Just Like Home(48)

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Vera sits on a towel for the drive home, the dead trout on her lap. There’s a bucket in the footwell on her side. The bucket has a mallet and a cordless drill in it, and a few metal spiles rattling around from when her father goes sugaring.

She stares out the window, chewing on her lower lip. Brandon would say it’s too late in the year to go sugaring.

She can’t stop thinking about what her father has told her. In her mind, she’s going over all the men she knows—her Phys Ed teacher who has a weird fixation on the marines, and Brandon’s dad, and the policemen who came to the house that time, and all the rest.

Are they corrupted? Are they unclean? Why don’t they fix themselves, like her father does? And if he’s fixed himself, shouldn’t that mean it’s impossible for him to lie the way Brandon said he lies? Should she ask about it?

When they pull into the driveway at home, Vera’s father doesn’t get out of the car right away. He drums his fingers against the steering wheel and smiles over at Vera. “Now,” he says, “I know I gave you a lot of new stuff to think about. But I think it’s best if that stays between us, don’t you?” When Vera doesn’t answer right away, he winks at her again. “Your mom doesn’t need to find out what you did with Brandon. I know Daphne, and I can tell you for sure that if she found out, she’d be so worried about you getting his rot on you that she’d wind up mad for no reason. So I won’t tell if you don’t tell.”

Vera nods, breathing an inward sigh of relief. She didn’t want to have to reveal to her mother that she’d spilled her secret about Brandon. It’s also a relief that she and her father have a secret now, instead of she and her mother having a secret. This is familiar. But it feels like she can ask her father things now, things she’s never been able to ask before. She decides to risk it. “I won’t tell. But can I ask something?”

“Of course.”

She can barely get the words out. Her voice trembles when she asks the thing she’s wondered her whole life. “Why do you let Mom be so mean to you?”

Francis hesitates before answering. “Well, Vera. That’s just how it is sometimes, between a husband and a wife. Your mother needs to help me remember how to be good. And if that hurts sometimes, I figure my patience is the least I owe her. Your mother…” His voice breaks the way Brandon’s does sometimes lately. “She was the first person who ever loved me. And then you came along,” he adds, resting a gentle hand on the back of her head. “And now there’s two people who love me, and if I get to be that lucky, I can put up with a little meanness sometimes. You know?”

Vera’s not sure if she understands, but her father’s eyes are shining with tears and she doesn’t know what she’ll do if he cries, so she nods. “Yeah. And, hey, Dad?”

“You don’t have to say ‘hey,’ Vee, I’m already listening to you.”

Vera flushes with warmth at the way her father’s eyes crinkle up at the edges when he says her nickname. She decides right then and there to forget the question she was going to ask, about the bucket and the drills and the spiles, about the weekends her father spends away harvesting sap that never seems to make it home. She decides to forget about what Brandon said. Her father wouldn’t have an affair. He wouldn’t have another family.

He loves this one too much for that.

So Vera decides to forget what she was going to ask. She decides to trust her father instead. “Thank you for taking me fishing,” she says, smiling down at the trout in her lap. “I had a really good time.”

Her father nods to the fish in her lap. “You did great, Vee. I’m proud of you.” He rests a big hand on top of her head, and the warmth of him seeps down through her hair, and she smiles back at him because he’s proud of her. That’s the only thing she ever really wants.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


Vera is twelve and two-thirds years old. Her bedsheets are dark blue flannel with light blue stripes, and her hair is too short to chew on so she is substituting her lower lip. She grinds that lip between her front teeth meditatively, her breathing slow and shallow, the smell of dust and steel bright in her nose.

She is not supposed to be awake, but she is awake.

She is under the bed in the dark.

She is waiting.

By the time Vera hears the door to the basement ease shut, the clock radio on her nightstand reads 02:30 in bright, burning red letters. The hinges on the basement door are well oiled, but she knows by now how to press her ear to the floor so she can listen for the soft click of the latch, the snag of the lock. She’s learned the difference between her father’s normal heavy daylight footfalls and the soft, liquid ease of his tread when he comes out of the basement in the wee hours of the morning. She can always hear him when she wants to these days.

She rests her cheek against the floor as she waits, feeling the way the wood bows to tenderly cup her face, letting the warmth of her skin blend into the warmth of the house. Her heart is racing, pounding so hard that she can feel the echo of it thumping back at her, a steady tap-tap-tap resonating through the floorboards.

She waits until those footsteps have passed her room and gone up the stairs. She waits another five minutes after that, counting out three hundred mississippis, going deliberately slow because she doesn’t want to risk counting too fast in her excitement.