A father's heart

Literary Review, Spring, 1995 by Ellen Cooney

Getting back from walking her dog, Fergus, a German shepherd, near the pond, Patty sees from the end of the road that her father is here. Fergus pricks up and runs ahead; the pond water that had sleeked back his fur sprays out all around him in small, sun-lit beads. Patty lives out here with Brian Smolley. They haven't been together very long, and it's still touch and go with them. If Brian didn't look so much younger than he is--twenty-six, which is eleven years younger than Patty--and if he weren't so blond, and if his beard didn't look so, well, experimental, Patty might feel a little less embarrassed about the way they appear as a couple. She never thinks it's funny when the people she works with look up from their desks and say, "Are you and your boyfriend going out tonight? Is it prom night?"

Brian's a cabinet maker. Patty works at a bank in an office building near the mall, where she's supervisor of the check-clearing department. Brian used to work for a franchise of Mr. Fix-It, but now he's taken over Patty's garage. He had a telephone put in. For the first few weeks of this arrangement, Patty called him from her office every two hours or so, but now she's cut back to just a few times a day. It's finally beginning to seem to Patty that the curse against happiness which had stricken her family might be lifting. A deal she has with Brian goes like this: Patty stopped saying, when she called him, "Are you going to stay with me?" And Brian stopped rubbing it in that the way he had met her was by saving her life.

They met at a bar called Davenport's, late on a Friday night. Patty was sitting at a table with some people from the bank. They always went over to Davenport's after work, and they always said, "It's just for the Happy Hour," but the place would be closing and there they'd still be. They never pretended that this was a great way to live their lives, but it felt safe to let the weekends float by, in a slow undulation from beers to shots of tequila, waiting for something to happen, like something might. That night, they were trying to decide if the ash tray on their table, which someone had wiped with a tissue, was clean enough to put into it the ten small bags of peanuts someone had bought. The peanuts were dinner. Brian was near the jukebox, just standing there looking too young. "You people are grossing me out," he had said, and walked away. Then Patty hadn't been hungry anymore--at least, not for peanuts.

A little while later, imagining herself as light as a bubble, she got into someone's car to be driven home. She'd leaned against the car door, which wasn't shut tight; when it opened, she tumbled out backward, head first. It wasn't immediately clear to the person who was driving that this was happening, and the car kept going for a while, with Patty hanging there. Her hair had grazed the ground; she had found herself looking upside down at Brian Smolley. He was standing in the parking lot with a bottle of beer in his hand. His mouth was where his eyes should have been, all blond and hairy. He looked good against the sky--the gray sky of late March, it had been, with too many clouds for real darkness. That's where Patty had felt she would fall to. Then Brian was catapulted into motion, spinning and waving and crying out. Things were whirling and fuzzy; things were in pieces and very blurred, but Patty remembers what it had felt like to understand, as she fell from the car, that her direction would have to be down, not up, and that someone who might have cared what happened to her was running toward her.

When Brian helped her to her feet, Patty acted as if falling out of cars was something she regularly did, like a hobby, but this was what she was doing: suddenly sober, she stood next to Brian Smolley, a new person, with the feel beside her of his arm and elbow and shoulder. For a minute they stood there in a casual way, like two people waiting for a bus. Maybe, Patty had thought, this is the first thing to do when you meet someone you'll perhaps fall in love with--get the hang of where you come up to. "Patty, Patty, get back in," her friends in the car were saying. But Brian had taken her home, and that was that. Patty discovered later that when the driver of the car saw he'd lost her, he'd reversed, and had almost run her and Brian over. There'd been scrapes on her hands and forehead, but not anything she wouldn't get over.

"Don't feed my dog, he's on a diet," Patty calls to her father across the yard. But Fergus, the traitor, is already leaping toward Bill Murcher's pickup truck to see what's in it for him. Brian is on the porch steps. Patty knows that he's trying to signal something, but they haven't worked out yet how to talk to each other in secret code, across distances. All he's wearing is a pair of cut-off jeans. His chest is very white; it's almost hairless. It's seven-thirty in the morning, in July.

"I brought chew bones from the store," Patty's dad shouts. He has his work clothes on, with the familiar brown jacket that says, in yellow embroidery, "Murcher's Discount Lumber." From the back of the truck he takes out treats: chew bones in the shapes of a taco, a red steak, and a shoe. Now Patty won't see Fergus again until night; he runs off with his prizes and forgets that she exists.