Cherry Read Free Page A

shiny black shoes. Six in the morning: all dressed and no bar to go to. He is not smoking. Not smoking for him is a form of pouting. He’ll also turn down food when he’s mad. Say, Y’all go on, I’m not hungry. It’s his way to say that nothing anybody has interests him one sliver.
    When you bend over to hug him, he smells of coffee dosed with whiskey. His mere presence in its dogged absence makes you cry, and the tears fall from your face to his khaki back where they hit and darken the weave. Behind him there’s an entire wall of books that first set the engine of your yearning in motion and over many years of reading and study led to this disapproved-of departure. Next to the wall of books is a painting of the seacoast at High Island that your mother did in the early fifties before you were born.
    Maybe it’s no accident that you have camped at that very spot a hundred nights, sleeping-bagged under Meekham’s Pier, so you could be there when the good waves rolled in with the main tide just before dawn. Maybe that painting of Mother’s kick-started this longing for the sea that your readings of
Moby Dick
only augmented.
    You dab the back of your hand against your eyes so you can better see the wrinkled majesty of your daddy’s profile against the white wall. He’s looking off into the painting like old Ahab scanning for whale, but the corners of his mouth pinch down. And while you know it’s his standard look—nothing personal—the innate distance in it fuels your own diffidence. It’s what keeps you from talking to him overmuch or questioning his whereabouts or offering details of your own. You sense his actual, upcoming geographic distance from you as a keening whine in the base of your skull.
    What you crying about, Pokey? he finally says. (Probably there was tenderness in that voice, but you first heard it as annoyance.) He rootsthrough his pockets for a handkerchief. You just stand there, your face wet. You finally say that you’re gonna miss him.
    Where you going? he asks. The question’s posed with that airy wonder that makes you puzzle over what the whiskey has left unsinged from his head.
    When you say California, he winces at you in disbelief.
    He says, Who told you that? Who told you you could do that? As if anybody has told you much of anything related to your comings and goings for years. You’ve long since stopped slithering in and out of the house through your window screen. You’ve come and gone at all hours, weekends and weeks at a time.
    Suddenly, the threads that tie you to your daddy seem frail as spider’s silk. You fumble for something that will impress on him your earnest competence in planning this trip. The work ethic usually gets him, and in spurts you will work hard. You tell him how much money you’ve saved. You mention the two factory jobs you have lines on—one silk-screening T-shirts, another fiberglassing catamarans. He doesn’t ask you where you’ll stay, so you don’t have to lie about the friends of friends who vaguely agreed to let you park the truck in their driveway. But you lie anyway.
    In your lie, you build a rolling assortment of town houses on the beach. There are boats listing on the bay and sleek polished cars in numbered slots. You don’t even fully believe such a world exists off TV shows, but still you tell your daddy about it. Then you decide it belongs to Beth Ann Guidrey’s uncle. You choose her because your daddy’s especially fond of her, but he never runs into her divorced parents who might disavow the story.
    The TV is on some rerun, but your daddy stares past it. He’s off inside his own head, where he goes to wander—you imagine—some solitary rows of low-growing peanuts or fat watermelons still held to the vine, which rustly world hasn’t existed since 1920, when he was a boy in the fields around the logging camp trying to hide from work in the far, low furrows. You have been wiped from his consciousness in one clean swipe.
    He stares