“Sorry about that. I meant to leave a note,” he says, not looking, putting a sub wrapped in tinfoil on a little card table in the far corner. “You finding everything okay?”
He has his back to me. I assent with the slightest murmur.
His voice is exactly the same. Why are voices so distinct, so recognizable, when all they are are vibrations against two reeds in the throat? It’s understandable that there can be a few billion variations of the face, given all the variables, but the voice? Neal’s is smooth, like skates on fresh ice. It hasn’t deepened much, though he has grown tall. And there is his hair, the same brown curls Miss Perth used to tease him about. She called him Shirley Temple when he was bad, which he sometimes was. Shirley Temple, go sit on your stool, she used to say without turning from the blackboard. I have eyes in the back of my head, Shirley Temple. In second and third grades we had red math workbooks and we used to race each other to finish one and get the next. We were paired together, pitted against each other. In those lower grades we were sent out of our classroom and into the next grade up for English. In fifth grade we were captains of opposing spelling teams. And then my parents divorced and my grades slipped and Neal’s never did.
He was small and narrow, almost scrawny, when he was younger, with square teeth too big for his face, but now he is long and broad, shirttails hanging out, an overgrown prep-school kid. I know the type and avoided them in college, those guys who never quite adjust to the world that isn’t boarding school, who can’t believe their angelic faces, long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes, and quick sardonic responses are no longer enough to impress every teacher or get every girl. They have a knack for sniffing me out, those disillusioned preppies, sensing my background despite all I have done to disguise it, and I run from them as fast as I can. Boys like that turn into men like my father.
I keep my back to him, moving toward poetry at the back. I hear him sink into a cane chair, prop up a book in front of him, unwrap the sub.
“I’m ready to settle up,” I say, after I hear the foil crumple and drop into a trash can.
His head jerks up from his book. I suppose my voice hasn’t changed either. “Jesus. I thought my mother was delusional. Daley Amory’s in town, Neal. That go-getter is a professor at Stanford.” He does a pitch-perfect imitation of his mother. But I don’t like being used as a prod. I didn’t realize she had a cruel streak. She seemed glad to have him home, proud of his store. The brief performance leaves me at loss.
“Berkeley, not Stanford,” I say, finally. And then, looking around, “This is a great store.”
“Yeah, well, I think I should call it Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow, but maybe everything is like that.” He clears a spot on the card table. “Here, put those down here.”
I slide my stack of books onto the table, nudging off a receipt pad. I bend to pick it up, noticing that the last person has bought The Pickwick Papers for $3.95.
“Your dad okay?” he asks as he writes down my books, his tone already apologizing for the question. How much has he heard? What does the town know?
“Yeah, I think he is.” I want to tell him that my father is at his second AA meeting, that he dresses for them like he’s going to a cocktail party, and who knows who is in there or what they talk about. I want to ask him if he has known anyone who has gone to that meeting in town and if it really might work — no, I don’t want to hear any stories of failure. “How are your parents?”
“They’re all right. They endure.”
His mother was such a presence that I barely remember his dad. A beige windbreaker is all that comes to mind.
I don’t know what to say after that. I watch him write, the handwriting familiar, bunched.
“Congratulations on the job at Berkeley,” he says, handing me my books, the receipt stuck in the middle of the one on top. “That can’t have been easy to get.”
I smile more than I should. “Thanks.” That job is my talisman against all this. “Take care of yourself, Neal.”
I look back before stepping off the stoop, but he’s putting the cash box back on the floor.
I head back toward the church. “Well, that was awkward,” I say to the empty sidewalk. “Not sure he even noticed the boobs.”
And then I hear it, the sound of heavy pieces of metal knocking against one another. I’m flooded with an old feeling, a delicious anticipation. It’s coming from behind me, across the tracks. I turn and, sure enough, the trucks and trailers have just arrived. The true sight and sound of summer in Ashing: the carnival is being set up.
I wish I could go watch like I used to with Patrick and Mallory, straddling our bikes outside the fence, sometimes for hours at a time, mesmerized by all the trailers and what came off of them, the enormous limbs of rides like the Scrambler and the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, the horses for the merry-go-round on their poles, the big crowns of lights and mirrors, upholstered seats, little boats and planes. Once a boy about our age brought us some fried dough from his family’s stand a day before the carnival actually opened. We devoured it and asked him questions about his life, if he got to ride for free, what was his favorite ride, his favorite food, his favorite town. “Not this one,” he said. “Rich towns like this keep all their pennies up their asses.” We laughed hard and a couple of other boys came over, but that caught the attention of a big guy attaching the fake balcony to the haunted house. “Hey,” he called down to us, “don’t harass the kids. They got work to do.” Rich towns like these, Pennies up their asses, and Don’t harass the kids all became refrains for us for years.
I sit on the bench outside the library until the clock strikes eight, then I cross the street and wait in the car until my father comes out. I recognize hardly any of them from the night before, but again they all make a point of saying goodbye to my father.
“All righty then,” he says when he gets in. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”
“How was it?’ I think I can risk it, given his good mood.
“Good.” He looks at the door of the rectory.
I can’t tell if he’s faking it all for me.
“Not too much God?” This is one of the things I’ve been worried about. My father hates God almost as much as he hates Democrats.
“No.” He’s still looking out the window, away from me. “To each his own.”
To each his own? I think of quoting this to Garvey and have to clench in a laugh.
The light is out at Lighthouse Books.
“I walked down here while you were in your meeting. To the bookstore.”
“Oh yeah? Never been in there. Nice place?”
“Small, but good books.”
“That poor kid.”
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “With a mother like that.”
“I like his mother.”
“Yeah, well, let me advise you right now, stay away from her. She’s got a big screw loose in her head.”
We pull into the driveway, and I realize I forgot to check the sign in the park that tells the day the carnival will open. I hope it’s before I have to leave.
I have Dad cook his own pork chop and show him how to poke holes in the potato before baking it.
We eat by the pool. The dogs swim. When we’re done, I ask him how he feels.