Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [111]
“That’s cool.” His voice was relaxed, like he was lying in a warm bath with a cold beer talking to good, good friends.
“Did you hear me, you piece of shit?”
“Yep, you too. Give our love to everybody. Bye now.”
In the hum of the dial tone Pop stood in the shadows of their small dining room looking at me. I hung up the phone, felt that old feeling again, that I was small and weak and invisible. His reaction the kind of non-reaction given to a nobody who can and will do nothing.
Many years later, Suzanne told me she was there with him when we called, that he spoke to us like we were phoning him just to shoot the shit. But for weeks afterward, I imagined shooting him, then digging a deep hole and rolling his body into it, filling it back up with dirt and broken rock and the roots I’d had to sever from any tree close to me.
THE FOLLOWING morning Pop pushed aside his writing and wrote a short story in one sitting. It was called “Leslie in California.” When he handed it to me and I read the first line, I remembered again how good at this Pop was, that he wrote beautifully every time he tried. I was standing in his kitchen holding the typed manuscript in my hands. He stood there in his tank top and shorts and running shoes, a bandanna tied around his head. Luke was beside him, his tail wagging. But Pop’s face was like I’d rarely seen it, his eyes expectant and hopeful yet mournful, too. As if he were both proud and ashamed. It was a feeling I knew well, and he nodded and left the house for his workout. I sat at his and Peggy’s table and read this story of a young wife the morning after her drunk husband hits her, his remorse, her dawning awareness that she is in a permanently dangerous place.
I finished reading the last line, and I too felt proud and ashamed. Proud because my father was an artist at this, a man who had just written deeply and poetically from a woman’s point of view. But ashamed because he had done that. It felt like thievery to me. Like he had just stolen Suzanne’s experience and made it his own, and meanwhile Keith was still walking the earth untouched, unpunished, his in-laws’ warnings some distant echo in his head. And now this story for strangers to read.
How did this help my sister? What good did this do?
After his run, Pop asked me what I’d thought of the story. His bandanna was drenched. He pulled it off and ran his forearm along his hairline.
“It’s a good story.”
“I’m going to send it to her.”
“Good.” I nodded. It was a Sunday, and it was time to drive back to my apartment in Lynn. I gave Pop a half hug, tapped his sweaty back, and stepped out into the cold. I felt like a liar and a chickenshit.
MY MOTHER sat across from me at Village Square, a breakfast place in Bradford set into a row of shops between Ronnie D’s and the Sacred Hearts church. It was midwinter on Saturday morning, and in front of us were plates of eggs and bacon, hot weak coffee, and she looked better than she had in years. Gone was the look of constant financial worry. Gone was the look that she was under a great weight she just could not hold much longer. Gone was the look, blue and still surprised, that she’d been left behind.
Instead, she was tanned, and her hair was nearly blonde again. She’d lost weight and her eyes were bright and if I’d ever seen her happier, I couldn’t remember when. She was talking of their life down in St. Maarten, Bruce’s work for his brother-in-law’s airfreight business, how much she enjoyed helping deliver food to restaurants, the white sand and green sea, the ice-cold Heinekens in the salt breeze.
I was glad for her. She seemed free of something, and she kept smiling at me. “Are you excited about graduate school?”
I sipped my coffee, shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” The place was crowded, people eating and talking and laughing, the waitresses delivering plates of waffles and sausage, the