but a kind of comfort? (So long as my mother didn’t know. But my mother needn’t know.) A risky comfort, but a comfort nonetheless for it was familiar, it was Daddy.
And the stubbled jaws suddenly ticklish-scratchy against my face as Daddy leaned over to kiss the edge of my mouth, wetly. Daddy’s movements were impulsive and clumsy as those of a man who has long lived by instinct yet has come at last to distrust instinct as he has come to distrust his own capacity for judgment, his sense of himself. Even as Daddy kissed me, roughly, a little too hard, a kiss he intended I would not soon forget, Daddy was pushing me away for a hot rush of blood had come between us.
“G’night, Puss.”
Not good-bye he was saying but good night. This was crucial to me.
It had not seemed to be raining hard but as soon as I climbed out of Daddy’s car and began to run to the house, a chill pelting rain started. A mad flurry of wet leaves rushed at me. Awkwardly I ran with my head lowered, I was breathless and wanting to laugh, so awkward, my backpack gripped in one hand slapping against my legs, almost tripping me. I hated to think that my father might be watching me. Halfway up the lane I turned to see—as somehow I knew I would see—the red taillights of my father’s car fading into the mist.
“Daddy! G’night—”
YOU WOULD THINK But he’d promised her! He’d wait until she was safely inside the house.
You would think that I was disappointed, hurt. And that I was not even surprised, to be disappointed and hurt. But you would be mistaken for I have never been a daughter to judge my father who’d been so harshly, cruelly and wrongly judged by others; and I would not wish to recall so trivial, so petty an injury, a misunderstanding, a moment’s carelessness on the part of a man with so much else to occupy his mind, a man drawn ever more rapidly and inexorably into the orbit of his death and his oblivion beyond the length of the graveled driveway glistening with puddles on that rainy night in November 1987 when I was fifteen years old and eager for my true life to begin.
REPROACH LIKE AN ARROW leaping from the bow, aimed at my heart. Reproach in a voice of the lightest chiding, almost you’d mistake—if this were a TV comedy, if you were an unseasoned viewer—for playfulness, mischief.
“You were with him, Krista. Weren’t you.”
My mother did not emphasize him. In the light-chiding TV-Mom voice “him” was flat as concrete.
Nor was her query a question. It was a statement: an accusation.
“You could have called, at least. If you weren’t going to take the bus. If you’d given a thought to anyone except yourself—and him. You’d have known that—”
That I was worried. Or if not worried, offended.
A mother’s pride is easily hurt, don’t mistake a mother’s love as unconditional.
Breathless from my dash through the rain and indignant, straggly-haired I kicked off my boots, fumbling to spike my jacket on a hook by the door half-hoping it would tear. A spiffy purple faux-silk jacket with cream-colored trim I’d quite liked when it was new not so very long ago but now had come to think looked cheap and too hopeful. I was avoiding confronting my mother for I did not want to have to respond to the accusing look in her eyes, a commingling of relief—for truly she’d been worried about me, not having known where I might be—and mounting anger. In the square-cut window above the kitchen counter, that my father had constructed, as he’d rebuilt much of the kitchen, our reflections appeared close together by a trick of perspective; yet you could not have identified either of us, even which was mother, which daughter. In a voice of deceptive calm my mother said, “Krista, at least look at me. Were you—you were, weren’t you?—with him?”
And now it was him. Now, unmistakably.
A strap of my backpack had become tangled in my feet. I kicked it aside, my face was smarting. Near-inaudibly I murmured Yes for I could not lie to my mother who so knew my mutinous heart, and, when she asked what I’d said, guiltily I repeated, defiantly: “Yes. I was with—Daddy.”
Daddy was a little-girl word. Ben had not uttered Daddy in years.
“And where were you, with ‘Daddy’?”
“Just driving. Nowhere.”
“‘Nowhere.’”
“Along the river. Nowhere special.”
But yes it was special. Because it was just Daddy and me.
Betrayal is the hurtful thing. Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
My mother’s name was Lucille. No one called her “Lucy.” An acute consciousness of her authority—now, the vulnerability of her authority—seemed to grip her, to bedevil her, at such times, increasingly as I grew older; to the most casual of exchanges she brought a mysterious demand that seemed never to be fully satisfied. Since Lucille’s husband—now her former husband—who was my father—had left us for the final time, or—this had never been clear to me, or to Ben—had been made to leave us, this demand had grown ever more insatiable.
“‘Nowhere’ would have to include a stop for drinks, yes? You must be forgetting that part.”
“Well—” I’d disentangled the strap from my feet, I had no reason not to look at my mother standing close beside me. “That country place on route thirty-one, by the Rapids bridge…”
“The County Line. He took you there?”
My mother’s eyes shone like copper coins. For she had me now, she would not readily surrender me.
“Why didn’t you call me, Krista? If you were in a place with a phone? You must have known I’d be waiting for you.”
“I did call, Mom. I tried…”
“No. I was here, I’ve been home since four-fifteen. I would have heard the phone ringing.”
“Mom, when I called the line was busy. Two or three times I tried, the line was busy…”
This was true: I’d tried to call my mother from the County Line. But I’d only tried twice. Both times the busy signal had rung. Then I’d given up, and I’d forgotten.
Now my mother was saying, conceding: maybe she had been on the phone, for just a few minutes. Maybe yes she’d missed my call. “I called Nancy’s number”—Nancy was a classmate of mine who lived in Sparta, at whose house I sometimes stayed overnight—“to see if you were there, or if Nancy knew where you might be. She didn’t.”
“Mom, for Christ’s sake! Why’d you call Nancy.”
“Krista, don’t use profanity in my presence. That’s crude, and that’s vulgar. Your father might say ‘For Christ’s sake’—and a lot worse—but I don’t want to hear such words in my daughter’s mouth.”
