Once We Had a Country Read Free Page B

up right away, and then there won’t be time for the two of them.
    She gives him a long kiss. When she feels his hesitation, she kisses him again.
    “Brid and Pauline will be here soon—” he says.
    “Exactly,” she replies. “We don’t have much time.”
    He slips a hand under her dress; she reaches for his belt. A shoe comes off, then his glasses. Once his jeans are around his knees, she draws away.
    “What is it?” he asks.
    “Turn the mattress over.” She removes her bra from beneath her dress and tosses it at him. “I’ll be back in a second with sheets.”
    In the camper, she consults her packing list, then finds the bedding in the box assigned to it. When she returns to the bedroom, Fletcher’s lying naked on his stomach across the mattress, the afternoon light filtered by blinds. She spreads a sheet over him like a fisherman casting a net. It billows and parachutes onto him, pushing the air across his skin, making all the little hairs along his arms and legs stand on end before the fabric settles. The blinds move in and out against the window screens.
    Lying beside him afterward, she remembers another time, another shabby house in the early summer sunlight. Eight years old, she enters the living room clothed head to toe in white, her dress wrinkled from the ride home, the knee-high stockings starting to itch and her father across theroom in his easy chair, watching television. Over the carpet she runs to him, the veil scrunched in her hand, torn off as soon as she escaped Gran’s station wagon. Maggie launches herself onto his lap and turns herself around so they can stare at the set together.
    “How’d it go, little girl?” he asks. “Say your lines all right?”
    She nods and kicks off her shoes, then starts to recite the words again under her breath. He lets her go on awhile before shushing her, and they both fall into the rapture of the screen.
    “One day will you come to church with us?” she asks after a time.
    “You know the answer to that.” He sounds pained and says no more. Her father has told her he went to Mass every week when he was a boy so now he doesn’t have to go. That’s how it works, he says. Gran was disapproving when Maggie repeated his words, but now that Maggie has taken Communion, perhaps she too will be given a choice. She imagines having to decide and can’t make up her mind. If it were only up to her she’d stay home, but her father says it’s good that she keeps Gran company, even if he seems sad each Sunday morning when Maggie kisses him goodbye.
    “Get your old man a beer?” he says.
    Without a word, she jumps down and runs for the fridge. Today, as she received Communion, she was made to understand that something had changed forever. It seems this ritual will remain, though, Maggie bringing him beer and changing the channel when he asks. Sometimes she would prefer a book, but her father never reads. He says booksonly tell you about the past; it’s TV that keeps you up to date. Side by side each evening he and Maggie sit before the set, eating their dinners from foil compartments on trays. When they visit Gran next door, she makes wry comments about scurvy and the Children’s Aid, and then Maggie’s father buys apples or grapes that sit on the counter gathering dust until the house grows lousy with fruit flies. There are times when Maggie herself wishes for some kind of change in their routine—a friend to stay over, dinner at a restaurant—but her father appears content, though he has no hobbies and doesn’t travel, hardly leaves the Syracuse city limits. He never complains about clerking at the Public Works Department. It seems he wants nothing beyond the silent hours of Maggie’s company in the living room, and the worst way in which she could betray him would be to ask for more herself. Sitting with him in his easy chair, she puts the veil back on and flips it side to side, watching the television grow clear and shrouded by turns.
    It wasn’t