“Well, not exactly. I kicked him out. But that house had been his before I married him. He had lived there when he was married to Sharon and Juli was little. I moved out as quick as I could. It never felt like my house.”
Girl stood over the garbage can peeling a potato with the old rusty peeler. She dropped the potato in the garbage by mistake and reached in quick before Mother noticed.
“It’s okay. We can just rinse it off.” Mother put her hand out for the potato. “Anyway, one night this woman was in front of our house in the middle of the road throwing rocks and screaming at your father. I tried to tell her that he wasn’t there, but she didn’t believe me. She seemed to think he was hiding. So I had to call the police.”
“God, Mother!” Girl handed her another potato.
“Anyway, you should really talk to Dr. B. I bet she’d love to go riding with you.”
Juli had heard that their father slept with all the nurses in the hospital, and even with a sixteen-year-old patient once, but Girl wasn’t going to ask Mother about that. It was too embarrassing. Besides, if it was true, Girl didn’t want to know.
“Someone told me that Father slept with the mother of one of his patients.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Pediatricians aren’t supposed to do that, but I’m sure he did once or twice.”
“Well, they said the woman tried to kill herself. Ended up in the psych ward.” This seemed the most likely reason for his exile in Girl’s mind.
“I never heard that. What did your dad say about it?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
car trip, circa 1985
“My mother didn’t want a boy,” Father said, looking out the front window of his yellow Subaru. It was just the two of them on the two-hour drive from Anchorage, where Father lived, to Seward, where he kept his sailboat. Girl would start eighth grade in the fall.
“My mother already had two girls, Jean and Anne. She said my dad got her drunk and raped her because he wanted another child—he always wanted a boy. When Mother found out I was male she wanted to drown me but my dad wouldn’t let her. Then he went off to war and left me alone with her.”
The sky out the window wasn’t very blue. The road from Anchorage to Seward curved around the end of Cook Inlet; the view out the window was gray-brown silt and boulders; the water had receded before cleaning up its mess. Girl knew she was supposed to appreciate the sparkle of the water and the great expanse of wilderness unsullied by human habitation, but all Girl saw looked cold and bleak.
“Never walk out on that mud,” Father said, “you’ll sink in right up to your waist. Some fool always tries to drive out there every year and gets stuck. Look, there’s a pod of belugas.”
Girl looked out the window, but all she saw were whitecaps on the ocean. No matter how often he pointed, Girl never saw the whales he was so fond of.
“Uh-huh. Pretty,” Girl said, because she had to say something.
“Did I ever tell you about my dog?”
“No.”
“Well, you know where I grew up in Olympia, Washington. The closest kid was five miles away.”
“The boy who lit his model planes on fire and threw them out the window?”
“Right. I didn’t like him very much. He was kind of weird. I was happy it was too far to go over there often. So my best friend was my dog, Pooh!”
“Like Winnie-the-Pooh?” Girl asked.
“Right. And because he was all white and had a big brown spot on his rump.” Father’s eyes sparkled as he looked at Girl. He turned his whole head, ignoring the road like it didn’t need watching. It made Girl crazy but he always did it.
“What kind of dog was he?”
“Terrier-like. Medium size. Wiry hair.”
“Okay.” Girl wound a strand of hair around her finger and loosened it again.
“Anyway, Pooh and I had a wonderful time exploring the woods! We’d mosey along through the woods. World War II had just ended, so I’d pretend we were spies, reconnoitering, going on missions. Chasing rabbits. We’d stay out all day until Mother rang the dinner bell.” Father’s mother had an unusual dinner bell in the dining room. She would hit a descending series of bells and end with a giant gong that resonated throughout the whole house with a deep note that you could feel vibrate in your whole body, like a timpani drum. When Grandma Mary was feeling kind she’d sometimes let Girl ring it, but only once per day. The gong looked like a black iron kettle and she hit it with what looked like a tiny wooden baseball bat, maybe eight inches long.
“What happened to Pooh?”
“He barked a lot, and he woke my father up every morning. Dad said I had to train Pooh not to bark, that if he woke him up one more time he was going to shoot him. But they wouldn’t let him sleep inside, so there wasn’t anything I could do. One morning the dog started barking, and I heard the gun go off from my bed.”
Girl had stayed once in Dad’s old room at Grandma Mary’s. It still had his old bunk bed and model airplanes hung from the ceiling. He had a little brown desk in front of a window that looked out on Puget Sound. From their house you could only see ocean and forest; there wasn’t another house anywhere nearby. It should have been a great place to explore, but Grandma Mary didn’t seem to like kids very much, and Girl didn’t like visiting her. The house seemed to breathe disapproval and discourage laughter. Girl noticed that her father had the smallest room in the house.
“He didn’t really shoot him, though, did he?” No father would do that to their kid, Girl thought. Father passed a car lazily. He always set
