Only the Rain(21)

Maybe a half hour later I came trudging up the beach toward where Cindy was sitting up now and staring out at the horizon. Every breath felt like broken glass going down my throat. My arms felt like they were going to drop off, and my legs felt like they were filled with cement.

I dropped down beside her and laid out on my back. She said, “There you are. You take a walk down the beach?”

“Long walk,” I said.

“You weren’t looking at all the pretty girls, were you?”

“Not all of them,” I said.

“Well, you better not have worn yourself out,” she told me. “I have plans for you when we get back to our room.”

And that’s exactly how I felt when I got home after work Monday night after making a stop at the storage unit, that same combination of total exhaustion and the dread of an impending duty I was in no mood to undertake. And then all that misery tripled when I went into the kitchen to see Cindy’s father standing there at the kitchen sink, blowing cigarette smoke out the window screen.

“Hey there, Russell,” he said, as if we’d seen each other a few days before and not years ago. He took another long drag from the cigarette, then turned on the tap and flushed the butt down the garbage disposal.

I said, “You don’t put paper down a garbage disposal. It’s not made for that.”

He grinned and said, “You put paper down the toilet, don’t you? And it all ends up in the same place.”

“More important,” I told him, “there’s no smoking in this house.”

“I blew it out the window,” he said.

“There is no smoking. In this house.”

“You’re the king of the castle,” he said. “So how’s everything been going?”

Right then I knew it was a good idea I’d left Pops’ revolver in the saddlebag and hadn’t carried it inside with me. I turned and went into the living room in search of Cindy and the girls.

All three of them were in Cindy’s and my bed. The girls were sitting up against the headboard on either side of Cindy, watching some Nickelodeon show on the little TV on the dresser. Cindy was laying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest, hands tucked into her armpits and her feet crossed at the ankle. She looked at me in a kind of a squint and her mouth never twitched out of its hard, thin line.

The girls said “Hi, Daddy,” but otherwise they were doing their best to mimic their mother.

I came inside and sat on the edge beside Emma. “What’s this?” I asked. “A SpongeBob convention?”

She said, “It’s not SpongeBob, it’s T.U.F.F. Puppy,” and Dani said, “Grandpa’s here.”

“Don’t call him that,” Cindy told her.

I asked the girls a couple of questions about how their day was, then I suggested they go to their own bedroom and decide where they wanted to go out for dinner. “No fast food,” I told them. “You two go decide. Either the buffet at KFC, or pizza and salads at Joe’s.”

“Pizza!” Emma said.

“Go talk it over, okay? You both have to agree. I’ll come see you in a minute or two. Please close the door on your way out.”

The moment the bedroom door was closed, Cindy jerked her head around to look at me and said, “I did not invite him here.”

“I’d never think you did. Not unless you were standing here with a smoking gun in your hand.”

“I wish I had one,” she said.

All I could do was nod. Then, “What brings him here out of the blue all of a sudden?”

“Claims he came to see his grandchildren. What a bunch of bull that is.”

I sat there thinking the same thing I always thought on the other occasions I had seen her father. I never understood how Cindy could be so decisive and even tough when necessary, with me and everybody else, yet so, I don’t know, crumpled up and passive around her father. Early on I had asked her a couple times why she could barely speak to him without gritting her teeth, but the most she’d ever tell me was, “I hate him. I hate the sight of him. He makes me sick to my stomach.”

Of course I had a fairly good idea why a girl would hate her father with that kind of intensity, but I long ago decided to respect her privacy about it. I figure if she wants to tell me anything, she’ll tell me. I don’t have to know every little secret to love her. And I hope she feels the same way about me.

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

And she said, “I want him out of my house.”

I didn’t even pause on my way through the kitchen. “Out back,” I told him.

I stood up against the rail on our little patio deck, looking out into the yard. When your wife hates her father as much as Cindy did, I think it’s natural for her husband to hate him too, even if he’s not sure why. From what I’d heard, a lot of people seemed to like Donnie, claimed he was a friendly, decent guy. All I knew about him was that he appeared to change jobs a lot, and that he struck me as a cross between a used car salesman and a lawyer. He had the same soft way of talking and same greasy smile I’d encountered in men of those professions, though I’d dealt with a lot more used car salesmen than lawyers.

Truth is the only lawyer I knew was a guy who lived down the road from us in the first house on our street. He had a sign out in his yard that said WILLIAM GRAYBILL, ATTORNEY AT LAW. The first time Cindy and I ever came down that street, looking for a house to buy, I had pulled the bike over right at his curb so that Cindy could look at the piece of paper in her jeans pocket that had the address on it. While we were checking the address with the house numbers, he comes walking up beside us.