Replacing Dad. Shelley Fraser Mickle
Replacing
Dad
a novel by
Shelley Fraser Mickle
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
708 Broadway
New York, New York 10003
Copyright 2013 Shelley Fraser Mickle,
All rights reserved.
Design by Susan A. Stirling
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1660-1
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based in part on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or, as in the case of some historical figures and events, are used fictitiously. No reference to the life of any real person, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.
For myself.
—Linda Marsh
For anybody who'll never tell my mother.
—Drew Marsh
Say, my spirit,
How fares the king and's followers?
Confined together . . .
Just as you left them; all prisoners, sir,
In the lime-grove.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest
"When Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."
—a sign in a novelty store, 1991
Acknowledgments
I'd like to express my appreciation to Louis Rubin and Shannon Ravenel for their incomparable insights; my family for their support, especially Blake and Paul, who always keep my lingo up to date; Parker, who supports me in many ways without charging interest; Claudia Sabin and Eleanor Blair, who helped me see as a painter might see; Carol Offen and Virginia Holman for making it all smooth; Virginia Barber, my agent; and last but not least, the fictional spirits of Drew and Linda who gave me their stories with such insistence.
1.
Drew
I remember thinking that the last thing on my mind ought to be my mother. It was my birthday. I was turning fifteen, and she and I were on our way to the Highway Patrol Station to get me my learner’s permit. Now, the thing is, I kept telling myself it was a little nuts for someone like me—fifteen, five foot ten already, and with a few girls already acting like they liked me—to be worrying about my mother. I was wondering what in the hell I could do to get her to just break through where she was. I was sick of her always wearing dark glasses and humming “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and cooking me and Mandy and George brownies every night like she was June Cleaver.
I know about Mrs. Cleaver, because when I was twelve I slipped on my bike in the rain on the main street of Palm Key, and Mr. Tuttle couldn’t stop the Wonder Bread delivery in time. I got to stay in bed at home for a good long time with a broken leg and five cracked ribs, watching all these “Leave It to Beaver” reruns. Of course old June cooked all her brownies in the afternoons ‘cause she didn’t have to work. But I’m not complaining about the brownies—they were out of a mix, guaranteed good, and served warm and gooey like I like them. And I’m not really saying I minded my mother singing “Don’t Worry,Be Happy,” all the time either, even though her voice is not much better than the sound of somebody blowing a flute with a hole in it. It’s just that being around someone who is trying like hell to act like Richard Simmons doing a fat-melting video—when all the time you know that inside, they’ve hit bottom—didn’t fool me.
When you get right down to it, the alternative would have been worse, I guess. But the point is, when someone around you is miserable, even if they do everything in the world to pretend not to be, don’t you know?
And so that’s where I was: living with June Cleaver. And it didn’t fit. It wasn’t my mother. It’d been six months since my father had moved out. He was living with this teacher in the same school whereI went. She taught fifth grade, was my sister Mandy’s teacher. My dad was the principal there—still is—which means he’s lord over everything K through twelve,which also means he’s lord over not much, since no more than a hundred kids go to the Palm Key School.
So my mother and I were heading up the walkway to the Highway Patrol licensing place—Mom in dark glasses, the curve of her shoulders like she had a fifty-pound backpack tied on, and a smile that Carol Burnett couldn’t have come close to. (Saw a lot of Carol reruns, too.)
My mother’s short. Even on my fifteenth birthday, she came up to only about my armpit. And in the face we look a lot alike, which can sound kinda weird for a guy to say he looks like his mother. But we both have this dark skin from some Italian great grandmother who decided to turn up just in us, and both our noses are these same long things that look like we’ve had them sharpened. My mom, though, wears glasses, little wire things. I’ve asked her several times if she’s an old hippie, but all she says is that back when she was in school, everybody was, or at least was sympathetic to the cause: peace and good food and save the Earth and all that. I guess really my mother’s hair’s too curly to have been a good hippie—unless she’d gone for the Afro look—but the glasses she still wears seem to me to make her look a good bit like John Lennon’s lost cousin.
My mother’s an artist—at least when she has time—mainly does watercolors. It’s my father who was the real hippie, my mother says. He was the one who grew a beard and wanted to do something socially important. Teaching school and then rising to principal of Palm Key High and then moving in with the fifthgrade teacher sure seems socially important.
Outside the Highway Patrol Station, my mother stopped and put her hand on my arm, and I could see the June Cleaver look in her eye, twinkling and carrying on like a damn hyper Christmas light. “Don’t worry, Drew, you’ll see, this’ll be a piece of cake.” She touched my arm. (My mother still touched on me quite a lot, even more since Dad had left, like she was afraid any minute I wasn’t going to be there either. I gave up touching on her when I was about twelve, had now just started thinking about how it felt: kissing her, mashing my lips up against her cheek when I was five or six, maybe even most recently at ten. (Now,right off, you can tell I’m not normal.) And I could be walking down the street, or working on my fishing boat motor, or just staring at a shear pin—at least everybody was thinking that’s what I was doing—while inside my head I was wondering if my mother’s cheek was going to be anything like touching Heather Wilson or Mary McVane or any of those other girls who’d been stopping to talk to me when they didn’t have anything better to do. The week before, we’d had this sex conference with the coach in the gym. The girls had gone into one side and us into the other, and the coach had said it was time we learned all about diseases and prevention and stuff. He said recent research showed that a seventeen-year-old boy thought about sex once every nine minutes. When I timed myself over the rest of the day, I found out I had that beat by two minutes already.)
Mom walked up the Highway Patrol steps in front of me, then turned and said it all over again. “Now just don’t worry about a thing. You can take this test as many times as you want to.”
I