Free Acts of God by Mary Morris Page A

provide the devotees of Eagger with a night within the walls of their beloved poet’s home. I’d serve them cranberry scones with whipped butter and cream in ceramic jugs and gourmet coffee in the morning, and slip after-dinner mints onto their pillows at night as they sipped cinnamon tea downstairs by the fire.
    And when they left, they would hand me their business cards or write their names in the leather-bound guestbook and tell me to look them up when next I was on the Continent or traveling through the Andes. I’d call it the Eagger House Bed and Breakfast, and I could envision the brochure. A picture taken out at sea, another of the view from the breakfast nook. A perfect place for a monastic rest.
    If my father had been alive, he would have told me that the house was a fairly crazy place to live. I could only insure it for fire and theft. I had flood from above but not from below, which meant if it rained I was okay, but if a river of mud flowed down from the hills, I wasn’t. I’d tried to get an act-of-God rider but my insurance agent, John Martelli, said the house was going to roll off the cliff one day and I’d be left with zilch. There was no premium I could afford for that. I had to say he probably had a point.
    I knew a little about what natural disasters could do because I traveled with my father to the floodplain and saw catastrophe up close. We traversed a town in a canoe. The cornfields were lakes. Cows waded up to their knees in muddy water as if they were the water buffalo of Thailand. A bed, still made, drifted by. A house stood without walls as a river flowing through it carried its pots and pans away. Trophies, photo albums, a wedding dress flowed past us in the debris.
    My father had shaken his head. “Hold on to what’s yours, Squirrel,” he told me that day. “You never know when it will be taken away.”

8
    I was Daddy’s girl. Everyone said it. All their friends. The Rosenmans, the Lauters. Whenever they came over, they said, She’s Daddy’s girl, all right. And I was. I clung to his chair when company was over, and when he let me, until I got too big, I’d sit in his lap. It was a firm, muscular lap with bony knees and I could sit there for hours, just rocking on his knees. When he left on Monday morning, I was always there to wave good-bye. And when he drove back in on Thursday after school, I was always there to greet him. “Where’s my little Squirrel,” he’d call, waving as he pulled in the drive.
    When he got home, he liked to put a record on. He enjoyed old jazz like the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra or show tunes. Once he put on South Pacific. When “Some Enchanted Evening” came on, he tried to get my mother to dance. “Come on, Lily,” he said, waltzing into the kitchen with an invisible woman. “Dance with me.” He caught her in his arms and tried to spin her into the living room, but she batted him away.
    â€œVictor, I’ve got dinner on.” She wiped her hands on her apron. My mother always had a million things to do—clothes to hang up, newspapers to throw out, meals to prepare. “Now let me be.”
    Though my father was used to this, he pretended to pout, then turned to me and made a deep bow. “May I have this dance?” he said. He scooped me up and we waltzed, dipping with each glide, singing, my father gazing with pretend infatuation into my eyes.
    *   *   *
    When the school year ended and summer came, my father took me and Jeb back to the floodplain. I knew he wouldn’t go without me. When Art saw we were leaving, he howled again, but our father told him he still wasn’t old enough. He’d just turned seven. It was too long a drive for a seven-year-old. You had to be ten. “Next year, Squirt,” he said.
    My father rolled down the window to say good-bye. “Now, please call if you’re going to stay away longer,” our