Stony River. Tricia Dower
pads and a white linen cloth protected the ski-legged cherry wood table Daddy bought Mother last year for their fifteenth anniversary.
At Tereza’s, Mrs. Dobra had taken two pans right off the stove and set them on the bare wooden table without the slightest concern about scorch marks. “Dig in,” she’d said: to canned corn and stewed tomatoes and hot dog pieces, like chopped up worms, swimming in baked beans. Eight-year-old Allen stuck his hand in a huge bowl of potato chips. No one said grace. The table wasn’t quite big enough for five people. Tereza’s stepfather, Jimmy, straddled the chair between Allen and Linda, his thigh pressing against hers. He was slighter than Daddy but the muscles on his arms stood out more. A construction worker, Tereza had said. They moved whenever he ran out of work.
“What kind of strange stuff?” Linda asked again.
Mother put a thin slice of roast chicken, a small mound of mashed potatoes and a spoonful of green beans on Linda’s plate. A canned peach-half waiting in a small dish on the sideboard would be her dessert. Since Linda had inherited her father’s build and was already overweight at a hundred and forty, she’d have to watch what she ate for the rest of her life. She had her mother’s ash blonde hair, which was lucky because the gray would blend in when she got old and be hardly noticeable. Tereza’s black hair was “a regular rat’s nest,” according to Mother who set Linda’s hair in tidy pin curls every Saturday night.
“Apparently he had a child,” Daddy said, unbuttoning his cuffs. “Possibly two.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Tony had quite a bit to say about that.”
“Really.” Linda recognized the look Mother gave Daddy as a warning. When she was younger, they’d spoken in Pig Latin. Eally-ray.
“What did you do today, Linda?” Daddy asked.
“Hung around with Tereza.”
“Interesting expression, that. Can you be more specific?” To Daddy, slang exposed an indolent mind and profanity a dearth of imagination. A single new word in your vocabulary, he claimed, could help you see the world differently. Each month, Linda memorized the words in Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Daddy might have been impressed if she’d said confabulated, but it wouldn’t have expressed the joy, the shivering bliss, of having a friend who wanted to spend the whole day with you.
“I don’t know. We just talked and stuff.” She didn’t let on she and Tereza had been in eyeshot of Crazy Haggerty’s spooky old house. “How old’s his child? Boy or girl?”
“That’s not open for discussion,” Mother said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t argue with your mother. Did you help around the house?”
“She peeled potatoes and set the table.”
“Good. He had a teenaged daughter and there’s a little boy who might be hers.”
“Roger!”
Dinner at Tereza’s had ended badly, too, after Jimmy asked Linda if she’d ever eaten wild boar and she said no sir, and he said it tasted like polar bear and Tereza made a rude noise and said how would he know and Jimmy asked if Tereza was looking for trouble and Mrs. Dobra rushed in to explain that, after the war, before she and Jimmy met, he had worked in the North. Jimmy said he could tell his own stories. He’d waggled his fork at Tereza and said it was in Thunder Bay, Miss Smartass, that’s in Canada, in case you ain’t learnt that yet, I’m not the dumb fuck you think I am. Nobody spoke after that, just applied themselves to getting the meal over and done with, Linda pretending she hadn’t heard Jimmy’s dearth of imagination.
After dinner, Mother and Daddy sat in the backyard while Linda did the dishes, a chore she rarely objected to because it let her pick at the leftovers. Tonight it also allowed her to eavesdrop through the window over the sink, her ears on full alert to even the rasp of Daddy’s match as he lit his pipe. Their voices were as faint as fly hums, at first, but soon came a buzzing and a hornet-like crossness that was loud enough for Linda to pick out words.
“He should have been shot.”
“No point poking a stick in his dead eye, Betty.”
“Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not. I don’t know enough about it to blame or defend. Neither do you.”
“A teenager with a baby and nobody knew she existed. Isn’t that enough?”
Their voices dropped again and then tapered off. Linda wondered why ‘a teenager with a baby and nobody knew’ meant Crazy Haggerty should have been shot. But Mother said no more. She came in and went up to bed—her modus operandi, as Nancy Drew would have said, when she was peeved. She’d have a headache tomorrow and not come down for breakfast. Linda finished the dishes, thinking about the baffling girl who’d emerged from Crazy Haggerty’s house, the child’s arms around her neck, the sway of her hips as she stepped toward the police car. Something about her had seemed older than teenaged, something that made Linda squirm.
Daddy stayed outside for a while, smoking his pipe. Later, Linda sat on his lap, as she did most nights when they watched TV. His lap never objected to her build.
• • •
“Bill has to clean up some paperwork,” Doris explains as she leads Miranda to a grape-green automobile longer and lower than the police car. “We’ll see him at home later.” She places Miranda’s valise on the back seat. Miranda gets to sit in the front, holding Cian on her lap. His hair smells like Doris.
“I can’t imagine how you must be feeling,” Doris says.
Like a tree drained of its sap. Miranda wants to be in her bed, sleeping this bizarre dream away. Even the air is drowsy.
“If you want to talk, my ears are wide open. I don’t suppose you felt like saying much to those two galoots.” Doris waves at Nolan and Dunn as the cars part ways.
James said every word generates its own force and every action its own unique consequences. She wouldn’t be in Doris’s car if that last morning had gone differently. James built a fire on the stove and set water on to boil as he did each morning. He took the chamber pots out the back door, as usual, Nicholas in his wake. She nursed Cian and bathed him in the sink, mixing cold water from a bucket and hot water from the stove. James returned, kissed Cian’s head and quoted the line from Joyce he always did when he came upon her bathing the lad: Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer.
“See how light it still is and already seven,” Doris says, her unborn babe’s chrysalis nudging the steering wheel. “The longest day of the year. We should eat outside.”
Miranda and James would prepare breakfast together, she stirring the porridge, he slicing the bread. They’d eat in silence, James hunched in his chair, concentrating on his food. Conversation came later in the day over tea, after her lessons or following the evening’s “reading from the gospel,” as James jokingly called it, the gospel being the sometimes tragic Ulster Cycle tales or myths of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who arrived in Ireland in dark clouds that blotted out the sun for three days and nights. Sometimes he read in unfamiliar tongues but she liked his voice in any language. It saturated her mind, crowding out her own muddled thoughts.
“What should we make for dinner?” Doris asks, as if she and Miranda do so every day.
“Colcannon,” Miranda says, surprised at her own spontaneity.
“Aha! The accent I couldn’t quite place,” Doris says, glancing over with a smile. “You must be Irish. Bill loves colcannon. Never heard of it before I met him.”
“Sure I’m not as Irish as James.”
“Your father?”
“Aye.”
“I wouldn’t have the nerve to call my father by his first name.”
“He wanted me to. I’m supposing