suffer with the cold when there are plenty of warmer places.’
‘It’s not the cold,’ I replied. ‘It’s the flowers.’
He pushed the lounger up into a sitting position. ‘What?’
‘I said, it’s the flowers. It’s not the cold or her back or anything else. It’s the stupid flowers. She wants to be somewhere with flowers. Even in January.’
My father didn’t say anything. It grew noticeably quiet, even with the music playing.
I studied him. My father couldn’t exactly be called a handsome man. He was of Irish descent, short and wiry, with masses of curly black hair, greying by his ears. His face had a well-lived-in look, especially around the eyes, as if he’d had a lifetime of bad nights’ sleep. But it was a cheerful face. He had a very ruddy complexion that gave him Santa Claus cheeks, and he was always betting Megs and me that we couldn’t look at him for five minutes without smiling. Neither of us could. Yet he was an unexpected choice to complement my mother’s rather awesome appearance.
‘It isn’t fair, you know,’ I said. ‘As soon as we really get settled somewhere, you guys want to up and leave. And frankly, Dad, I just don’t want to go anywhere right now. I’m a senior this year. I’m going to graduate and I want to do it here where I got some friends. I know kids here.’ I looked at him. ‘What I really want is to go to my senior prom. I want to get asked out by some guy and go on a date and be like every other girl in the senior class. I don’t want to be the only one not invited. The only one who doesn’t have anywhere to go. And if we move now, that’s what’s going to happen.’
He smiled gently and reached a hand over to touch me. ‘I know it’s been hard sometimes,’ he said, and I could tell from his voice that if it came to a showdown between Mama and me over moving, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
I sighed. Then once again, heavily. ‘I feel like I’m going to be a million years old before I even have a date. I feel like I’m probably going to be a toothless old granny, and when I get my first kiss, he’ll suck my dentures right out.’
He grinned.
‘It’s not funny, Dad.’
‘I know, sweetie,’ he said and chortled anyway.
‘Look, if Mama decides to move—’
‘Lesley, she has said absolutely nothing about it. You’re creating problems that don’t exist.’
‘If Mama decides to move, I want to stay with Brianna. I’ve already talked to her. I told her we might be moving, and she said she’d ask her mom to see if I could stay with them until the school year ends. It’d only be until June.’
‘You shouldn’t be talking to people about family matters, Les. This is strictly our personal business. I don’t think you ought to be sharing it with strangers.’
‘Daddy, Brianna’s no stranger. She’s my very best friend. Besides, I wasn’t specific. I was just sounding her out.’
‘The cold bothers your mother,’ he replied flatly. ‘If she wants to move, then I think we ought to move. We owe her that much.’
I said nothing. I put my head down and braced it between my hands. I gazed at the floor. The music coming from the radio was Rachmaninov’s. One of his concertos. I couldn’t remember which one.
‘Dad?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Do you think I’m ugly or anything? I mean, being really honest with me.’
His eyes widened. ‘Of course you’re not ugly, Lesley. What a thing to ask.’
‘I was just wondering.’ I listened to the remainder of the concerto and studied the pattern in the rug.
‘Look,’ he said, and his voice was gentle, ‘you still have plenty of time. Don’t put yourself in a state over it. Things’ll work out just fine.’
I raised my head. ‘How old were you when you first went out with a girl?’
‘Older than you are now. I was in the army.’
‘Didn’t you ever go out before that? When you were at home?’
‘The way your grandmother felt about things like that? Are you kidding? And way out there on the farm?’ He grinned. ‘I was lucky I even knew what girls were.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, see?’ He put his hand on my head, ‘Nature’ll take care of things. Don’t worry. Your time will come.’
There were no tattered remnants of European aristocracy in my father’s background, no private tutors, no summer afternoons whiled away with garden parties and violin music. The son of an Irish immigrant, my father grew up on a pig farm on the vast plains of Illinois.
There were seven children. My dad was the fourth child, the second son. They weren’t a poor family, not dirt poor the way a lot of farm families were in the Depression. Not the way his father had been when he’d arrived, aged four, in steerage with his parents at Ellis Island. But my dad had recollections of just getting by. My favourite was the one about how he got into a fight at school because another boy had said his coat was a girl’s coat. It had been. His mother had made it over for him from one his sister Kathleen had outgrown. When he was recounting that episode, Dad would always end up grinning. Yes, he’d say, it had been a girl’s coat, but he sure wasn’t going to let Jacky Barnes say so.
The mainstay of their lives had been religion. Both my father’s parents were devout Catholics. All the children had had at least a few years at parochial school, even with the hardship of the Depression. One of his sisters had later joined an order of nuns devoted to helping the poor and still lived in Colombia. His younger brother taught theology at a university in Massachusetts.
When my father was thirteen, his father was killed in a farm accident. He had been mangled under the wreckage of an overturned tractor, and two men near by had helped free him and bring him down to the house. My dad had been alone at the time. He was hoeing in the vegetable garden and keeping an eye on the baby, who was about two. The men had come, carrying his dying father between them. Dad wasn’t one for telling stories. Unlike Mama, he couldn’t spin out a small incident into a captivating drama. But when he told this, you felt it. You saw the skinny kid in worn overalls and dusty bare feet. You saw the baby with his one-eyed teddy bear. Daddy’s mother had gone down to the neighbours’ and so he’d been alone at the house with his small brother and his maimed father and he didn’t know what to do. And every time he told us about it, you felt his horror.
So I never knew my grandfather. We didn’t even have a photograph of him. Once, Dad told us, a travelling photographer had stopped by the farm and offered to take a picture of all of them. His mother made the children wash and dress in their Sunday clothes. But when the photographer returned with the developed pictures, he wanted more money than he had said initially: they hadn’t said there were so many children, the photographer told them. A deal’s a deal, Dad’s father replied. In the end, the photographer was sent
