Free Mr. Was by Pete Hautman Page B

when the strangest thing happened.
    He started crying.
    Now, I know that men cry sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but to see
my
father cry, it was like the sky had turned from blue to red-and-green polka dot. I’d never before seen him with so much as a teary eye, and here he was snuffling like a lost child.
    After that, there wasn’t much to say. Of course, Mom said he could stay.
    The next morning they were all lovey-dovey, like nothing bad had ever happened between them. Iwalked into the living room and found them sitting tight together on the sofa, smiling like Romeo and Juliet. It made me feel good, but more than that it made me feel weird. I came right out and said it.
    â€œHanging out with you guys is like being in the Twilight Zone.”
    There was a time when if I said something like that my father would’ve smacked me and my mom would’ve started crying. But it didn’t faze them. Dad laughed, and Mom sort of let her head fall on his shoulder.
    I took my baseball bat and went out to the orchard to hit the wormy apples. I liked the sound they made when splattered by a hard-swung aluminum bat.
    In the mornings, Mom would go to her job at the berry farm, and Dad and I would go to work on Boggs’s End. A house that big, there’s always plenty to do. We replaced cracked windows, unstuck stuck doors, scraped and repainted the veranda, fixed the loose banister at the top of the stairs, put new washers in the leaking bathroom faucet. We went to work outside, too, cutting back the young walnut and ash trees that were invading the orchard, and trimming dead wood off the apple trees. Mom wanted us to put up a clothesline so she could dry the laundry outdoors, so we found some rope in one of the sheds and strung it up between two of the apple trees. As he pulled the rope tight, my dad looked critically at the misshapen fruit weighing down the branches.
    â€œToo late to do anything about them this year, champ. If we haven’t sold the place by spring, we’ll start spraying them. That’s when you have to stop the worms. Next year maybe we can make cider, if we don’t sell this place first.”
    â€œDoes Mom want to sell the house now?” I wasn’t sure which way I wanted him to answer.
    Dad stood with the pruning saw in his hand, staring up into the twisted branches. “I don’t know, Jack. What do you think? It’s going to be a long winter. You want to spend it here?”
    â€œMom likes it.”
    â€œAre you sure? Maybe what she liked was just being away from me while I was drinking. She liked it in Skokie as long as I was on the wagon.”
    These conversations made me uncomfortable.
    â€œI don’t care,” I said. That usually stopped a conversation dead. It worked like a charm. Dad pressed his lips together and went after another limb with his saw.
    We finished the orchard, then cut back the hydrangeas that were taking over the south side of the house. I hacked at the fibrous stems with hedge clippers and tried not to look too hard at the doorshaped patch of mismatched siding.

The Invisible Man
    O ne afternoon I was sitting in the study flipping through some of Skoro’s old copies of
National Geographic
when I looked out the window and saw my mother in the orchard talking to somebody. But there was no one there. She stood holding her basket of wet laundry, shirts and towels hanging from our improvised clothesline, talking to some invisible person, smiling too hard the way she would when meeting someone new. It gave me a hard-to-describe feeling, something like having your body climbed by a thousand ice-cold centipedes. The one-sided conversation didn’t last long—she slowly rotated her head as if she was watching someone walk away, then let go of the laundry basket with one hand and waved. The basket fell. Wet laundry spilled onto the grass.
    That night at dinner, as she was shaking Parmesan cheese over her