“He paid me twenty dollars to show him the back door out,” Hannah said. “Sorry.”
I said, “I don’t think I called you up for a date. Are you sure it was me? I dated one girl the whole time I was at Cal-loustown High. Her name was Vivian. You remember Vivian? And then we broke up and I went to college, and then I met a woman I ended up marrying.”
Hannah stood up. She grunted. She shook her head sideways. “I knew you’d end up no good, even back then, cheating on Vivian like you done.”
The doctor said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and retreated back into the examination rooms. I could see in her eyes, though, that she didn’t believe my story, and that she felt sorry for her receptionist.
I said, “Someone played a joke on you. Or on me! On top of that, my father’s telephone doesn’t work right anymore. Maybe it didn’t back then, either. Did you pick up the receiver and I was there already?” I looked in her face and tried to recognize anything. “Where’s my father?”
Hannah said, “Search-a-Word. I’m doing Search-a-Words.”
My father swore that his doors changed overnight from opening in to opening out. All of them. He said he’d put his hand on a Bible and tell the story about how one morning, maybe six months after my mother left for the oyster entrepreneur in Sumter, he got up to go put black oil sunflower seeds in the Yankee feeders only to pull and pull on the door knob, thinking someone had come along post-midnight to shove silver slugs between jamb and lock prankster-style. He said he tried the front door, the back door, and a side door that went off to a sunroom of sorts. Understand that this was a good decade after I’d lived in the house, so I couldn’t remember if doors went in or out in the first place. I didn’t even remember a sunroom in my house of training.
I went back outside from the clinic thinking about this — I accidentally tried to pull the door toward me, then pushed it out — and wondered where my father might have gone. I tried to think backward. Would one leave a doctor’s office and light out for the funeral home, or the maternity ward of a hospital? Would he hitchhike back home because he figured I would never think of him doing so, or toward Sumter, or to the opposite of Calloustown — which happened, in my mind, to be Asheville, North Carolina. Would he go to a wedding chapel?
“I’m over here, Freckle-dick,” I heard my father yell out. I looked at the CPR driving range and saw, still, that man and child standing there with three-woods in their hands. The man took his club and pointed down to the opposite end of the wide fairway. My father stood three hundred yards away and appeared to have a ball teed up to hit in the woods beyond the Calloustown Practice Range’s perimeter.
And he had his shirt off so that, from where I stood, he looked like a man with a thousand ticks on his back. I started walking his way. I entered the driving range’s boundaries and kept looking behind me in case the man and kid wanted to tee off in my direction, which is exactly what I would’ve done. My cell phone rang, I pulled it out of my pocket, and I noticed that Patricia was on the other end.
“Hey,” I said, breaking into a trot. My father addressed the ball. Where did he get the club? I wondered. Did the CPR hand out drivers to people who showed up clubless and unprepared? I said, “I’d be willing to bet I’ll be staying here tonight.”
“I might’ve found a dermatologist in Calloustown, or someone who’s a specialist,” Patricia said. In the background I could hear her yarn whispering down to the wooden floor of our den. “What’s a dendrologist?”
I said, “No. That has to do with trees.”
“Well they have one of those people in your hometown.”
My father reared back and swung at the ball. He hit a beautiful tee shot over the scrub pines that edged Calloustown Practice Range’s property. Behind me, a ball landed from the kid teeing off like a normal person perfecting his swing. I didn’t want to say, “It might be time to look for a psychiatrist,” so I didn’t. I said, “We got it all under control here. I’ll see you tomorrow,” and punched End.
Sin teed up another ball. As I reached him he said, “Was that Patricia? Did you tell her I said hello? I don’t want any shit from you about this. Listen, if I got my skin cleared up, then I’d end up being perfect. Can you imagine what it would be like being perfect? And then everyone around here would hate me all the time. People around here would kill a perfect person just so they wouldn’t come up so short at home daily.”
“Why’re we out here at the end of the range?” I asked him. I looked back. We were too far away to be in possible danger from anyone, unless they pulled out a modified potato gun and shot Titleists our way.
“I can’t think up there. I can’t think teeing off from where everyone else tees off. Listen to this idea, Dust. Listen to what I came up with just before you showed up: it’s a commercial for either a golf club or a golf ball. The camera shows a man at a par three hole, you know, like 150 yards from the tee box. So he pulls out his gigantic driver, and his playing partner says, ‘What’re you doing?’ and the dude turns around with his back to the green. Then he rips one and — I think they can do this now, what with all the fancy cameras and computers — it goes around the world, like a meteor, and then plops down on the green and rolls in the hole. Can you see it? The ball goes 24,901 miles, and then he gets a hole in one.”
I had to admit it seemed like a viable and worthy television commercial for a dimpled ball or oversized clubhead. I said, “Put on your shirt and let’s go to Worm’s.” I said, “Do you have any other ideas for commercials? I have a buddy in Charlotte who works at an ad agency.”
My father hit one more ball into the woods, topping this one so that it never reached knee high, then ricocheted off a pine tree and nearly came back to us. “So what did you think of Hannah?” my father said.
I handed him his shirt and tried not to make eye contact with those lesions. “She was kind of abrupt with me. Who the hell is she? I don’t remember her whatsoever.”
My father left his driver on the ground. He didn’t pick up his tee, which hadn’t moved through any of his swings. We walked on a veer toward my car. He said, “One day gas will be solid, and the Earth will be gas.” At the unlocked car my father said, “That Hannah woman used to call me up every day, thanking me for the way I brought you up. She says she wouldn’t have become the woman she is if it weren’t for you. She used another word for ‘woman.’ I forget it. Hell, she called so much your mother got to thinking that we were having an affair. I kept telling her — your mother — that everything was backwards.”
I drove to the bar, but I didn’t pay attention to Sin’s constant monologue. I thought, how many times have I unwittingly caused someone to choose a path in life? I thought, I wonder if there’s a woman out there that I should’ve married — one who never had to unravel yarn, or who never attempted to manufacture mittens in the first place. And then I got stuck thinking, what if my mother met the retired Air Force colonel before he retired, and he became my father? What would I be doing now? Would I be working in the restaurant, shucking oysters for the hungry masses? Would I be delivering shells to people who wanted crushed driveways? Would I encounter some kind of shellfish allergy and break out in hives?
Sin said, “I kind of miss her.” I didn’t ask him if he meant my mother, my wife, or the woman at the clinic. I even thought that, perhaps, by “her” he meant “him.”
We got in the car and Sin picked up my cell phone from the console. I got on the two-lane to drive into Calloustown proper. He pressed the receiver icon as if to make a call, then said, “I knew it would be you.” Was Patricia on the other end? Did that Hannah woman somehow retrieve my number, maybe through my father having written it down under Emergency Contact during another visit to the clinic?