Writers & Lovers(44)

Ann sent one condolence letter to me and Caleb and signed it for both of them. My father probably doesn’t know this.

It has been a long time since I’ve seen them. Three years, maybe. They look older, like something is gently tugging them to the floor. I wonder if my father knows how much hair is missing at the back of his head.

Behind them Fabiana seats me a four, so I take their drink order and get away.

‘It’s very fishy,’ I tell Harry in the wait station.

He’s peering at them. ‘She’s a shiny little object, isn’t she?’

‘Why are they here?’ I want to call Caleb, but it’s long distance and I have too many tables. ‘What did he tell them?’

‘Maybe he told them the truth. That you miss your mom. That you need some cash.’

I laugh. ‘They would never be here if he’d told them either of those things.’

I pour my father a cup of coffee and bring it to him. Ann doesn’t drink beverages. She won’t even sip her water. She’ll order the house salad and nibble on the carrot shavings. My father will order the double sirloin cheeseburger, remove the meat from the bun, and soak each patty and hand-cut fry in ketchup. I know this, but I let them tell me their order anyway.

‘Aren’t you going to write that down?’ he says.

‘I got it.’

I feel them watch me with my other tables. At one of them is a Harvard history professor I’ve waited on before. He’s brought his wife and their two granddaughters, and when I set down his enormous sundae he shrinks in his seat and pretends not to be able to reach it with his spoon and I laugh with the little girls. I feel my father’s glare. He used to get so jealous of other men: certain golf pros, Tara’s father, my favorite high school English teacher.

I ran into him in the Madrid airport a few years ago, that teacher, Mr. Tuck. He introduced me to Faulkner, to Caddy and Benjy and Quentin, in ninth grade. I wrote my first short story for him in tenth. We spent an hour and a half together at an airport bar. He was catching a flight to Portugal to visit his son who was studying there. I was moving to Barcelona. I told him I’d gone to grad school in creative writing because of him, that I was writing a novel. He said he’d stopped reading fiction. It wasn’t any good anymore he said. He asked about my father. I didn’t know what he knew. I said he was fine, retired, living in Florida, summers on the Cape. After his third beer he wanted me to know it wasn’t him who turned my father in. He’d heard about it, the spying, he called it, but he wasn’t the rat.

‘Can’t you talk to us a bit?’ Ann says when I bring their food.

‘A little.’ I look around for Marcus. I’m not going to tell them I’m on probation. ‘I’ve got four other tables. I guess they’re okay for now.’

I wait for them to talk if they want to talk. They don’t, so I ask how their summer is going.

‘Good,’ my father says to the center of his rare burger. ‘Very good.’

‘You’d think they’d give you a more colorful uniform,’ Ann says.

‘You like being a waitress?’ my father says. ‘Is that what all those degrees were for?’

‘I do like the pink,’ Ann says, smoothing out the top tablecloth. ‘It’s a pretty shade.’

‘You think you’re making more than Patty Sheehan or Annika S?renstam? Did you know that the median income for a female professional golfer is over a hundred thousand dollars?’

‘Robbie.’

‘Five-time Rolex Junior All-American, AJGA Player of the Year, winner of eleven national—’

‘I was never going to—’

‘Yes, you were,’ he says, beginning to stand up before he realizes where he is. ‘You don’t know anything because you gave up.’ That narrow face, those yellow-green eyes. He looks just the same now, all the extra years shaved off.

‘Robbie,’ Ann says more sharply.

‘You probably couldn’t even par one hole now.’ ‘Maybe not.’

‘You think that’s funny? Funny to waste what you had? End up in a place like this?’

Iris wasn’t really on his side, with its gold-leaf sconces and French doors and mahogany sideboards.

‘Rob,’ Ann says again, signaling something more overtly now. But my father is breathing heavily and shoveling chunks of burger into his mouth.

She sighs and takes my hand. ‘Pretty ring.’

I look down. My mother’s hand. My mother’s ring. She strokes the sapphire on my finger. This is what they’ve come for.

The professor is signaling for the check. I pull my hand out of Ann’s.

‘They want the ring,’ I tell Harry as I run the professor’s card through.

‘Your mother’s ring? That’s cheeky.’ He’s nabbed a duck confit and I get a fork and take a few bites. The tender meat dissolves in my mouth.

I tell Harry about my father and the storage closet and how the athletic director had not wanted to believe me when I told him about the peepholes.

‘Oh Casey.’ He looked around the corner. ‘That slumpy man out there?’

‘Ann has no idea. It was all hushed up. They even threw him a little retirement party with cake.’

I bring my father the check. No coffee refill or dessert menus or squares of chocolate.