Free Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

head.
    “Daddy? What’s a ‘mental note’—”
    “You tell her, Zoe.” Affably Daddy raised his voice, to draw Zoe into the conversation. A few feet away Zoe was preparing sundaes for a family of fretting young children. “What’s a ‘mental note.’”
    This presumed that Zoe had been listening to us from a distance of ten, twelve feet. That, since Eddy Diehl had first entered Honeystone’s, Zoe Kruller had been keenly aware of him and his two young children who took after the mother’s side of the family, it seemed— A gosh-darn pity since Eddy Diehl is the good-looking one and not chubby moon-faced Lucy Bauer.
    Zoe tilted her head to indicate that she was thinking hard.
    “Mental note’ is—a memory. You make a special memory inside your head, to remind yourself of something at a later date. ‘Mental note’ is for the future, to refer back to now. ”
    Zoe spoke in a low mysterious throaty murmur. I had no idea what she and my father were talking about but any succession of words Zoe Kruller spoke no matter how ordinary or banal were freighted with significance like words blazoned on a billboard or in a bright-lit TV commercial.
    Eddy Diehl wore work caps, baseball caps. Always outdoors and often indoors. He’d removed his cap—grungy dark-blue with bronze letters SPARTA CONSTRUCTION, he’d worn for years—to swipe at his hair but he’d quickly replaced it tugging the rim low over his forehead. There was something shy about him, or anyway self-conscious: here was a man who knows he is looked-at by both women and men, and wants to be looked-at, yet on his own terms exclusively.
    At work—at Sparta Construction, Inc.—Daddy wore white shirts: short-sleeved in summer, long-sleeved in winter. These shirts my mother ironed, for Daddy insisted upon white cotton shirts, not wash-and-wear. Daddy wore neatly pressed trousers on the job, sport coats or jackets in cold weather, never an overcoat. You would never see a carpenter—anyman who works with his hands—wearing an overcoat on the job. Summers, away from work Daddy wore T-shirts and khaki pants likely to be rumpled and stained, running shoes on his size-twelve feet.
    It never ceased to amaze me, Daddy was so big. Daddy loomed above me, a tall muscled man with broad shoulders, long arms and powerful wrists. In spite of his bad knee (as my mother called it, though not in Daddy’s presence) Daddy walked without wincing, or at least visibly wincing; never did he wish to allude to his bad knee, his injury; he flushed with indignation if anyone—usually female relatives of my mother’s—questioned him too pointedly about his health. (So too my father coolly disdained questions from relatives both male and female about how the construction business was going, smiling and shrugging Can’t complain. Holding our own. You?)
    There was something loose and impulsive in my father’s movements, a quicksilver excitement hinting almost of threat except he was teasing, smiling—wasn’t he? Don’t come too close! Don’t mistake my seeming friendly for my being your friend.
    On my father’s tanned arms thick hairs grew in bristling swirls and eddies, dark-rust-red shading to black, springy and intransigent as wires to the touch. As a little girl I’d been intimidated by Daddy’s muscled arms covered in hair and the hint of a dark wiry animal pelt covering his chest, parts of his back, beneath his white T-shirt, springing into view at his throat. Seeing the look in my face Daddy laughed: “Don’t worry, Puss. Turning into a mean hairy ape won’t happen to you .”
    This was Daddy joking. I like to remember Daddy joking. It is important to remember that men like my father—so very American, small-city-coming-of-age-in-the-Vietnam War-era—were given to joking, teasing, what they called kidding around, there was nothing more wonderful than a man like Eddy Diehl in this mood, maybe he’s had a few beers, maybe he’s with his buddies, guys like himself who