Hearts in Atlantis(119)

He opened the fridge, groped, and brought out the jug of red tea. He drank it without sugar. I have taken it that same way on occasion, and can tell you it tastes like almost nothing at all. My theory is that my dad always went for the red tea because it was the brightest thing in the icebox, and he always knew what it was.

'Soucie girl, wasn't it?'

'Yeah, Dad. Annmarie.'

'All them Soucies have the distemper, Pete. Slammed the door, didn't she?'

I was smiling. I couldn't help it. It was a wonder the glass was still in that poor old door. 'I guess she did.'

'You trade her in for a newer model up there t'the college, did you?'

That was a fairly complicated question. The simple answer - and maybe the truest, in the end - was no I hadn't. That was the answer I gave.

He nodded, set out the biggest glass in the cabinet next to the fridge, and then looked like he was getting ready to pour the tea all over the counter and his own feet, anyway.

'Let me do that for you,' I said. 'Okay?'

He made no reply but stood back and let me pour the tea. I put the three-quarters-full glass into his hands and the jug back in the fridge.

'Is it good, Dad?'

Nothing. He only stood there with the glass in both hands - the way a child holds a glass - drinking in little sips. I waited, decided he wasn't going to reply, and fetched my suitcase out of the corner. I'd thrown my textbooks in on top of my clothes and now took them out.

'Studying on the first night of break,' Dad said, startling me - I'd almost forgotten he was there. 'Gorry.'

'Well, I'm a little behind in a couple of classes. The teachers move a lot faster than the ones in high school.'

'College,' he said. A long pause. 'You're in college.'

It seemed almost to be a question, so I said, 'That's right, Dad.'

He stood there awhile longer, seeming to watch me as I stacked my books and notebooks. Maybe he was watching. Or maybe he was just standing there. You couldn't tell, not for sure. At last he began to shuffle toward the door, neck stretched out, that defensive hand slightly raised, his other hand - the one with the glass of red tea in it - now, curled against his chest. At the door he stopped. Without looking around, he said: 'You're well shut of that Soucie girl. All Soucies has got bad tempers. You can dress em up but you can't take em out. You can do better.'

He went out, holding his glass of tea curled to his chest.

28

Until my brother and his wife showed up from New Gloucester, I actually did study - half caught up on my sociology, and slogged through forty pages of geology, all in three brain-busting hours. By the time I stopped to make coffee, I'd begun to feel faint stirrings of hope. I was behind, disastrously behind, but maybe not quite fatally behind. I felt like an outfielder who has tracked a ball back and back to the left-field wall; he stands there looking up but not giving up, knowing that the ball's going to carry over but also knowing that if he times his leap just right, he can catch it as it does. I could do that.

If, that was, I could stay out of the third-floor lounge in the future. .

At quarter of ten my brother, who arrives nowhere while the sun is still up if he can help it, drove in. His wife of eight months, glamorous in a coat with a real mink collar, was carrying a bread pudding; Dave had a bowl of butter-beans. Only my brother of all people on earth would think of transporting butter-beans across county lines for Thanksgiving purposes. He's a good guy, Dave, my elder by six years and in 1966 an accountant for a small hamburger chain with half a dozen 'shoppes' in Maine and New Hampshire. By 1996 there were eighty 'shoppes' and my brother, along with three partners, owned the company. He's worth three million dollars - on paper, at least - and has had a triple bypass. One bypass for each million, I guess you could say.

Hard on Dave and Katie's heels came Mom from the Ladies' Aid, dusted with flour, exhilarated from good works, and overjoyed to have both of her sons in the house. There was a lot of cheerful babble. Our dad sat in the corner listening to it without adding anything . . . but he was smiling, his odd, big-pupiled eyes going from Dave's face to mine and then back to Dave's. It was actually our voices his eyes were responding to, I suppose. Dave wanted to know where Annmarie was. I said Annmarie and I had decided to cool it for awhile. Dave started to ask if that meant we were-

Before he could finish the question, both his mother and his wife gave him those sharp little female pokes that mean not now, buddy, not now. Looking at Mom's wide eyes, I guessed she would have her own questions for me later on. Probably quite a few of them. Mom wanted information. Moms always do.

Other than being called a f**king jerk by Annmarie and wondering from time to time how Carol Gerber was doing (mostly if she had changed her mind about coming back to school and if she was sharing her Thanksgiving with old Army-bound Sully-John), that was a pretty great holiday. The whole family showed up at one time or another on Thursday or Friday, it seemed, wandering through the house and gnawing on turkey-legs, watching football games on TV and roaring at the big plays, chopping wood for the kitchen stove (by Sunday night Mom had enough stovelengths to heat the house all winter with just the Franklin, if she'd wanted). After supper we ate pie and played Scrabble. Most entertaining of all, Dave and Katie had a huge fight over the house they were planning to buy, and Katie hucked a Tupperware dish of leftovers at my brother. I had taken a few lumps at Dave's hands over the years, and I liked watching that plastic container of squash bounce off the side of his head. Man, that was fun.