never known how to water a garden; it had to be mother nature or nobody. He’d water
too long in one spot and drown the plants. In the next row, plants were dying of thirst.
He could never hit a happy medium. But he didn’t talk about it often. He’d lost a son
in April and a garden in August. And if he didn’t want to talk about either one, I guess that was his privilege. It just bugged me that he’d given up talking about everything
else, too. That was taking democracy too fucking far.
‘Hi, daddy,’ I said, standing beside him. I offered him the Rollos I’d bought at
the drugstore. ‘Want one?’
‘Hello, Gordon. No thanks.’ He kept flicking the fine spray over the hopeless
grey earth.
‘Be okay if I camp out in Vern Tessio’s back field tonight with some of the
guys?’
‘What guys?’
‘Vern. Teddy Duchamp. Maybe Chris.’ I expected him to start right in on
Chris–how Chris was bad company, a rotten apple from the bottom of the barrel, a
thief, and an apprentice juvenile delinquent. But he just sighed and said, ‘I suppose it’s okay.’
‘Great!
Thanks!’
I turned to go into the house and check out what was on the boob tube when
he stopped me with: ‘Those are the only people you want to be with, aren’t they,
Gordon?’
I looked back at him, braced for an argument, but there was no argument in
him that morning. It would have been better if there had been, I think. His shoulders
were slumped. His face, pointed towards the dead garden and not towards me, sagged.
There was a certain unnatural sparkle in his eyes that might have been tears.
‘Aw, dad, they’re okay -‘
‘Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.’
‘Vern Tessio isn’t feeble,’ I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.
Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,’ my dad said. ‘And that time he
slept over. When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an hour and a half
to read the funnypages.’
That made me mad, because I didn’t think he was being fair. He was judging
Vern the way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off and on, mostly
going in and out of the house. He was wrong about them. And when he called Chris a
thief I always saw red, because he didn’t know anything about Chris. I wanted to tell
him that, but if I pissed him off he’d keep me home. And he wasn’t really mad anyway, not like he got at the supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud that nobody wanted to
eat. Now he just looked sad and tired out and used. He was sixty three years old, old
enough to be my grandfather.
My mom was fifty-five–no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got
married they tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant and had a
miscarriage. She miscarried two more and the doctor told her she’d never be able to
carry a baby to term. I got all of this stuff, chapter and verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you understand. They wanted me to think I was a special delivery
from God and I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when
my mother was forty-two and starting to grey. I wasn’t appreciating my great good
fortune and I wasn’t appreciating her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.
Five years after the doctor said mom would never have a baby she got
pregnant with Dennis. She carried him for eight months and then he just sort of fell
out, all eight pounds of him–my father used to say that if she had carried Dennis to
term, the kid would have weighed fifteen pounds. The doctor said, Well, sometimes
nature fools us, but he’ll be the only one you’ll ever have. Thank God for him and be
content. Ten years later she got pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term,
the doctor had to use forceps to yank me out. Did you ever hear of such a fucked-up