The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [107]
My dad smelled of grease and dime-store aftershave. Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad’s stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him.
That Sunday afternoon proceeded in a normal fashion until my mom asked if I had a picture of Oscar. I went to a drawer and pulled out his high school graduation photo, where he’s smiling in a smug way I never saw him smile, and his hair is watered down, and he’s basically pre-me, pre-Chloé, so he doesn’t look like himself, he doesn’t look transformed, except by the drugs he was using right about then. He was a little gaunt in those days, at least in the off-season, away from the track team, feeding his body with drugs. Later, Oscar in love went out of two dimensions into three or four. We made love in the fourth dimension, for example. But anyway this graduation portrait’s the only picture of him I have, except for one of him that Scooter took at our wedding, in which me and Oscar are kissing and Oscar’s got his hand planted on my tits, which I wasn’t going to show to my parents, the picture I mean, for safety’s sake.
“He looks very nice,” my mom said.
“Kinda thin,” my dad said.
No point in telling them about the drugs, so I said, “He’d just had flu.”
They nodded.
They spent the rest of the afternoon with me, making mature efforts to reconcile. We talked about boring stuff like my dad’s job, my mom’s job (she’s sort of a cashier-receptionist at a car dealership), and how the house was empty these days and if I wanted to move back, just before or after the baby was born, I could do that, and I could use the crib for my baby that they used for me. I almost said, “Thanks very much, that’s very sweet, but, you know, it’s too late for that,” but I didn’t, because they were trying to be solid and correct with me, turning over a new parental leaf, now that I was my own woman and not their little girl anymore. Besides, I wanted to show them how mature I’d gotten by not saying fuck all the time, a habit that’s hard to give up. That’s scary for parents. You have to be careful with parents once you’re grown up into mature adulthood. They get sensitive. Almost anything you say, you hurt their feelings. Their aging hearts get broken. They just crumple up. Besides, I was about to become one of them.
THERE WAS ONE OTHER CALL I was expecting, and sure enough, eventually it came. I was expecting it to come at about two in the morning, but the phone rang at seven at night, and I just knew it was him, I had known all day at work that it was going to be him, it was a little gift that Mrs. Maggaroulian had given me, knowing when my father-in-law the Bat would call me before he actually did. Maybe I knew these things because I was carrying his grandchild, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I picked it up from Mrs. Maggaroulian, what Weekly World News calls “precognition.”
After I was a full-fledged married woman, the Bat had stopped stalking me, and Oscar and me, we sort of forgot about him, just figured that he had retreated into his bat cave for a while until he decided to be decent. Oscar didn’t need anything from the house — he’d taken all his stuff out of there a long time ago — so we were what you would call out of touch with the Bat.
Anyway, the phone rang and I answered it.
“This is Mac Metzger,” the Bat said. “I thought I had better talk to you.”
“Oh, hi,” I said.
I waited for him to say something. Then he said, “Lot of water’s over the dam, ain’t it?”
“I guess so.” Then I asked, “Uh, water?”
He ignored the question. “I hear tell you’re in the family way.”
“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”