One of the fathers thought of the afternoon his daughter’s braces had been removed as the moment he’d lost her.
One of the fathers wished he could work on cars. He wished he could prop his hood in the driveway and hang that competent and hopeful lantern and take a look at a belt or hose and then straighten up to his full height while wiping his hands on a torn green rag. Men like himself, driving by on the street, would notice him and feel lost.
One of the fathers thought of one of his daughter’s friends while he lay awake at night. He thought of her during slow moments in the day, too, but in the day he only felt fond of the way she walked and the way she carefully formed words with her lips. At night it was something worse. He didn’t think in terms of being in love. He had, apparently, been in love twice before. He knew there was no dependable advantage, when smitten, to doing something about it. There were numerous disadvantages. The father had never been addicted to anything, had never been unable to control himself. He would weather this, just another secret to keep. In so many ways, he was lucky. His daughter was lucky. Her friend, with her feline face and muscled calves and shabby fingernails, was lucky — lucky to be desired by a man who did not act on his wanton fixations. When the father picked all the girls up from somewhere in his restored classic Jeep, he hoped the girl he thought about at night would sit in the passenger seat. He had no way to encourage this. When it happened, when she hopped up beside him and the rest piled in back, he felt overcome, dizzy, like he’d had whiskey and a rich dessert. Her teeth were gleaming and slightly crooked and her skin was the color of honey when the sunlight shines through it. On the inside of her ankle was a pale beauty mark in the shape of a tropical fish. Her tummy sometimes peeked out. There were soft depressions behind her ears. She regarded the father with a comfortable sort of formality. There was no chance she understood him, but she trusted him. When she was in the front seat she didn’t lean back toward the others to join the gabbing. She listened, an amused outsider, same as the father. He wondered what she would do if she ever noticed how he looked at her, but she would never notice. Or she already had. This was the father’s problem alone, not the girl’s. It was best to keep his visions plain, he knew, but the nights were soundless and aimless and in the dark he would imagine the two of them living on a meadowy ranch out west or holing up down in Central America, local children running into town to fetch them produce and rum. He imagined teaching the girl how to cook, imagined going on weekend excursions for the purpose of buying hats. He even imagined scolding her coarse etiquette, imagined her taking up cigarettes. They would buy a horse. They would read the longest novels ever written. He imagined her coming down with a swift and exotic illness, and nursing her back to health, giving her medicines with his palm cupped underneath a spoon, placing cold rags on her forehead, leading her on leisurely walks over mild hills until the gold color returned to her limbs. He imagined her desire returning as she became hale. He wouldn’t rush her, he would wait until they were lying on the humid porch during the hottest part of the day and she sighed and pushed the tiny soft arch of her foot into his hand. He even allowed himself to imagine the fallout. His own daughter’s injury. The other father’s rage. A fistfight. The law. The shame. Except that nothing was going to happen. He was unfamiliar with the abandon that caused people to commit murder or rape or break into houses over a fix, that made gamblers end up homeless, that caused old ladies to hoard knickknacks and canned goods and small pets until their houses were condemned, that turned the upbeat overweight into the grotesque obese who couldn’t leave their apartments. No, his mind was like his lawn; it could grow unruly, but there was a snug, irresistible pride in trudging out into the heat and mowing and clipping and raking. He had seen the girl in sundresses. He had seen her in men’s-style pajamas. He had seen her in a soccer uniform. He had seen her in a thin, stiff coat and high boots. He had seen her in a faded clay-colored towel almost the same shade as her skin. He had seen her in a ball gown and in a middle school graduation gown. He had seen her in a beat-up sweatshirt, eager to paint houses for the less fortunate.
The fathers knew it was important to have meals with their daughters. For one father, breakfast was convenient. For another, dinner. One of the fathers regularly picked his daughter up from school and took her for salads in the quaint town center of their neighborhood. One of the fathers was only free on Sundays and he took his daughter to brunch on the water, and he’d recently begun to feel, sitting there just the two of them in the midst of so many hungover, sated couples and sprawling wedding parties, oyster shells and champagne everywhere, that something was not quite natural about his and his daughter’s lingering over this sunny midmorning luxury, that this familiar indulgence had curdled.
The fathers remembered their own childhoods lovingly, remembered that first summer they were allowed to walk down to the old pier without any adults and fish an afternoon away, many years younger than their daughters were now. They remembered the storm beginning to assemble on the horizon as they pulled lunch out of a plastic grocery bag — a sandwich of whatever pastrami had been left after their father’s work week, a peach, a warm can of ginger ale. They remembered taking their shoes off and setting them in an out-of-the-way spot where they wouldn’t get knocked down into the swells. They remembered getting their bait stolen by pinfish, getting their lines tangled. They remembered the clouds rising, advancing, snuffing out the sun. They remembered pointing at the lightning in the distance and tasting a metallic tang on the breeze. Soon everyone else on the pier began reeling in and packing up and shuffling toward land, throwing in the towel — first the young professionals on a day off, wearing bright ball caps and expensive deck shoes, then those women of indeterminate age that had always frightened and interested the fathers when they were boys, with their platinum hair and harsh laughs and sculpted manly arms, and finally the pier hounds, their mustaches unkempt and shorts ratty, who fished for their dinners most days. The storm had been racing in, aimed directly at the pier, and then it seemed to hold itself in place a moment, offering a fair chance to anyone who’d not yet fled. The fathers found their shoes then. They remembered the sky growing dark as night, the thunder seeming to come from beneath them. That was when the snook finally started hitting, forced landward by the storm. They remembered throwing the wriggling creatures back, too small to keep anyway, and slicing a finger while dislodging a hook, knowing that this moment, with fish caught and the line up and blood dripping onto the planks of the pier and the lightning close enough to blind them, was when they should run for cover. But they didn’t run. Something inside them wanted this danger. If the storm washed them off the pier, they would drown. The lightning could fry them crisp. Yet they baited and dropped their hooks once again. They remembered being fascinated at being alone, remembered turning and looking back at the beach, which was abandoned and which seemed itself to be bracing for a siege. They remembered the first fat drops of rain hitting the backs of their hands. The angry front was now hanging over them like a cliff. They remembered not being able to account for their stubbornness, not understanding why the thing that ought to chase them off was holding them still. The gusts rocking the pier. The surf pounding the pilings below. They remembered those days and prayed, knowing it wouldn’t be so, that whatever fates their daughters were testing were as wholesome as rough weather.
THE INLAND NEWS
It was breakfast time, and Sofia was in the kitchen with Uncle Tunsil. He was eating a lemon with sugar and had a glass of milk waiting for him. Sofia was working on a bowl of colorful cereal meant for children, crunching it down in the quiet morning. Uncle Tunsil gazed out the front window. The lemon tree was out there, and also a colossal nut tree that had been struck by lightning and rendered half dead. The branches that shot out over the house were pale and bare, while the branches over the road hung lush in their own shade.