Free Acts of God by Mary Morris Page B

mother said.
    â€œDon’t worry.” He kissed her on the lips. Art shrieked as we pulled away and I put my hand to the glass, gave him a little wave. As our mother held Art back, she gave us a little wave like a windshield wiper, back and forth.
    Once he couldn’t see them in the rearview mirror, our father clicked the radio on high and began to sing along. I hadn’t heard his voice loud and booming like that in almost a year. He knew new songs now. “Pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue, oh Peggy, my Peggy Sue…” Dumb lyrics, but he followed along.
    This year I knew the road. It was old hat, an expression Lily liked to use. Old hat. I anticipated the flatness, the yellow land, the smell of pigs and fertilizer. It was less amusing when Jeb and I had to hold our noses. We were too big for road games. That was old hat as well.
    The flood was less spectacular. No floating cows, no bedroom sets. Jeb didn’t try to fool me that he was going to dive in. Instead he seemed to pay more attention to some giggling girls in shorts by a picnic table. He tried to act cool and pretended he didn’t know me.
    We stayed in a motel but my father had called ahead this time. We had a reservation. When we arrived, the desk clerk said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Winterstone,” even before my father said his name. I missed “acancy.” I wanted to go back to that place where the clerk with the bloodshot eyes who smelled of smoke looked startled when we walked in the door. I wanted to surprise him again.
    But here we were expected. My father had reserved two rooms. Adjoining rooms, they were called. “One for you, Tess. This year you get your own room.” I didn’t want my own room. I didn’t know what to do in it. It had a connecting door and for most of the evening we kept the door open, moving freely between our rooms. My father wanted to read and rest, so Jeb and I watched television in my room. Then my father called Jeb when it was bedtime. My father gave me a hug, a peck on the cheek, then closed the door between our two rooms.
    With the door closed I sat up in the big bed with the scratchy sheets (that was the only thing that was the same). I thought about opening the door, but I didn’t. Almost all night I stared at it. I put my ear to it from time to time so I could hear them breathing on the other side.
    *   *   *
    Every night when he wasn’t on the road, my father came and tucked me in. He sat at the edge of the bed, told me a story, sang me a song. Usually it was the Whiffenpoof song about how we’re poor little lambs who’ve gone astray. I sang it to my kids when they were small. But not long after that trip to the floodplain, when I turned ten, everything changed.
    He stopped walking into my room without knocking, and after a while he just gave me a peck on the cheek before I went to bed. I tried to get used to being alone in my room. I busied myself with rearranging my stuff on the shelves (“It looks like a museum in here,” Lily always said when she came in my room) or trying to read, but basically I was waiting for him to tuck me in. My room had pink wallpaper shaped in squares. If I was tired, lying on my side, the wallpaper seemed to move in strips like film through a projector, like when you’re sitting on the window of a train, watching the world go by.
    I had two beds. I slept in the one near the window and my stuffed animals slept in the other, unless I had a sleepover, and then the stuffed animals got moved to the shelves. Mostly I used the extra bed for my clothes, which I tossed there on a daily basis and didn’t hang up until my mother shouted at me to hang them up, which I did about once a week. There were often big piles of clothes because, God forbid, we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the same thing two days in a row.
    I lay there one night watching the wallpaper move, thinking I’d heard footsteps.