The pages fluttered as Rusty’s hand dropped to his lap.
She looked at him. He had taken off his reading glasses. Nothing was tapping or clapping or jumping. He was staring out the window, silent, his gaze fixed on the distance.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Headache.”
Her father never complained about real ailments. “Is it about the guy?” Rusty said nothing, so she asked, “Are you mad at me about the guy?”
“Of course not.”
Charlie felt anxious. For all of her bluster, she could not abide disappointing her father. “I’ll get his name tomorrow.”
“Not your job.” Rusty tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket. “Unless you plan to keep seeing him?”
Charlie sensed an odd weight behind his question. “Would it matter?”
Rusty didn’t answer. He was staring out the window again.
She said, “You need to start humming or making stupid jokes or I’m going to take you to the hospital so they can make sure nothing’s wrong with your heart.”
“It’s not my heart I’m worried about.” The statement came across as hokey, absent his usual flourishes. He asked, “What happened between you and Ben?”
Charlie’s foot almost slipped off the gas.
In nine months, Rusty had not asked her this question. She had waited five days to tell him that Ben had left. Charlie was standing in his office doorway. She had planned to relay to her father the fact of Ben leaving, nothing more, which was exactly what she’d done. But then Rusty had nodded curtly, like she was reminding him to get a haircut, and his ensuing silence had brought out a sort of verbal diarrhea that Charlie hadn’t experienced since the ninth grade. Her mouth would not stop moving. She’d told Rusty that she hoped Ben would be home by the weekend. That she hoped he would return her calls, her texts, her voicemails, the note she had left on the windshield of his car.
Finally, probably to shut her up, Rusty had quoted the first stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
“Dad,” Charlie said, but she couldn’t think of anything more to say. An oncoming car’s headlights flashed into her eyes. Charlotte looked in her rear-view mirror, watching the red tail-lights recede. She didn’t want to, but she told Rusty, “It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of things.”
He said, “Maybe the question is, how are you going to fix it?”
She could see now that talking about this was a mistake. “Why do you assume I’m the only one who can fix it?”
“Because Ben would never cheat on you or do anything to purposefully hurt you, so it must be something that you did or are not doing.”
Charlie bit her lip too hard.
“This man you’re seeing—”
“There’s no seeing,” she snapped. “It happened once, and it was the first and only time, and I don’t appreciate—”
“Is it because of the miscarriage?”
Charlie’s breath caught in her chest. “That was three years ago.” And six. And thirteen. “Besides, Ben would never be that cruel.”
“That’s true, Ben would not be cruel.”
She wondered at his comment. Was he implying that Charlie would be?
Rusty sighed. He curled the stack of papers in his hand. His foot tapped the floorboard twice. He said, “You know, I’ve had a long, long time to think about this, and I think what I loved most about your mother was that she was a hard woman to love.”
Charlie felt the sting of the implied comparison.
“Her problem, her only problem, if you ask the man who worshipped her, was that she was too damn smart.” He tapped his foot along with the last three words to add emphasis. “Gamma knew everything, and she could tell you without having to give it a moment’s worth of thinking. Like the square root of three. Just off the top of her head, she’d say … well, hell, I don’t know the answer, but she’d say—”
“One point seven-three.”
“Right, right,” he said. “Or someone would ask, say, what’s the most common bird on earth?”
Charlie sighed. “The chicken.”
“The deadliest thing on earth?”
“Mosquito.”
“Australia’s number one export?”
“Uh … iron ore?” She furrowed her brow. “Dad, where is this going?”
“Let me ask you this: what were my contributions to that little exchange we just had?”
Charlie couldn’t follow. “Dad, I’m too tired for riddles.”
“A visual aid—” He played at the window button, rolling it down a fraction, then up a fraction, then down, then up.
She said, “Okay, your contributions are to annoy me and break my car.”
“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”
“Okay.”
“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
She chewed her lip again.
“We return to our visual aid.” Rusty pressed the window button again, but held it this time. The glass slid all the way down. Then he pressed in the other direction and the window rolled back up. “Nice and easy. Back and forth. Like you’d volley a ball on the tennis court, except this way I don’t have to run around a tennis court to show you.”
Charlie heard him tap his foot along with the car blinker as she took a right onto the farmhouse driveway. “You really should’ve been a marriage counselor.”
“I tried, but for some reason, none of the women would get into the car with me.”
He nudged her with his elbow, until she reluctantly smiled.
He said, “I remember one time your mama said to me—she said, ‘Russell, I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.’”
Charlie felt a weird pang in her heart, because that sounded exactly like the kind of announcement Gamma would make. “Was she happy?”
“I think she was getting there.” He blew out a wheezy breath. “She was inscrutable. She was beautiful. She was—”
“Goat fucker?” The Subaru’s lights showed the broad side of the farmhouse. Someone had spray-painted GOAT FUCKER across the white clapboard in giant letters.
“Funny thing about that,” Rusty said. “Now, the goat, that’s been there a week or two. The fucker just showed up today.” He slapped his knee. “Damn efficient of ’em, don’t you think? I mean, the goat’s already there. No need to pull out the Shakespeare.”