Free Martin and John by Dale Peck Page B

She lay on my father’s side of the bed, and that picture, an image of a very young man rugged in fishing gear, no more than twenty, and smiling victoriously at his catch, shone over her shoulder. The stranger slept soundly, his hand interposed—but only slightly—between my mother’s shoulder and my father’s smile, and his penis lay harmlessly like a small white fish a few inches from my mother’s mouth. I let them both sleep, unable to break the fragile harmony of the scene: the odor of sex, new to me, mingling with spring; my father and the man lying side by side with my mother; her own, obvious security in their combined presence.
    Back in the living room I hung up the phone without taking a message. I turned on the TV and stared through it. My stomach seemed filled with liquid, and as I sat there it boiled out of my guts and into my veins, and my skin turned red with the angry heat of its passage. I felt betrayed, and suddenly my father’s picture on the bedside table flashed in my mind. But my mother’s stranger was, almost immediately, kind to me. He came in the living room around noon and acknowledged to me what he’d done with a silent shrug of his shoulders. It was a mature shrug, the kind one adult gives to another, and, as a child, I was flattered. The shrug wrecked my resolve, which had risen with the heat of the day: I’d wanted to assault mymother—and him—with my knowledge of their hideous infidelity to my father’s memory, but my anger, sourceless from the beginning, retreated into the blazing pit from which it had sprung. His shrug simply said, It happened. There was an apology there if I wanted it, but it was superfluous. Then my glare softened, became a stare, and I found my eyes wandering his body, which was covered now by a loose pair of jeans. “I’m Martin,” he said then. I opened my mouth to tell him my name, but the word flew from my tongue before I could voice it. I said, “Did my mother tell you who I was?” He said, “Yes.” “Good,” I said, for if she’d told him my name, then she must have told him she had a child in the first place. And if there was a child, he must have realized, there would be a father as well, and I believed that my mother had explained what had happened to him. So this man, Martin, knew everything, yet still he’d come. I don’t know why I thought this, nor why I took comfort in it, but secure in that knowledge—unaware that none of it was true—I turned back to the television. Martin went in the kitchen.
    Later he slipped back in the bedroom with the breakfast I’d heard him making. He took time to stop and tell me there were eggs and bacon on the stove, and plenty of coffee. “Thank you,” I made sure I said, pleased he’d considered me mature enough to drink coffee. I ate all the food he’d cooked, though I’d already had both breakfast and lunch, and I drank two cups of coffee, though it raised the gall in my throat. When I finished eating I put on the long apron that hung inthe cupboard and started washing dishes. The dishwashing apron, my father had called it, because it was waterproof, and from a long time before I remembered laughing at him encased in its yellow ruffles. After a few minutes Martin entered the kitchen behind me and tousled my hair. His fingers were still greasy from the bacon and I could feel his fingerprints on my scalp after he took his hand away. “Thanks,” he said. He grabbed a towel and dried the dishes that I washed and handed to him. I started to explain where everything went, sensing he would need to know this for the future, but he interrupted me. “I know,” he said. “I found it all before I cooked.” “Right,” I said, and turned back to the sink. Martin worked beside me and behind me, and I took as long as I could with the dishes but said nothing more to him, thinking anything that could come out of my mouth would sound childish. When I finished I helped him put away the last of the dishes,