He glared at me. “I won’t hiding!”
I just sat there and looked back at him.
“I won’t hiding,” he muttered.
“No? What do you call this?”
He turned back to the dogs without answering, but when next he looked at me, he said, “You don’t go on, you’re gonna be late for the burying.”
I shrugged. “She’ll have lots of other aunts and uncles there.” I let a moment go by. “No father, though.”
“I ain’t—” He broke off with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Oh, hell, Deb’rah. She don’t want me there.”
“You won’t know that for sure unless you go.”
I stood up and walked over to the dog pens. “Show me your hands.”
“Huh?”
“Your hands,” I said.
Puzzled, he held them up. I reached across the fence, took his right hand in mine, turned it over, and traced the scar there with my finger. “How’d you get that?”
“Aw, you know how. Guy in a bar had a knife.”
“And you took it away from him.”
“I was liquored up,” he said dryly. “You telling me to go have a couple of stiff ones?”
He started to pull his hand away, but I held on to it and pointed to another ragged scar at the base of his thumb.
“You weren’t liquored up when Jap Stancil’s bulldog went after Jack.”
He did pull his hand away then.
“You’re not a coward, Andrew, so how come you’re so scared of meeting her?”
“I wouldn’t know what to say after all this time,” he said plaintively. “Besides, she’d probably just spit in my face.”
“Yes,” I conceded. “There is that possibility. So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re not afraid of switchblades or bulldogs, but you are afraid of a little spit, right?”
“Shit, Deb’rah.” Against his will, the barest hint of a smile crossed his lips.
“Daddy’s got soap and water,” I told him. “And if she really does want to spit in your face, well, don’t you think you owe her that much?”
His eyes were anguished. “But what’ll I say to her?”
“How about ‘I’m sorry’? How about ‘I was a stupid kid who didn’t have the brains God gave a monkey’? How about ‘I was wrong. You are my daughter and I’m glad to meet you’?”
“Yeah,” he said with a shaky smile. “I guess any of those would do.”
One nice thing about men—they don’t take forever to get dressed.
While Andrew splashed around in the bathroom, I laid out his suit, shirt, and tie, found fresh underwear, dark socks, and his dress shoes, then got out of his way. He was a little damp around the edges but ready to go exactly twelve minutes after he caved.
Even so, Duck Aldcroft’s funeral car had already arrived with Tally, Arnold, and Val, and Daddy must have been out front to welcome her. Tall and dignified, his hair bright silver in the sunlight, he was escorting her to the front row of chairs as we came down the slope. Arnold and Val both wore sports jackets, shirts, and ties as did the other owner, Ralph Ferlanski, and Dennis Koffer, the show’s patch. Tally looked beautiful in a dark green pantsuit and man-tailored white silk shirt. Some twenty-five or thirty other carnival people arrived in a collection of motley cars and trucks. All were neatly, if more casually, dressed, and they followed the Ameses awkwardly, uncertain of the protocol of a family graveyard. There was a little glitch as Duck’s people tried to get them to take seats under the canopy and they held back. They clearly thought they should be the ones standing and that our family should sit.
While Duck was sorting them out, I took Andrew’s hand and led him to the front row where Tally sat between Daddy and Arnold. She looked up as though in relief at seeing my familiar face, and I gave her a quick hug.
“This is Andrew,” I whispered in her ear, “and he’s scared out of his mind that you’re going to spit in his face.”
Her blue eyes were huge in her drawn face as she looked up at him somberly.
Standing there between the coffin of his grandson and the daughter he’d denied for so long, Andrew suddenly looked as if he’d been hit with a poleax. His face crumpled.
“They didn’t tell me you were so pretty,” he said brokenly. “Oh, Livvie, baby, I’m so sorry. About your boy, about you—I was so dumb back then.”
I don’t know what she’d planned to do or say when she finally met him. What she actually did do was look deep in his eyes, then put out her hand to him and say, “You were seventeen back then.”
Daddy got up and gave Andrew his chair. Duck found him another a few rows back, and I went and stood between Seth and Dwight.
Tally had said they didn’t want a religious ceremony and Duck did the best he could, but it’s hard when you’re so used to Bible Belt rituals. He read Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” and talked about youth’s bright promise cut short. He started to call for prayer, caught himself, and instead suggested that everyone close their
