The Family Tree Read Free Page A

Michael.
    There hadn’t been another baby until Dora was seven—that was Kathleen—but after that it was like Mama finally got the hang of it, and there’d been Margaret, and Mark and Luke and Millicent for Dora to be big sister to. Then when Mama got pregnant with Polly—Polly was number eight—Grandma arrived out of nowhere like a cyclone of gray hair and starched skirts. She spun around, looking here, looking there, then took thirteen-year-old Dora by the hand and said enough was enough, what was Mama trying to do? Set a new record?
    And Mama just smiled that slow way she had and said she didn’t think using anything was nice. That Daddy wouldn’t like it if she used anything.
    “Well, the two of you have been using something! You’ve been using Dora!” said Grandma. “Look at her! She looks like a dishrag! This child deserves a childhood.” And that was it, because Grandma took Dora with her when she went back to her own house in Denver, and it was like going to heaven, even with all the weeding.
    Meantime, back at home in Omaha, everything went from pillar to post, and two years after Jimbo was born Mama died from something perfectly preventable, except they hadn’t bothered to prevent, and then Daddy fell apart, and Grandma asked him what the hell he expected, a medal?
    That’s when the younger kids had come to Grandma’s house, too. Michael was eleven, and Jimbo was only two. And from then on it was Grandma and Grandpa and Dora and the kids, then after Grandpa died, Grandma and Dora and the kids, and finally just Dora and the three left at home. Daddy was never part of the equation.
    “It hurts to say it about my own, but he always has been useless,” said Grandma. “Takes after my dad. Why my mother married that man, I’ll never know. Nothing in his head but maybe this, maybe that. Sit there for half an hour looking at his shoes, wondering which one to put on first! Both my brothers were just like him. I did my best to compensate, Dora, I swear to God. I picked a man with some gumption to him, but it seems I carried the strain, like a curse in the blood. Your daddy showed the tendency by the time he was two. Most kids, they’ll holler, they’ll reach for things, but not your daddy. Too much trouble. He always did what was least trouble. I thought he’d never learn to walk; he couldn’t decide to stand up. And school, Lord, he’d do just what he was told and not a bit more. If the teacher said pick a topic for a paper, he was a goner. The only thing I ever saw him hot and bothered over was your mama, and I guess it was less trouble for him to marry her than to say no to her mama, and God knows without her supporting you all these years, you’d all have starved.”
    She frowned, shaking her head, pinching her lips together.
    “You never had any other kids, Grandma?”
    “Nope. Not after I saw how your daddy had inherited the diddle gene. Diddle here, diddle there, never get anything done. The world’s got enough fool diddlers. Doesn’t need any more.”
    Grandma was right about Daddy. He was ineffectual. Dora would say we need shoes for Michael, he’s got holes all the way through the sole, we have to have lunch money, school says we have to get immunizations; and Daddy would say, sure, have to pick those up, have to get some change, have to plan a visit to the doctor. Then nothing happened. Nobody ever picked up, nobody ever got, nobody ever remembered the plan. They were always running out of diapers, running out of milk, forgetting to pay the gas bill. There were always notes coming home from school—this child doesn’t do his homework, this child needs polio vaccine, this child, this child…
    Daddy and Mama just couldn’t get around to doing anything on purpose. The two of them were like leaves before the wind, just skittering along from bedtime to bedtime until they wore out or there was nowhere else to blow. The diddle gene finally killed Daddy when he went to bed with the gas