was gamblin’. Then they come back. I don’t know if they still run those boats. Your mother say it was the first time she ever eat steak.”
Fat Charlie tried to imagine what his parents had been like before he was born.
“He always was a good-looking man,” mused Mrs. Higgler, as if she were reading his mind. “All the way to the end. He had a smile that could make a girl squeeze her toes. And he was always such a very fine dresser. All the ladies loved him.”
Fat Charlie knew the answer before he asked the question. “Did you—?”
“What kind of a question is that to be asking a respectable widow-woman?” She sipped her coffee. Fat Charlie waited for the answer. She said, “I kissed him. Long, long time ago, before he ever met your mother. He was a fine, fine kisser. I hoped that he’d call, take me dancing again, instead he vanish. He was gone for what, a year? Two years? And by the time he come back, I was married to Mr. Higgler, and he’s bringing back your mother. Is out on the islands he meet her.”
“Were you upset?”
“I was a married woman.” Another sip of coffee. “And you couldn’t hate him. Couldn’t even be properly angry with him. And the way he look at her—damn, if he did ever look at me like that I could have died happy. You know, at their wedding, is me was your mother’s matron of honor?”
“I didn’t know.”
The air-conditioning unit was starting to bellow out cold air. It still smelled like a wet sheepdog.
He asked, “Do you think they were happy?”
“In the beginning.” She hefted her huge thermal mug, seemed about to take a sip of coffee and then changed her mind. “In the beginning. But not even she could keep his attention for very long. He had so much to do. He was very busy, your father.”
Fat Charlie tried to work out if Mrs. Higgler was joking or not. He couldn’t tell. She didn’t smile, though.
“So much to do? Like what? Fish off bridges? Play dominoes on the porch? Await the inevitable invention of karaoke? He wasn’t busy. I don’t think he ever did a day’s work in all the time I knew him.”
“You shouldn’t say that about your father!”
“Well, it’s true. He was crap. A rotten husband and a rotten father.”
“Of course he was!” said Mrs Higgler, fiercely, “But you can’t judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god.”
“A god among men?”
“No. Just a god.” She said it without any kind of emphasis, as flatly and as normally as she might have said “he was diabetic” or simply “he was black.”
Fat Charlie wanted to make a joke of it, but there was that look in Mrs. Higgler’s eyes, and suddenly he couldn’t think of anything funny to say. So he said, softly, “He wasn’t a god. Gods are special. Mythical. They do miracles and things.”
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Higgler. “We wouldn’t have told you while he was alive, but now he is gone, there can’t be any harm in it.”
“He was not a god. He was my dad.”
“You can be both,” she said. “It happens.”
It was like arguing with a crazy person, thought Fat Charlie. He realized that he should just shut up, but his mouth kept going. Right now his mouth was saying, “Look. If my dad was a god, he would have had godlike powers.”
“He did. Never did a lot with them, mind you. But he was old. Anyway, how do you think he got away with not working? Whenever he needed money, he’d play the lottery, or go down to Hallendale and bet on the dogs or the horses. Never win enough to attract attention. Just enough to get by.”
Fat Charlie had never won anything in his whole life. Nothing whatsoever. In the various office sweepstakes he had taken part in, he was only able to rely on his horse never making it out of the starting gate, or his team being relegated to some hitherto unheard-of division somewhere in the elephants’ graveyard of organized sport. It rankled.
“If my dad was a god—something which I do not for one moment concede in any way, I should add—then why aren’t
“Obviously.”
“Well then, why can’t I bet on winning horses or do magic or miracles or things?”
She sniffed. “Your brother got all that god stuff.”
Fat Charlie found that he was smiling. He breathed out. It was a joke after all, then.
“Ah. You know, Mrs. Higgler, I don’t actually have a brother.”
“Of course you do. That’s you and him, in the photograph.”
Although he knew what was in it, Fat Charlie glanced over at the photograph. She was mad all right. Absolutely barking. “Mrs. Higgler,” he said, as gently as possible. “That’s me. Just me when I was a kid. It’s a mirrored door. I’m standing next to it. It’s me, and my reflection.”
“It is you, and it is also your brother.”
“I never had a brother.”
“Sure you did. I don’t miss him. You were always the good one, you know. He was a handful when he was here.” And before Fat Charlie could say anything else she added, “He went away, when you are just a little boy.”
Fat Charlie leaned over. He put his big hand on Mrs. Higgler’s bony hand, the one that wasn’t holding the coffee mug. “It’s not true,” he said.
“Louella Dunwiddy made him go,” she said. “He was scared of her. But he still came back, from time to time. He could be charming when he wanted to be.” She finished her coffee.
“I always wanted a brother,” said Fat Charlie. “Somebody to play with.”
Mrs. Higgler got up. “This place isn’t going to clean itself up,” she said. “I’ve got garbage bags in the car. I figure we’ll need a lot of garbage bags.”
“Yes,” said Fat Charlie.
He stayed in a motel that night. In the morning, he and Mrs. Higgler met, back at his father’s house, and they put garbage into big black garbage bags. They assembled bags of objects to be donated to Goodwill. They also filled a box with things Fat Charlie wanted to hold on to for sentimental reasons, mostly photographs from his childhood and before he was born.
There was an old trunk, like a small pirate’s treasure chest, filled with documents and old papers. Fat Charlie sat on the floor going through them. Mrs. Higgler came in from the bedroom with another black garbage bag filled with moth-eaten clothes.
“It’s your brother give him that trunk,” said Mrs. Higgler, out of the blue. It was the first time she had mentioned any of her fantasies of the previous night.
“I wish I did have a brother,” said Fat Charlie, and he did not realize he had said it aloud until Mrs. Higgler said, “I already told you. You
“So,” he said. “Where would I find this mythical brother of mine?” Later, he would wonder why he had asked her this. Was he humoring her? Teasing her? Was it just that he had to say something to fill the void? Whatever the reason, he said it. And she was chewing her lower lip, and nodding.
“You got to know. It’s your heritage. It’s your bloodline.” She walked over to him and crooked her finger. Fat Charlie bent down. The old woman’s lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “—
“What?”
“I say,” she said, in her normal voice, “if you need him, just tell a spider. He’ll come running.”
“Tell a spider?”
“That’s what I said. You think I just talkin’ for my health? Exercisin’ my lungs? You never hear of talkin’ to the bees? When I was a girl in Saint Andrews, before my folks came here, you would go tell the bees all your good news. Well, this is just like that. Talk to spider. It was how I used to send messages to your father, when he would vanish off.”
“—right.”
“Don’t you say ‘right’ like that.”
