The Returning (9 page)

He picked gingerly at the soiled napkins, tossing them into the tub. He gathered up the plates, the glasses, the flatware, trying to arrange them in such a way that the drinking glasses wouldn’t break. His cheeks and his forehead burned, and a small wave of nausea rippled through his stomach. He remembered the way the
w
key always stuck on the portable typewriter in the infirmary, how mad that used to make him. He sure wouldn’t be mad about it now. No, he sure wouldn’t.

When the table was cleared, he lifted the spray bottle of cleaner from where it hung by the nozzle on his apron string. He sprayed the table down, rubbed it clean with a dishrag.

There, one table done. He wondered how many tables he would bus before he could quit this place and move on.

The lunch hour passed and the early afternoon crawled by with John and Billy repeatedly passing each other as they moved from the tables to the dish window and back again. Billy was all smiles—for his dad, for his uncle Owen, for Maggie, for the customers. Billy smiled even when there was no one to smile at save his own self. John wondered at the boy’s satisfaction and found it enviable.

When he had a spare moment, he watched his son at work, watched how he tackled each table in the same way. First Billy gathered up the trash, then the flatware, the plates, the bowls, the glasses, the coffee cups. The order never varied. When the table was clear, he sprayed the bleach solution in a left-to-right pattern, starting with the upper left corner of the table and working his way to the lower right. He sprayed five streaks of cleaner over each booth, four over each table, since the tables were slightly smaller. Then, starting again in the upper left corner, he rubbed circles over the table with a dishrag in the same left-to-right pattern until the whole thing was clean.

That was Billy for you, John thought. Orderly and determined, like most kids with Down syndrome. He didn’t like to change his routines, and he didn’t like to give up. The trait could be aggravating for him and for everyone around him, but then again, he eventually got the job done, and that was what mattered.

Around four o’clock John was clearing yet another table when Billy showed up at his elbow.

“I’m working up a big hunger, Dad. You too?”

John realized then that he hadn’t had lunch and his stomach was starting to rebel. Billy was allowed to break for his shift meal at five o’clock, John at five-thirty. One free meal every shift, which was just about the only fringe benefit of the job.

“Yeah, I could eat,” John said.

“Try the Philly cheesesteak, Dad. It’s the best.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. With hot peppers.” Billy patted his stomach.

“Okay, sounds good.”

Just as Billy moved on to his own station, a pretty, darkhaired girl about Rebekah’s age waved at John from a nearby booth. He looked at her, turned, and glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at her.

“Hey,” she hollered, “you Billy and Rebekah’s dad?”

Caught already, on the first day. He didn’t want to admit that he was Rebekah’s dad, more for her sake than his own. But he knew he couldn’t lie and expect to get away with it. He moved over to the table where the girl sat across from a young man with a bowl haircut and a face sporting the first bloom of downy whiskers.

“You know my daughter?” John asked, which, as soon as he said it, he knew was stupid. Of course the girl knew his daughter.

“Yeah.” The girl was all smiles. “We go to school together. So you’re back?”

John nodded hesitantly. “Yes, I’m back.”

“Way cool!” the girl exclaimed. “So what was it like?” John felt himself stiffen, felt his throat constrict. He didn’t want to talk about prison with a child he didn’t know. “Well—”

“I always wanted to go to Peru!” the girl said.

John frowned then. His head moved slowly from side to side. “Peru?”

The girl slapped the table excitedly with the palms of both hands. “Rebekah’s dad has been on an archeological dig in Peru,” she said to the boy.

John’s eyes moved slowly across the cluttered table to the boy. The shaggy teen was already staring up at him with admiration in his brown eyes. “Whoa, dude! Like, whatja find?” he asked.

“Well, I—”

“Didja come across any human bones?”

“Well, I—”

Long after he left the restaurant that day, John considered it a gift of fate that Billy, at that very moment, had dropped a too full bin, scattering dishes, flatware, and shards of glass all over the linoleum floor. John rushed to clean it up while Billy, distraught at his own clumsiness, was whisked away by Maggie to Owen’s office, where he spent twenty minutes calming down. John hated to see his son so upset with himself for what was simply an accident, but at the same time he silently thanked the boy for creating a distraction when he needed one.

John could understand Rebekah not wanting to tell other kids her father was in prison, but—Peru? John wasn’t sure he could so much as point to the place on a map.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Every time she woke up
with the throbbing headache, Rebekah tried to convince herself it was worth it. She couldn’t remember even half of what had happened the night before, but she was sure she’d had a good time. Besides, by now she knew how to handle the pain. Pop a couple of ibuprofen, keep your eyes shut, and wait for time to do its trick.

“Beka?”

She reluctantly opened one eye and squinted against a shaft of blinding light. “Yeah?”

“You feeling all right?”

“Yeah.” She shut her eye and hoped her father would go away.

After a moment she realized he was still there. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Of course I’m sure.”

“You’ve been lying here on the glider for the past hour.”

“And your point is?”

“I just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m just resting. Is that against the law?”

“Well, no.”

Idiot
, she thought.
He doesn’t even know a hangover when he sees one. And he, the king of hangovers himself
.

