Free Cherry by Mary Karr Page B

far off ship.
    “You ever worry Mother’s gonna start drinking again?” I finally said.
    “She doesn’t have to drink, she’s so loaded up on pills.” And it was true that her bedside table was a forest of prescription bottles, some with dates going back to Kennedy. In the distance, Daddy’s truck engine wound down to nothing, but I still clung to the silence for the noise. The air conditioner chugged like bad diesel. In the back bedroom, Mother put on Mozart’s
Requiem.
“Great,” Lecia said. “Dead man music. Lullaby and good-goddamn night.”
    We lay listening to the weaving angelic chorus till it gave way to this deep-throated war march sound—the hounds of hell rising up from some hole in the earth to chase Mr. Mozart’s ass to the grave.
    “Where does Daddy go all the time?” I asked after a while. “I mean, there’s nowhere to go this late. The package store’s closed. The Legion’s closed. You can’t even get a tank of gas.”
    “Who knows?” Lecia said, and I said Mother must. “Mother doesn’t know shit,” Lecia said with certainty. Till right that instant, I’d clung to the notion that Mother somehow colluded with Daddy in not explaining his whereabouts.
    “You ever ask her?” I said, for there was a thread of hope that Lecia had only presumed Mother’s ignorance on this.
    “Hell yeah. She says if he wanted her to know, he’d tell us, and if he didn’t, he’d just lie.” By the time the luminous dials on the clock read midnight, Lecia was breathing deep.
    Daddy was so far off in those days, even when he was there, he was gone. In every room I occupied, he was just passing through. One night that summer, I’d decided to wait up for him. When it got late, I’d fetcheda quilt to wrap around me and a pillow. No sooner did my cheek settle into that softness than sleep had come. In the next instant, I’d felt Daddy scooping me up from my seat into his arms.
    “You smell like Tennessee whiskey,” I said. “Where you been?” He said just making rounds. Cradled against his chest, I felt the cold of his shirt snaps on my cheek. The whole house was dark. Our reflections moved across glistening windowpanes. I asked what time it was, and he said time for my narrow ass to get on to bed. “They’s school tomorrow.” I rolled out of his arms onto the covers with a plop like a meal sack. “You getting long, Pokey,” he said. And when I asked him when I’d get too old for him to carry, he said not long as he could walk.
    Only a week had passed since then, and I was at the same back door, staring out into the same dark after Mother. Hell is repetition, somebody once said, and this backyard never altered. Its orders were dull. Nothing would move but the occasional cockroach unless wind hit the foliage.
    The Siamese shoved her chin against my ankle. I banged the aluminum screen open so she could snake out. The noise must’ve jolted Daddy up, for down the narrow hall where he’d been asleep the bed creaked. “That you, Joe?” he said, by which he meant Mother. There was a wire of joy in his voice that nobody but Mother could get from him. After I said it was just me, he stayed quiet. I stood in the doorway a minute before asking was he awake enough to play some rummy. His silhouette just lay back down. “Get on back to bed, Pokey,” he said. “She’ll roll in directly.”
    On the white pillow, his black hair was a crow’s wing. A pair of headlights swam slow past the windows. I made out his beaked profile, like the calm, farsighted Indian on old nickels. (His mother was from some tribe we never figured out.) There was no crisis so dire that Daddy couldn’t sleep through, particularly if he’d pulled two nights of double overtime at the refinery, as he just had. I came to stand by Mother’s side of the bed. Still he didn’t open his eyes.
    “What if she’s dead?” I said.
    “She’ll stay dead,” he said. “She’ll still be dead come morning.” Strangely enough, this was