Then we all sat there, chewing, not saying much of anything else at all. Bill was home, safe, and for the time that’s the only thing that mattered.
By summer, though, he was fed up with Harold Timms, who happened to be his foreman on the section gang. It was generally known throughout Goldengate that Mr. Timms was keeping time with my mother, a fact that rankled Bill day in and day out, because on the job he was tired of acting like he didn’t know better. My father, a withdrawn man who kept his troubles to himself, had apparently decided to ignore my mother’s adultery.
“I have to do what Harold Timms tells me every day,” Bill said to my father one Sunday afternoon when they were in the shade of the big maple alongside our house, changing the points and plugs on our Ford Galaxie. “And all the while everyone in town knows he’s getting it steady from your Annie.”
I lay on my bed, listening. Out my window, I could see Bill leaning over the fender of the Galaxie. The hood was open above him, and he was going to town with a spark plug wrench. He had on a black bowling shirt with a print of a teetering pin wearing a crown and the words King Pins across the back. He’d rolled the short sleeves tight on his biceps. From where I was lying, all I could see of my father, who stood on the other side of the Galaxie, was his hand on top of that fender. His long, narrow hand. The face of his Timex watch seemed enormous on his slender wrist. A brown leather band wrapped around that wrist with plenty of length to spare. I knew he’d had to punch an extra hole in it so the watchband wouldn’t be too loose.
“Dammit, R.T.” Bill banged the spark plug wrench against a motor mount. “You need to put a stop to that monkey business. For Roger’s sake if for no other reason.”
My name came to me through the window and caught me by surprise, as if my father and Bill knew I was eavesdropping, even though I was sure they didn’t. My father’s hand pulled away from the fender, and I imagined him, outside my view, fuming.
The leaves on the maple rattled together. It was August, the start of the dog days, and we were grateful for every stir of air. Next door at the Timms’s house, a radio was playing. The curtain at the window lifted and fell back with the breeze. I could hear the faint strains of “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and the chorus — I believe, I believe, I believe I’m fallin’ in love — annoyed me because I knew it was Connie Timms listening to it, and I was fretting about her because she’d told me after church that she and I were through.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. We were outside on the sidewalk, and people were coming out of the church and down the steps. “I want a boyfriend I can tell the world about. I don’t want some...” Here she struggled to find the words she wanted, the ones that would describe what she and I had been up to that summer. “I don’t want an affair,” she finally said.
Now I can almost laugh at the way that word sounded coming from a girl her age. At the time, though, my heart was breaking. I watched Connie run down the sidewalk to her father’s Oldsmobile ’98, fling the door open, and get inside. I knew she didn’t mean for me to come after her. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the nerve.
If not for my mother and Mr. Timms, everything between Connie and me might have been fine. Bill and my father weren’t saying anything I didn’t already know. My mother and Mr. Timms. Like my father, I tried to ignore what was going on between them, but it was impossible.
Earlier that summer, Connie and I began to take note of each other, and as we got cozy, we agreed to keep our hey-baby-hey a secret. What would people think if they knew? Apples didn’t fall far from the tree. Why did that concern me? I suppose there was a part of me that believed I was betraying my father by throwing in with the daughter of the man who was coming between him and my mother.
How could Connie and I make our affections known when her father and my mother were the subjects of so much gossip? I’d like to say we wanted to be better than that gossip, but I suspect the truth was we were embarrassed. We were afraid the town was watching us, and every time we were together on the sly, I felt guilty. I wanted to think that we’d found each other solely from our two hearts syncing up, but as long as there was the story of my mother and her father, I wasn’t sure. Maybe we were just following their lead.
We couldn’t have said any of this at the time. At least I couldn’t have. I won’t presume to speak for Connie. I only know this: no matter what we could say then, or what we knew by instinct, one fact was plain — whatever was happening between the two of us could never be separated from the fact that her father and my mother were lovers.
“We can’t let anyone find out,” I told Connie early on. “We can’t be trashy like them.”
“My father’s not trashy.” She had a pageboy haircut and her bangs were in need of a trim. We were talking over the wire fence that ran between my backyard and hers. She had on Levis and white Keds sneakers and a T-shirt that advertised Boone’s Farm, a soda-pop wine popular in those days. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes and stared at me. “He’s lonely. He’s a very lonely man.”
I loved her brown hair and her blue eyes. I loved the smell of her perfume — something called Straw Hat, which was all sweet and woodsy and made me want to press her to me and breathe in that scent. She could have said anything to me at that moment and I would have taken it as gospel. So I let that statement about Mr. Timms’s loneliness absolve him, and with my silence — much to my shame now — I allowed my mother to become the wicked one in the story of their affair.
Mr. Timms was a widower. His wife, a nervous, fretful woman, took sick one winter night when a heavy snow was falling. It started around dusk, and before long the streets were covered. The snow kept coming down as night crept in. My father and I went into our living room to watch it out the window. By that time the snow was up to the top of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the street.
“It’s like a picture out there,” my father said. I was thirteen then. We stood in the dark room and watched the snow coming down past the streetlights. No cars passed by. We could see lights on in the houses around us. Everyone was hunkering down to wait this one out. Over twenty inches by morning, said WAKO radio out of the county seat, Phillipsport. The wind was up, and already the snow was starting to drift against the side of our shed. My father’s Galaxie, parked in our driveway, was barely holding its shape as the snow covered it. “Roger, I swear.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s like we’re in a picture,” he said, and I’ve always remembered that, because it was one of the first times he ever said anything that I sensed came from some private place inside him, which he generally kept to himself.
My mother was in the family room behind us with the television playing. It was a Saturday night. I’m sure of that because I remember that The Carol Burnett Show was on. My mother laughed at something, and I could hear the television audience laughing too. My father and I turned at the same time, looking back through the French doors that separated the living room from the family room. We saw the lamplight there. He squeezed my shoulder again, and at his touch we headed toward those French doors. Once we opened them, we stepped back into the life that was ours.
“Baby, you should’ve seen,” my mother said to my father. She was kicked back in her Barcalounger, her arm bent at the elbow so it went up at a right angle. She held a Virginia Slims cigarette between her fingers and the smoke curled up into the lamplight. “It was the funniest thing. I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.”