She shifted her position and set the glider in motion, an unfortunate mistake that sent waves of nausea lapping across her stomach. She clenched her jaw against the juices creeping up her throat. That was all she needed right now, to toss the remnants of last night’s partying all over her father’s shoes.

A few deep breaths helped settle the queasiness, but still, thousands of tiny tipsy feet beat out a chorus line across her brain. If only she could remember the fun. If only payback wasn’t expected for something she could hardly remember.

“Beka?”

“What?” She stifled a moan. “Can I ask you something?”

“No.”

She sensed his surprise at her answer. Her one word was an attack he hadn’t expected. She liked that.

He sighed. “Well, I’m going to ask anyway.”

Just shut up and go away
. She fought the temptation to cover her ears with her hands. She tried to think about being in David’s arms, leaning against him as he in turn leaned against a gravestone in the small cemetery behind the church. That was their favorite place to meet late at night—she and David, Lena and Jim. Sometimes a few others, whoever wanted to sit among the stones and down a few bottles. They laughed at the thought of the A.A. meetings held every Wednesday night in the church basement, and made a point of lining up their empty bottles—vodka, rum, beer, whatever—all along the threshold of the back door.
In your face
, the bottles said to all those anonymous drunks trying to stay dry.

Lena had introduced Rebekah to alcohol a couple of years ago, when they were both fourteen. Lena was a good friend. Rebekah knew she was indebted to her. It was the alcohol that melted her shyness so that she could simply be with people. The love of it gave her the courage to climb out her window at night and walk along the dark road to meet David and Lena and Jim for their midnight gatherings.

Her father was still standing over her; she could hear him breathing. He had said something and was waiting for an answer. In an attempt to clear her head, she rubbed a temple. “What?” she asked.

“I said, did you tell your friends I’ve been on an archeological dig in Peru?”

She almost laughed—might have, if the thought of moving that much didn’t send her head spinning. “What was I supposed to tell them? That dear old dad was in the slammer?”

She waited for his anger, but it didn’t come.

“I understand why you did it, Beka,” he responded quietly.

She clenched her jaw again.
Don’t think it’s going to win you any points being nice to me. I’m not buying it
.

“But”—he sniffed and cleared his throat—“don’t you think your friends are going to wonder why an archeologist is working as a busboy?”

She didn’t know what to say. Finally she muttered, “Who cares?”

“Well, I care, and I think you care too. Somehow, word’s going to get out what really happened, and then your friends are going to wonder why you told them I was in Peru.”

Not even David knew where her dad had really been. In the three months they’d been seeing each other, they hadn’t talked about her dad very much. She’d given him the dig-in-Peru story, but he hadn’t seemed very impressed. What seemed to matter most to David was the fact that Rebekah didn’t have a father around to interfere in their lives.

But now her father
was
here, and he was right—David and everyone else would eventually know he’d been serving time. Word got around in a small town like Conesus.

She wondered how David would take it and what it would mean for them. She didn’t want to lose him because of her father. She would have to do something to make sure she didn’t lose him.

“Listen, Beka,” her dad was saying, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not going to change what happened, though, is it?”

“No, nothing’s going to change what happened, but—”

“Then save your apologies for someone who cares.” There, that should do it. That should make him go ballistic. She would enjoy listening to him yell, even if it crushed her brain like a vise. She was tired of being the only angry person around here.

But when he spoke, his voice was tender. “Beka,” he said, “I never meant to hurt you.”

To her surprise she felt an aching in her chest, as if something heavy had suddenly crash-landed there.

Her dad went on, “You were always the special one. You were always special to me.”

Good thing her eyes were shut; her lids could catch the tears. It was the headache, the hangover. Feeling sick always made her weepy.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he said again.

“Well,” she replied, “for not meaning to, you did a pretty good job of it.”

Silence. And then footsteps. And then the squeaking of the screen door as it opened and shut.

Now she could go back to getting rid of the pain. God knew she wished she could get rid of the pain. In her head. In her heart. Everywhere.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

The long-suffering fan
by the open window in the kitchen was no match for the humid heat of summer. Here it was the eighth of June, and it was already—as Billy would put it—“hotter than blazes.” One of the chores made more miserable by the hot weather was washing the dishes, all of which had to be done by hand. Andrea wore rubber gloves to buffer her skin from the steaming water in the sink, but her hands felt sticky inside the gloves, and beads of perspiration gathered on her forehead and trickled down her temples. The hair so recently colored and styled was a stringy mess, held out of her face by two large barrettes.

She chided herself now for spending the money to have her hair done. Selene had given her a discount—but never mind that. The point was, her effort had gone right past John. She had hardly expected to dazzle him, but she had hoped he might say something, whatever it is men say when they’re trying to compliment their wives.
Hey, your hair looks pretty
, or even,
You do something different to your hair?
Anything to tell her he’d noticed.

She patted her face with a damp dish towel, then went back to washing the bowls and plates that had accumulated throughout the day. She didn’t know which bothered her more, the heat of summer or the cold of winter, which here on a lake in upstate New York was a brutal and relentless cold. But when she was in the midst of one, she always longed for the other.

She remembered the rhyme her mother had so often recited:

As a rule, man’s a fool,

When it’s hot, he wants it cool,

When it’s cool, he wants it hot,

He’s always wanting what is not.

That fit her, she figured. Always wanting what was not.