragging a little beagle on wheels by a string. Sometimes she drags it right through our money piles to get our attention, but we don’t give it to her. Through the swinging door I can hear Mrs. Tabor making her and my father’s dinner, and Dad mixing more drinks at the bar on the other side of the door. Their voices rise, as if drinking made them deaf.
“Oh, that ass. I can’t believe she said that to you!”
“I was just minding my own business. Standing in line at the drugstore, for chrissake.” My father is enjoying himself. “But I set her straight.”
“I bet you did, pet.”
A while later his voice drops to a scratching sound, his attempt at a whisper. All I can hear is something like alcar over and over again.
“What’s alcar?” I ask Patrick.
“You don’t know who Al Carr is?”
“No, obviously.”
“He’s your mother’s lawyer, and he’s trying to take Gardiner to the cleaners.” Patrick says this wearily, without accusation, as if he’s tired of the sentence.
My father’s voice scrapes on. It sounds like he’s choking on his sirloin.
Mrs. Tabor doesn’t bother to lower her voice. She just says mm-hmm and of course and you’re right about that.
Outside you can hear BBs slicing through the leaves in the trees.
If you play all the way to retirement, Life is a long game. My car is full of babies. I’ve had two sets of twin girls and a boy I have to lay down the middle.
Mrs. Tabor comes into the living room and asks us where Elyse is. We don’t know.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? I thought she was in here playing with the two of you.” She is speaking with her eyes shut, but when she starts to tip forward she opens them and catches hold of the back of a sofa.
“Nope,” Patrick says.
“Nope,” she mocks, badly. “Get off your ass and find her!”
Her words are so slurred I can’t take her anger seriously. I want her to leave so Patrick and I can laugh about it, but he gets up and leaves the room.
“There are responsibilities, Daley, if you want to stay here.” Her eyes are shut again. She pronounces my name Day-lee.
I almost say Fuck you. It almost flies out of my mouth.
“Catherine,” my father calls. “He’s got her.”
I get up and follow her in. Patrick is holding Elyse, who is sound asleep.
“She was under the dining room table.”
“Let me have her, pet,” Mrs. Tabor says.
“No, I’ll take her up.”
“I’ll take her.”
“You’ll just wake her up.” Patrick moves quickly to the back stairs. “Or drop her,” he mutters.
“C’mere,” I hear my father say. I turn — I thought he was talking to me — just as he is wrapping his arms around Mrs. Tabor. He puts his face close to hers and waits for her to kiss him. Her lips separate and I watch her tongue go into my father’s mouth. He grabs her by the butt with two hands and shoves her into him. “I love this ass,” he says, not even trying to be quiet. “I love this fucking ass.”
I go out the back door. I have the idea that I will walk home to Mom’s, but then I hear a BB hit the side of the house and don’t want to risk it. It’s too dark to see where Frank is. I push out the little chest of drawers that has some gardening stuff in it from against the wall and sit behind it for protection.
My father is always in a good mood in the morning. He is up before anyone else, showered, shaved, and dressed in bright colors. He sings in the kitchen as he makes coffee and feeds the animals.
I can hear him humming below my window in the guest room, on his way to clean the pool. I slept in my clothes, so I catch up with him before he reaches the poolhouse.
He stops humming; then he says, “Does it look a little cloudy to you?”
The water is its usual rich clear turquoise, but I want to do the chlorine test with him afterward so I say, “A little.”
He connects the pieces of the vacuum cleaner, the long silver shafts and the rectangular head, then sidesteps slowly along the edge of the pool, the long pole sinking as the vacuum travels toward the drain in the middle, then rising up over his head as he brings the vacuum closer, directly beneath his feet at the bottom of the pool. He gives me turns, helping me when I let it out too far and don’t have the strength to pull it back, and for brief flashes I feel just like I used to feel when this was my only home and my mother was still asleep upstairs and nothing had changed. Even though it’s going to be a hot day, it still feels like the beginning of fall. The leaves are brittle and loud when they shake in the breeze.
My father used to sing a back-to-school song he got from an old ad on TV. He changed the words and put our names in it. He always sang it when my mother and I came home with shopping bags in early September. The tune would linger in the house for weeks, someone breaking out singing it just when the others had nearly forgotten. The tune is in my head now, but I know if I sing it, it will be a betrayal. I know — I sense all the new rules, though I could never explain how— that I’m not allowed to refer in any way to the small particular details of our past life together, the details that made it uniquely ours. We had an array of refrains among us, my father, my mother, Garvey, and I, clusters of words repeated so many times I thought they were universal clichés until I slowly learned, one by one, that they belonged solely to us. I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time, is one. It came from my parents’ honeymoon in Italy. On their third day in Rome, my father returned to the hotel room with a puppy. My mother was not happy about this and the puppy sensed it. He bit her little finger, which is why my father named him Pinky. I was born twelve years after their honeymoon, but the expression was still very much alive, used by all of us in our sulky but self-mocking moments. But I know this expression and all the others have to be buried now. They are a dead language. If I ever said, I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time to my father, something would perish between us, as if I had broken a blood oath.
And so I do not sing the back-to-school song as I push the vacuum toward the middle of the pool and pull it back to where I stand at the edge. And I do not ask about Nora, whose bureau has been cleared off, her Jean Naté, silver pillbox, and photograph of her and my father in Maine gone, her drawers empty, and even her soft blue bathrobe no longer hanging in her bathroom.