Читать книгу Suitcase City - Sterling Watson - Страница 17

TEN

Teach put two plates of waffles topped with fresh strawberries and two glasses of orange juice on a tray and carried them to the breakfast room. Buttery sunlight streamed through the French doors that let onto the back terrace. This was his favorite room on weekend mornings. He walked to the stairs and called, “Time for breakfast, Deanie.” And standing here he felt his heart rise with the remembered joy of mornings when Dean was little and it was Paige calling her down for a meal before driving her to school. The sounds and smells of those mornings flooded over him. The dizzying sweet waft of shampoo from Dean’s hair as she passed through the foyer and hurried toward the breakfast room. The heat of the crown of her head as he briefly rested his hand there. The rubber scuff of Dean’s sneakers on the ocher Spanish tiles. The bounce of her blond ponytail on the blue and green tartan of her Episcopal school jumper.

The radio came on upstairs, a rock station blasting the quiet morning, and over it, Dean’s tired voice called down, “Okay, Dad.”

Back in the kitchen, Teach poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and a glass of milk for Dean and carried these and a pair of scissors out to the breakfast room. He opened the French doors and smelled the hot, fragrant air of the garden. Paige had told him when they’d moved into this sixty-year-old Mediterranean Revival house that she wanted a walled garden like those she had seen in old St. Augustine. She wanted high, stuccoed walls bordered by shade trees. And there must be benches and oyster shell paths and a fountain. A fountain was the heart of a garden, she had said, just as the hearth was the heart of a house. She wanted to stand by the splashing waters of her fountain and look up at the Barcelona balcony letting into the bedroom she shared with her husband.

Teach had built the garden exactly to her specifications, and her only disappointment was a city ordinance limiting the height of the walls. Walking her oyster-shell paths, Paige could see into a neighbor’s window, or glimpse the straw hat that floated along on the head of Angel Morales, the yardman who worked this neighborhood. These things, she had told Teach, harmed the illusion of isolation she wanted in her garden, but the rest of what she felt in it was wondrous. She had planted Spanish bayonet and bird-of-paradise under the Jerusalem thorns along the ivied walls. Terra-cotta jugs of dendrobia hung from low tree branches.

With the scissors, Teach snipped a beautiful yellow and orange bird-of-paradise blossom. Back in the kitchen, he put it in a crystal vase just as Paige would have done and sipped coffee while he waited.

And then Dean stood in the kitchen doorway rubbing her eyes. Her honey-blond hair was matted to her scalp in what she called “bed head.” She wore a long T-shirt and razored jeans and was barefoot. Teach looked at her poor scarred feet. She was sixteen and her feet were forty, calloused and abraded from years of dancing. There was a scud of soap along her jawline and blond wisps framed her blurry blue eyes. Dean’s eyes, people always said, belonged to Teach. The eyes of his hangovers. Had Dean been drinking at Marty Flipper’s party? Better not to ask. Better not to tilt the fragile thing we are now, father and daughter so far from those mornings when a little blond head passed under my hand on its way to a warm winter kitchen.

Teach reached over and gently wiped the soap from her face. “I didn’t think you’d want coffee.”

“I do. With skim and a little sugar.”

And when had she started drinking coffee? Bringing back the cup, watching his daughter sip from it, make first a face of distaste, then of bored approval, Teach saw the spot of blood on the floor beside her chair. Smeared spots of it led across the tile to the chair where Dean sat now trying a sip of orange juice. When she glanced up out of the bleary vagueness that was adolescent morning, Teach had to turn away because his eyes were full of tears.

As he walked to the kitchen, he heard Dean behind him: “Wow, Dad, these waffles look great. You’re really jammin’ in the kitchen this morning. Kinda reminds me of when I was a kid.”

Teach took a copper mixing bowl from a cabinet, poured some medicated hand soap into it, and filled it with warm water. He found a fresh dish towel in a drawer, dried his eyes with it, and turned back to Dean. Her head was bent over the plate of waffles and strawberries. The fork dipped and rose with a mechanical rhythm. Teach walked over and knelt with the bowl and towel at his daughter’s feet.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

Teach lifted the bleeding foot and examined it. Dean tried to pull it away. He held it, his head bent, hearing the fork settle to the plate. “Dad?”

Teach didn’t answer, couldn’t speak now. Not yet. In a minute. He put the bowl under her foot and began to lift warm soapy water to it. He wanted Dean back. Back from that place where adolescent girls went for a while to get away from their parents. He couldn’t look up at his daughter now, couldn’t show her his red eyes, couldn’t say any of the necessary things he carried with him for her and for her lost mother. Well, he would say them later. To say them was the thing he wanted most. Now he would wash this poor bruised foot.

Dean did not resist his hands, but he knew that if he looked up he would see her blushing face, a daughter’s eyes darting around in the improbable fear that someone was watching this. He said, “Deanie, I wish you could dance without hurting yourself so much. Look, this is infected. After I wash it, I’ll have to put iodine on it.”

Dean said, “DADDY, get up, will you? I don’t know what you’re doing down there.” But Teach could hear it, her voice softening. The years slipping away. When she said, “You know, that feels kind of good, actually,” he finally looked up at her.

He wished his eyes were not what they were, red and swollen, but there was nothing he could do about that.

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

“Nothing, honey.” Teach dried her foot and began to wash the other one. It wasn’t bleeding, but it was covered with horned callouses and raw scrapes. The cruelty, he thought, of the things we love.

“Dad, are you okay? Did something happen last night?” Her voice was slow and warm now like the water that dripped from Teach’s hands. The child was little again, putting her world in order. Sighting bodies in the firmament of home. Daddy, are you okay?

It was easy for Teach to say, “I’m okay, Deanie. Nothing happened.” Drying his daughter’s beautiful, skillful, wounded foot, he thought, And I want us both to be okay. This Saturday morning is what I want. He rose and took the bowl of soapy water to the kitchen and said, “Now don’t you move. I’ll be right back with the iodine.”