At eleven-thirty the phone rings. He gets it before the second ring. He snaps off the TV but I can’t hear anything. I get out of bed and move slowly to the top of the stairs.
“It’s all right. It’s all right. Sweetie, it’s going to be all right.”
After a long silence, he says, “I do. You know I do. I always will. We’s gonna be okay, you and me.”
The next day Barbara Bridgeton arrives with two baby-blue hardshell suitcases. My father drags them upstairs while I make us some tea. Barbara stands near the dishwasher, her coat still on. I do everything slowly, to delay the moment when I have to turn and face her.
“I know how strange this must be for you, Daley,” she says to my back, “but I’ve loved him — I’ve loved your whole family — for as long as I can remember.” Her voice breaks, and I hear her drop into a chair. “Please be on our side. Someone needs to be on our side.” The sound of her weeping is awful. I think of Thanksgiving and her boys in coats and ties and the brick covered in needlepoint. It had been their thirty-sixth Thanksgiving in that house, Scott told me.
“Have you talked to your children about all this?”
She nods. Her crying quickens.
“They’re having a hard time with it?”
She nods again more vigorously. “Scott hung up on me. Hatch and Carly listened, but they think I’m being rash.”
“You are both being very rash.”
“We’re not teenagers. We know what we want.”
“My father does not know what he wants. You have to understand this. He has a lot of work ahead of him.”
“I don’t want him to do any work. He’s perfect the way he is.”
“I know to outsiders he appears that way but—”
“I’m hardly an outsider, Daley.”
Somehow he has hidden vast swaths of his personality from people who do not live with him. We hear him cross the dining room, enter the pantry. She wipes her face and stands up.
He hugs her and she starts crying again and he tells her he has cleaned out a bureau in his room for her. I slip out of the room.
Barbara insists on making dinner that night. She says she needs something to do with herself. There is a tenderloin in the fridge, but she has me go down to Goodale’s for cubes of lamb and some heavy cream. It’s clear she doesn’t want to go herself. Word has probably already gotten out about where she’s shacking up. She is right. I can tell by the way Mrs. Goodale greets me, her voice a bit louder, with just a hint of mischief in it.
When I get home with the groceries, they are upstairs again. They already took what Barbara called a siesta after lunch. I take the dogs for a walk to the beach. It’s freezing. I don’t like sand and snow mixed together. It seems unnatural. I don’t let the dogs off their leashes; they’ll try to swim. They strain toward the water. We are the only beings in sight.
If I move out now, my father will stop going to AA. It won’t last with Barbara. They’ll have their fling and she’ll return to her good solid family. I need to stay right here and hold his place so he won’t have to start all over again after she leaves him.
When he puts on his coat for the meeting that night, Barbara asks, “Why is it held at seven? Why right at dinnertime?”
I wait for my father to tell her that he never eats before eight, but he doesn’t. He just shrugs.
“Maybe it’s because that’s when people really want a drink,” I say.
“I see,” she says with a pout.
When he comes home she wants to know if anyone she knows was there.
“That’s the anonymous part,” I say.
My father separates the lamb from the sauce, eats a few bites, then says he’s full.
He leans back in his chair and looks at me. “You don’t wear your hair back like that very often, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s a good thing. You’ve got some big ears.”
This is the first criticism of me he’s made in a long time. It burns a little, but I don’t let him see that. “I’m pretty sure I know where I got them.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Garvey’s got them too. We measured once. Whose do you think were the bigger, Garvey’s or mine?”
“Yours.”
“Nope. Garvey by three-eighths of an inch.”
He gets up and rustles around in a kitchen drawer. “Here we go.” He holds up a ruler to my left ear “Two and three quarters.”
I do the same to his. “Three and one-eighth.”
He raises his arms straight up. “The biggest ears in the world!”
“Don’t I get a chance to compete?” Barbara asks.
We look at her ears. They’re tiny.
“Nah,” we say at the same time, and laugh.
The next morning Barbara wants to help me unload the dishwasher. Dad is outside shoveling out the cars. I tell her to sit and finish her coffee, but she wants to know where everything goes. I don’t want to show her. I don’t want her tell me it would be better to have the mugs closer to the coffeepot. But she doesn’t. She holds up a plate with pink flowers and a gold rim and tells me it was the breakfast china my father’s mother gave my parents for their wedding.
“I remember your mother opening up the boxes of it at the shower.” And then she puts the plate on the counter. “I wish you wouldn’t focus on your father’s flaws, Daley.”
“What?”
“It’s not good for his self-esteem.”
“Are you talking about his ears?”
“Yes, that’s one thing.”
“I think it’s great to be able to laugh at your own small irregularities.”
“He has beautiful ears. And so do you. If you really want to help your dad, build him up, don’t knock him down.”
For the first three nights, my father doesn’t watch sports after dinner. But on the fourth night the Patriots are in some important game and he asks her if she wouldn’t mind if he watched a little.
“Of course not,” she says, and goes to fetch her needlepoint. My father is trying so hard to watch passively, without leaping to his feet and hurling expletives at the screen, that his hands twitch.
The phone rings. My heart does its usual throb. I’ve never quite given up hope that Jonathan will call. I reach it on the third ring.
“I’d like to speak to my wife, Daley.”
I look at Mrs. Bridgeton. She has the needle between her lips as she untangles a small knot within the small squares. The rounds of pink in her cheeks made me suspect that the phone made her heart pound, too. She’s a fine actress, though.
“Barbara,” I say, and watch her force a delay, then look up. “It’s for you.”
She stands and places her needlepoint in the hollow where her body has been beside my father. He watches her and she moves toward the little study where the phone is. I hand her the phone and shut the door on my way out.
My father’s fists are balled tight during the next play. After all the men on the field have fallen into another enormous pile, a commercial comes on.
“I’m going to have to get the number changed, you know,” he says. “He can’t be calling here.”
“Dad, you have to let them speak to each other.”
“No, she’s made her choice.”
“He must be pretty devastated right now. And if it leads to divorce, then everything will go smoother if they’re communicating well.”
“If it leads to divorce? She’s divorcing him, Daley. I think that’s pretty obvious.”
“You have to let her make her own decisions. You can’t force it.”
“You think she’s going to go back to him? Is that what you think?”
“I have no idea what she’ll do. But forty years of marriage shouldn’t be underestimated.”