Free Martin and John by Dale Peck Page A

the lid cup and the inner plug, and filled the cup with flat pop. Then we sat at the table for a few minutes, each of us drinking and refilling our cups, me with just Coke, she with Coke and the last of the rum. “So,” she said finally. “It’s over.” I nodded my head; I knew that. “Okay?” she asked me. What did she mean, okay? Was it okay with me that my father was dead? Was I okay? “He’s dead,” I said. “Yeah, he’s dead,” she said, and started crying. “Oh, my baby,” she said through her tears, and I didn’t know if she meant me or him. She came over andsqueezed herself in the chair with me, wrapped both arms around my shoulders, and shook me with her sobs. Then I started crying too and soon the tears rolled off my nose and cheeks and splashed in the forgotten cup I half held in my lap.
    We’d been expecting his death for a while but still we cried a lot. Too much, perhaps: for two or three days we didn’t stop. We were new there, and we had no relatives within a thousand miles, nor any close friends in town. With no one to share our grief and measure it out, we expended it in one great, incomplete burst of tears, and it seemed we stopped feeling when we couldn’t cry anymore. Later, she’d sometimes ask me to be with her until she fell asleep. “Come stay with me,” she’d say, always waiting until I’d gotten ready for bed. I’d just go to the door at first and stand there to see if perhaps she’d already passed out. There was always a glass beside her bed; on bad nights there were the rum and Coke bottles as well. “Come right here,” she’d say if she was still awake, and pat the side of her bed. I would go over and kneel beside her, facing the picture of my father on her bed table. In the winter I’d be in my pajamas, in the summer just a T-shirt and underwear. I can still taste the toothpaste, feel my face tingling from the washcloth, see in the glass protecting my father’s picture my own hair, damp and combed straight back. The long ends tickled my shoulders and dripped water down my back. My mother would put one hand on my father’s empty space beside her, the other on my head, and leave them there except for when she needed a drink. Then her hand kind of slid offmy head to the table and grabbed the glass. At some point she usually knocked over my father’s picture, and during the course of a night, each time her hand returned to my head it fell a little harder: a tap, a thump, a slap, her hand scattering the strands like a wild rake through grass, until, late at night, she would miss completely, and then I knew she was almost asleep. Quietly I would stand my father’s picture up and smooth my hair, using the glass as a mirror.
    In the distance, somewhere in the depths of the house, a fan belt would kick in and squeak arrhythmically, and dry air would wheeze from floor vents. When my mother’s breathing came in time with the fan’s gasps I went to my own bedroom, though once I moved my father’s picture to his bed table so my mother wouldn’t knock it over again. On the day my stepfather and I slept together it was the clanking of the window air conditioner that signaled the presence of the house. At the noise, my stepfather eased out from me and dressed. As he left he turned to me and said, “I know I can trust you to keep this a secret.” Then he pulled the door softly closed behind him, like a lover or a thief. I was thirteen then.
    MY MOTHER BROUGHT him home from a bar one night; what I thought I’d heard was confirmed when, in the morning, I went to awaken her for a telephone call. I opened her door quietly and saw her curled on the bed without clothes or sheets, her head at a lopsided angle on the naked sternum ofa man I’d never seen, a man with a handsome body and a face that, in repose, looked sad. A breeze blew through the half-open slats of the Venetian blinds and moved her hair. I looked at her face: it was red and puffy, but underneath that, content.