Dead Letters(5)

“Yeah, very average Mexican food.” He grins. “But it’s the only place open between two P.M. and dinner in this one-horse town.”

“The only place with a bar, you mean,” I say, half-teasing.

He smiles again. “I’d forgotten how charmingly…sedate it is ’round these parts.” He signals with his blinker, and we ride silently for a moment or two.

“How is your ‘old friend,’ Dad?” I ask. He blinks. He’s a very good liar, and I can tell he’s considering whether to lie now. But I’m betting he’ll come clean. Because I’m older now. Because my twin sister just died. My twin sister, who, incidentally, inherited this particular talent for deception.

“Sharon, you mean?” he says.

“Who else?”

“She’s okay,” he says uncertainly. We’ve never had a real conversation about the woman he was fucking during my middle school years. I’ve wondered more than once whether he knows that Zelda and I knew. Our mother certainly did.

“That’s good. Do you still see her often?”

“No,” he says softly. “It’s been years.”

“And how is the third wife? Maria?”

“She’s well. The girls are well too. Six and eight, if you can believe that! Scrappy little things. I’ll show you the pictures on my phone, later.” He pauses. “Blaze is a bit of a terror, and Bianca sometimes reminds me of you, when you were little. She’s so…neat.”

“Napa is treating you well, then?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty great! The vineyard’s doing really well—we were in Wine Spectator last month.” I know. We own a vineyard, too, and have had a subscription to Wine Spectator since 1995. Which he knows; he insisted on the subscription, and left us with the bill. “You should come out and visit, while you’re back in the States. I know Maria wants to see you girls.” We both flinch at his use of the present tense, the plural.

“Maybe. I need to get back to Paris kind of soon, though.”

“It’s summer, Little A! Live a bit! You never relax. Your studies can wait until fall, surely.” He nudges me with his elbow, annoyingly.

I nod. “Sort of, I guess. I’m working on my dissertation now, though, so I’m busy. I’m interested in the intersection of Edgar Allan Poe and the OuLiPo movement, their shared emphasis on formal constraint—”

“Poe never struck me as particularly restrained,” Marlon interrupts, presumably thinking himself to be clever.

“Not restraint. Constraint. Specifically, I’m interested in lipograms and pangrams. I’ve got a theory that while both are obviously important for OuLiPo texts, they might appear unconsciously in Poe’s works. So far I’ve focused mainly on alliteration and repetition, and because Poe’s work is explicitly invested in the unconscious—”

“A pangram—that’s like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?” Marlon interjects. I expect he’s trying to impress me.

“That’s the idea. So far I’ve been working on this one essay he wrote on poetry—”

“It sounds really erudite, Little A, and I can’t wait to talk about it more. But can’t you take a break? It’s summer, and, well, your sister…”

I capitulate. Marlon is not remotely interested in what I spend my days thinking about.

“Yeah, well, Zelda was the relaxed one. I was the responsible one.”

“You still are, sweetie,” he says, trying to be comforting.

“No, I’m the only one now.” I suddenly feel like my mother, nastily baiting this man into feeling like shit. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just not…sure…” I trail off, watching in the mirror as Ithaca disappears behind us and we head up the highway on the other side of the lake.

“It’s okay, kiddo. You say whatever you have to.” He pats my knee. I realize that since greeting me, my father hasn’t looked at me once. As if he can’t. I root in my oversized bag for my sunglasses and put them on, in case I start to cry. But as I gaze out at the dazzling spray of too-green leaves and the shimmering water, I suspect that I’m not going to.





2


Brutally jet-lagged and insufficiently buoyed by Bloody Marys, I can’t keep my eyes open and doze off somewhere on the dirt roads that will take us across the narrow, rugged span between the lakes, and I wake up just as we hit the top of the hill overlooking Seneca. The view is spectacular, with the sun about to set on the west side, and my breath catches a little, as it does every single time I make this drive. This is the longest I’ve been away from home: twenty-one months. I glance over at Marlon, and though he has his sunglasses on, I think he’s been crying. Weeping, even. I’m startled and distressed by this—his charming, fun-loving fa?ade so rarely cracks, and when it does, I feel as though my world is being unmade. Maybe Marlon knows this, because as he sees me waking up, he instantly transforms, flashing me one of his brilliant, toothy smiles. I know that he loved living here, loved our subpar vineyard. Even loved my mother and us girls. But his love for us is tempered by years of discord and cruelty, whereas the love he feels for this modest patch of ground is unadulterated. I smile back at him, because in spite of myself, I’ve missed it too.