Another thing we were celebrating was the success of Mercy’s blackmail campaign. Bunnie Hutchison met with Mercy in person, secretly, and guaranteed that the child tax credit would be brought back, if she didn’t breathe a word about Bunnie’s bogus flood claim. An extra thousand bucks? When you’re only pulling in nine grand, an extra thousand bucks in worth a little blackmail.
Unfortunately, Bunnie Hutchison has decided to set up what she called a Snitch Line to catch welfare cheaters. People are supposed to call some number if they know someone guilty of welfare fraud. So now Half-a-Life and Serenity Place, we’re all battening down our hatches and gathering our ammo, ’cause there’s sure to be a war. Again. Don’t even ask me how Lish reacted to news of the Snitch Line. The Snitch Line, the Fingerprints, the Surprise Home Visits, geez, you’d think we were dishonest. Which brings me to Lish and the Gotcha problem.
I was troubled by Lish’s unchanging mood. The whole point of that stupid exercise had been to resolve things for her, to stop the wondering and the waiting, to cement his love for her, to create a dead father for the twins to love instead of a missing one. About one day after I’d done it, I realized I had done the wrong thing. But still, Lish didn’t know the truth and, in my mind, she should have been acting differently. Based on what she thought she knew. Instead she was pretty much the same. She burned her incense, played her music, read her books, cooked her garlic dishes, hung out with her kids, helped Mercy with her baby, made cracks about everything, railed against the system. Nothing had changed!
As for my dad, well, he asked me if it would be alright with me if he stayed for three days while he had his basement cleaned out, installed a back-up valve and a sump pump, and replaced his weeping tile. With the ground as saturated as it was, there’d likely be more flooding next spring when it thawed. My dad decided to forget about having a finished basement and just live on the main floor. Dill and I didn’t really see a lot of him during those three days. The first night I let him sleep in my bed, and Dill and I slept on Lish’s air mattresses. The second night he said he would sleep on the air mattresses and when I said no no, he said, “I honestly would prefer to.” In the morning we drank coffee together and watched Dill perform feats of derring-do, as my dad put it. I hadn’t, up until then, really had anybody else to enjoy Dill with. And it was a wonderful feeling. I mean I had Lish and the other women in Half-a-Life, but my dad was far more thrilled with the little things Dill did. He saw them as incredible achievements. I think he was even proud.
Whenever there was a ruckus in the parking lot or a loud thud he’d scurry over to the window to check his car, and at night he’d ask me twice if the coffee was off and the chain was on the door. He was mostly at his house watching the men work, but he’d always come back at suppertime and take us out to a restaurant. Dill was still mostly breast-feeding and eating rice cereal with the odd piece of actual food thrown into his diet, but my dad figured hamburgers and french fries were the way to go. It wasn’t because he was cheap or anything; I think it was because for him I was still kind of frozen in time at the age of fourteen: the year before my mother died and before I went off the deep end. When his life made more sense to him. I didn’t want to tell him that Lish had properly introduced me to things like curry and rotis. I didn’t want him to think he should change his mind from thinking what he had always thought. That’s the kind of relationship we had. At least it wasn’t pasta he was taking us out for. I’d had enough noodles to last me a lifetime.
At the restaurants we went to Dill would fuss a bit and my dad would say to me, “Why don’t you nurse him, Lucy?” So I would, and my dad would cross his legs, sit kind of hunched over, and chew on a toothpick and stare out the window, not saying anything. He always nodded at anybody who walked by us, kind of like a cop on his beat, as if he should have said, “It’s okay, this lady’s feeding her baby, nothing to see, keep moving, that’s it.” When I was finished, my dad would say to Dill, “Bet that hit the spot, eh?” or “There, that’s the ticket. Yup,” or “Dillinger’s favourite restaurant, eh?”
His last night at my place, like I mentioned, we were having the tequila Scrabble party at Teresa’s. Everybody was there. Kids were running in and out. Nobody complained, because everybody’s kids were doing it. Sing Dylan couldn’t tell us in his polite way to keep the noise down, because he was at the party too, and it was partly in his honour to boot. Tanya brought in a vat of homebrew, and Teresa and Angela and Lish were already half cut. Nobody was playing Scrabble. Teresa made the smokers go out on the balcony because of little Mayhem, and there were some kids there, too, dropping stuff onto the parking lot. I noticed that Sing Dylan hadn’t managed to get any of the EAT THE POOR THERE MORE TENDER graffiti off the wall, or maybe he’d decided to leave it there. Terrapin had trapped my dad in a corner and they were discussing the merits of home births versus hospital births. Well, Terrapin was discussing, and my dad was nodding, looking nervously around the room for an exit.
Eventually we all headed outside for the parking lot — all except Mercy and Mayhem. They stayed on the balcony like the royal family and waved periodically, at least Mercy did. She couldn’t walk yet, not too easily, anyway. Teresa brought her ghetto blaster, covered in a plastic bag in case it should rain, and we all sat around in the grass behind our building, talking and listening to music. My dad was trying to talk to Sing Dylan about ducts. I heard Sing Dylan saying ducks? ducks? and looking around shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. I noticed that Lish was drunk. Really drunk. She was telling Gypsy that she was not a mean drunk. Sometimes she was mean, she said, and sometimes she was drunk, but she was not a mean drunk.
She said she was a gentle drunk. That she should get drunk more often and she’d probably get a Nobel Peace Prize. She was rambling on like this and moving her hair around from one side of her head to the other. She looked over at me and waved and then she smiled and then she whispered something into Gypsy’s ear. Gypsy smiled and looked at me and waved too. Then they left, hand in hand, laughing and whispering, and went inside the building. I sat on the grass wondering whether or not I should have another shot of tequila, watching Dill pull grass out of the dirt and put it carefully on his head. Every time he leaned over to pull more out, the grass on his head fell off, and every time he looked surprised. I was about to go over to where my dad and Sing Dylan were when I heard a scream and then Lish came careening around the corner, black hair flying around her head like a dust storm.
“It’s him, it’s him!!! Oh my god I can’t believe it!! It’s him!”
“Who? Who? What are you talking about?” I had run over to her and she was kneeling on the ground like she was in labour. Everyone had started to crowd around her and some had run to the other side of the building to see who it was.
“It’s … it’s … it’s … oh my god, Lucy, this is a miracle.”
“What’s a fucking miracle Lish — just say it already!”
“Oh Luce, Luce, It’s … it’s …” She belched.
“It’s whoooo??” I yelled.
“It’s … it’s…GOTCHA! He’s come BACK! He’s HERE! HE’S HERE!!!” And then Lish swooned like a silent movie actress and fell to the ground, dropping her beer bottle, her hair splayed around her, her white hairy legs sticking out of her gauzy skirt.