Tilt - Alan Cumyn [23]
Stan’s father could pick up a kid and twirl him like a helicopter blade so fast you were almost flying.
This man — this imposter — had to straighten himself up just to avoid looking Stan in the eye. He had soft shoulders and a paunch and weak eyes, saggy in the corners. Not the dark, glinting ping-pong champion beamers that Stan remembered.
He looked like a man who’d abandoned his kids years ago.
“Ron,” Stan’s mother said.
“Isabelle,” Ron said.
They stood on the little walkway in front of the house. Lily was still draped all over him. He pressed her thick hair to his neck as if hanging on to a cliff-face vine.
All right, his father would do that. But this man — Ron — was crumbling in the corners. He looked like all the other middle-aged men Stan’s mother had dated in the past few years.
“What are you doing here?” Stan’s mother asked.
Ron buried his pudgy hand in Lily’s hair and mumbled something about bus fare.
“What’s bus fare got to do with anything?”
“There was a special on. I saw a flyer for it and so I thought I’d come.”
Ron still hadn’t looked Stan square in the eye. Stan might as well have been a fence post. It was up to his father to say something.
Up to Ron, who wasn’t up to much.
“That wasn’t our agreement,” Stan’s mother said. “You can’t come here and disrupt everything just because there’s a special on.”
“I’m special,” Lily blurted. “I’m going to go to a special school!”
“Please get down, Lily,” her mother said.
“Why can’t we just have a visit?” Ron pleaded.
“They tested me and I’m extraordinary,” Lily said, not getting down. Ron gripped her tighter.
This man made Gary look good.
“I just hopped on a bus. That’s all —”
“You just owe us four years, three months’ worth of child support!” Stan’s mother turned her icy gaze on Lily. “Lily.”
Lily hugged the man — Ron — all the harder. Stan imagined taking out the side of his knee with a sweeping kick. He’d collapse like a broken tent pole.
“Look, I’m not here to make any trouble,” Ron said. He put Lily down. She clung still, a koala bear grappled to a tree limb. Ron squatted and blew a quick puff to clear the hair from her eyes.
That was something his father used to do.
“Did you bring your checkbook?” Stan’s mother said. “Or I’d be happy to take cash.” Then, because she couldn’t help herself, she said again, “Lily.”
Lily didn’t move.
If Stan had his broom handle he could sidekick the innocent grin off Ron’s face.
“Look. This wasn’t meant to be a big thing. I just saw the ad —”
“What are you doing for work these days, Ron?” Stan’s mother asked.
Ron laughed bitterly. “That’s what it always comes down to with you. What’s the bottom line? What’s the measure of a man’s worth?”
Stan’s mother’s chest shivered with quick little phony breaths. Either she was going to faint from lack of air or claw his eyes out.
“I’m a carpenter,” Ron said finally. He opened his hands — his pudgy, white, non-callused hands.
“From law to real estate to carpentry,” she snapped.
Then a miserable gaze between the two. Stan fell into the trap of it for a time. It was hard to look away. But finally he stepped in and took Lily’s wrist — not harshly, not softly — and pulled her into the house.
“He’s not going to stay,” she whined in the vestibule. Stan wanted to wait close enough so he could spring to his mother’s aid if need be.
“He doesn’t deserve to,” Stan said.
He couldn’t make out what they were saying out there.
They weren’t screaming. That was something.
Carpentry? Stan remembered his father trying to replace a spoke on Stan’s bicycle years and years ago. He remembered the wrenches, the sweat, the swear words rising to the basement rafters. And the new spoke broken, poking through the replacement inner tube. The blood on Stan’s father’s knuckles.
Carpentry.
Stan’s mother came through the door. Stan glimpsed the front walk. Ron was gone. He’d left on foot for