Free Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

little. His teeth were perfectly straight and even. Dentures, I remembered my mother telling me once, courtesy of Uncle Sam. “She told me you did,” he said.
    My father fiddled with the spoon. Had I asked earlier in the conversation who Billy Sheehy was or Marge Tierney or Eddie Schmidt or Tony D’Agostino I might have been inclined to inquire here about Eva and her gas station and her four kids. But the chicken salad had walnuts in it that I was thinking I really could have done without and it was easy enough to guess that Eva was someone from the neighborhood, from the company, from my grandfather’s sprawling legacy of immigrants and immigrants’ children. Someone Billy might send place-mat letters to.
    “I did know,” my father said. “I’m sorry to say.”
    And Billy blew some air from between his lips and shook his head and glanced at the cold ceiling above us. Then he winked at me. “When you were christened,” he said, “your father drove us over to the church from your house. Your mother, God rest her soul, stayed at home—women did that in those days, didn’t they”—to my father—“missed out on their own babies’ christenings to stay home and get things ready for the party?”
    “They were supposed to still be in confinement,” my father said, and then, acknowledging the truth: “But they were usually getting things ready for the party.”
    “So your aunt was holding you,” Billy went on, “your mom’s sister Louise, and she and I went on in with the others while your father here parked the car. You were brand-new to that parish, weren’t you, Dennis? To St. Clare’s?”
    I saw my father beginning to grin, anticipating what was to come. “We’d just bought the house the month before.”
    Billy turned back to me. “Well, he must have gotten confused parking, because he took longer than we thought he would, and next thing you know, we’re all standing at the baptismal font, waiting for him. And in he comes, at a run, and when he sees us standing up there with the priest he does a little leap to get to us—I guess he thought we were going ahead without him—and splat, lands right on his face at our feet.”
    My father was grinning now, looking at his lap, shaking his head.
    “I’ve heard this,” I tried to say, but Billy went on.
    “Well, everybody says, Good Lord, and when the priest bends down to help him, your father looks up all red in the face and says, ‘I’m just so loaded.’”
    “With happiness!” my father said now. “I meant to say, I’m just so loaded with happiness …”
    Billy shook his finger at him. “Yeah, but what you said and what everyone heard was ‘I’m so loaded.’” To me again, his eyes suddenly wet with tears, although only my father was laughing. “And just a week later I go into a diner up on Linden Boulevard and there’s the priest who did the baptism—what was his name, Dennis, he was an older man?”
    My father shook his head to show he couldn’t recall. “I should remember,” he said. “He gave me such a talking-to when the christening was over.”
    “Anyway, there he is in this diner and he comes over to me and he asks, ‘How’s that unfortunate brother of yours?’—he thought we were brothers—and I told him, ‘Still full of the
same stuff, I’m afraid.’” And now Billy, too, began to laugh, a deep, quiet but irrepressible laugh, his eyes shining with their unshed tears. “‘Still full of it,’ I said.” He glanced at my father. “Not exactly a lie, you might say. More a matter of interpretation.”
    My father bowed his head again, as if to concede something, but when he looked up his smile showed a shadow being lifted. “All right,” he said, as if he were ready to stand corrected. “All right.” As if he believed he was being forgiven.
     
    We took him on the usual big-home tour through the estates of East Hampton and he seemed to remember every one of them from his single summer here after the war. One