Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [36]
Dickie is waiting outside, and he is surprised to see me, I can tell, though he is trying to make his face mainly polite. “Hey, look who’s coming,” he says, and then, to Diane, “Is she?” Diane nods, hoists my suitcase, then hers into the back of his truck. “Go ahead, get in,” she tells me, and I guess that I am to sit in the middle, just like I imagined. Everything they say to each other will have to pass over me. I can stay quiet as can be and still be in the conversation. I get in, Diane gets behind the wheel, and Dickie goes to the back of the truck. At first I think he is walking away, giving us the truck. But then Diane shifts into neutral, nods at him, and he begins to push. A silent leave-taking. This must be how they’ve done it before. I hold my breath until we are a good block away. Then Diane stops the truck and hops out to move to the other side. Dickie gets in and starts the engine. We are going. And in his bed, he is sleeping.
Once I got into bed with him and my mother. I was sick, full of longing for the feel of someone else’s normal flesh, and so I crawled in beside her. She awakened instantly, felt my forehead, and got up to get me something. “Don’t wake your father,” she said.
I lay still and listened to him breathe. There was a smell to him that I felt in my nose and in my throat. He was wearing a T-shirt on top; I didn’t know what on the bottom. I took in a ragged breath, closed my eyes, opened them. I could see the green glow of their alarm clock, hear a muffled, rapid tick. Where was my mother? He stirred then, reached out, and lay a heavy arm across me. I jumped, thinking he’d been going to hit me, and the movement must have awakened him. “What are you doing here?” he said. “What happened?”
“I’m sick,” I said, and then, “Mom said to wait here.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He felt my forehead. “You have a fever.”
“Yes.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“Just my throat. And my ears. And some in my stomach.”
“That’s a lot to hurt.”
“Well, only a little in my stomach.”
“All right.” He turned over, went back to sleep.
He doesn’t like people to talk about pain. Once he had to have an operation on his stomach. He never said anything about it—not before and not during and not after. When we went to the hospital to visit him, I saw him from outside his door before he saw us. His face was like before you have to make a big jump across something deep. Then when he saw Diane, my mother, and me, he changed into normal. He nodded and said to give him his robe, and he sat up and said he was taking us to the hospital cafeteria. And he did, walked slowly beside us in his paper slippers. His face was sick white and he was pushing a pole with a big bottle swaying on it. I got french fries and Diane got an ice cream sandwich and my mother got tea and he said, no, he didn’t want anything, he wasn’t allowed to have anything, but he paid. I was glad to see his same old wallet in his robe. He watched us eat and then he went back to his room and got into bed and told us to go home. Before we left, he called my mother back. “Lock the windows,” he said. “Check the basement before you go to sleep.”
“I love you,” she said, and bent down to kiss his cheek. He stared straight ahead, nodded. After she turned to leave, I saw him pull one hand up slowly over his stomach, then the other. In school the next day, I cried thinking about it. I said it was because I had a headache, and I got to go home. My mother put me on the sofa under the afghan, brought me tomato soup with crackers