An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [51]
"It's my fault, really," I said. "I'm the one who told him those stories about you."
"About ... me?"
"About where you went, what you did when you left us."
"You ... did?" my father asked. Only then, as though he was on tape delay, did his eyes slowly move through the air, following the book's trajectory. His eyes rested for a minute on the hall closet, as if trying to picture the book there among the winter coats and file cabinets and partnerless shoes he knew to be inside. "No ... right," he said again. My father looked at me in displeasure, then took an especially angry pull on his beer.
"I know," I said, bowing my head. "I'm so sorry."
We sat there for a while in silence, me ashamed, my father angry, waiting for our third to come and break the impasse. Because this is what it also means to be in a family: to have two of its members break the family and then wait around for a third to make it whole again.
Finally, after fifteen minutes or so (my father had a cooler of beer near the base of the exercise bike and drank two beers, but he didn't offer me one and I didn't blame him), my mother showed up. She wasn't wearing exercise clothes: she was wearing green corduroy pants and a white shirt that somebody, for some reason, might call a blouse and not a shirt, and brown leather boots. She looked classy, regal, like a man without being at all manlike, like Katharine Hepburn but without the shakes or the Spencer Tracy. She looked young, too, not at all like the fifty-nine-year-old woman I knew her to be. Her face was flushed ― healthy and outdoorsy in a way that made you think of a commercial for the most expensive, physician-endorsed kind of lip balm. My mother was carrying a twelve-pack of Knickerbocker: she freed one of the cans from the cardboard, threw it to me, and said, "I don't care why you're so gloomy, but stop." Then she turned to my father and said, "You, too."
"OK," I said, and my father grunted something that also sounded affirmative. I cracked the beer, took a long drink of it, and asked, "Hey, what did you do today?" Because it occurred to me that this is what family members ask one another after a long day, and it also occurred to me that I had no idea what my mother had done the previous three days I'd been home, either.
My mother was taking a slug of her beer when I asked this, and it was weird: there was a slight pause in her drinking, a hitch in her gulp, a slight but noticeable arrest in her imbibing, before she continued her drinking, finishing the whole beer in one long swallow, as a matter of fact. "Work," she said, and then, without looking at me, she tossed another full can of beer at me, even though I was only half-done with the first one.
"What about you, Dad?" I asked. "What did you do today?"
It was more difficult to read my father's reaction, since he had so few of them and they were so spastic and incomprehensible to begin with. But I did notice this: my father glanced pleadingly at the television, as though asking it for help. Then he looked at his cooler, which was apparently empty, and to the cooler he said finally, "Work." As if in reward for his giving the right answer, my mother tossed my father a beer, the way a trainer throws a seal a fish. My father amazingly caught it, too, although in doing so, he nearly capsized the bike, and I had to run over and catch him and it before they crashed to the floor.
"What about you, Sam," my mother asked. "What did you do today?"
I didn't know at the time whether my parents were lying or not, but I did know that it appeared as though they were, and I decided then and there as a poorly read and unschooled detective learning on the fly that the key to telling lies is to act the opposite of those who might be liars. I looked my mother square in the eye and said, "Nothing," and then looked my father in the eye and said, "Nothing," even though he hadn't asked the question, which I'll