The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“If you want me to apologize, I won’t. I’m not sorry for knowing her.” He gets up to pace and feel for cracks in the walls. He stops by a photograph of Enola in the water, in my mother’s arms. “I took that picture.” He starts in about how it was the end of June when the water gets warm but the jellyfish aren’t out yet. “Paulina didn’t want Enola to get stung, so she made me go in first, just to check. I’m not sorry for knowing you, either.”


“Don’t pretend you’re my father.” I see him wince. “You slept with her.”

“Yes.”

“How long did it go on? How long did you fuck under my father’s nose?”

“Don’t talk about her that way.” A floorboard creaks.

“Was it before I was born? After? After Enola? How long? Months? Years?”

“A while,” he says quietly.

“Am I?” We both know what I mean. Am I his.

“No.”

“Enola?”

“No.”

“Dates,” I say. “I need to know the goddamned dates.” I need to be sure.

“We stopped when Dan wanted kids. We were apart a year before she got pregnant with you. It wasn’t me.” His cheek twitches as if holding back a wince. “It was hard to look at her sometimes, hard enough knowing I was sharing her, but then she wanted his kids.” And not Frank’s. “It tore me up some, but I’d give her anything she wanted. When you were around two we started up again. On and off for about two years. Then she wanted another kid, a little girl. I guess she saw Alice and fell in love. She cut it off, said she was done. We hadn’t been together in a year and a half before Enola.” Here is a new awful part: all the time he wanted my mother, he had his wife, and they had Alice. Quiet, perfect Alice. They threw us together—was it to keep Leah occupied? Were we an intentional distraction? My gut hurts. For me, for her. Frank sits down again and reaches over as if to touch me, but he stops.

“Dates,” I say.

“I don’t have them.” He’s almost shouting. “I didn’t write it down. It’s not something—it’s not the sort of thing I ever thought I’d have to explain to her son,” he says. “You’re his. Hell, you even chew your fingers the way he did. It was never a question. Your mom wouldn’t let it be. No matter how much I wished you were mine sometimes.”

“Stop lying.” I’m up. My ankle shouts, but it fades into the rest of the noise. My teeth hurt. My veins hurt.

“I wouldn’t lie about that. You’re not mine, but I wished you were.”

“Did she know you gave him the money?” He doesn’t answer. “Did she know?”

“Yes,” he says, at length. “It was the one thing I could give her. And it’s gone to shit, Simon—”

“How much did you give him?” He looks at me blankly. “How much did the house cost?” We’d been family, all of us. Frank, who’d shared a boat with my father, gone sailing with the man whose wife he slept with. I’ve eaten at his table. Kissed and loved his daughter.

“Two hundred fifty thousand.”

There is no apology in him, and that, of all things, is most repugnant. “And for how many years? How long were you two together?”

“Five years, on and off,” he says.

Five years; 1,826 days. “If you look at it logically, that’s fifty thousand a year to sleep with my mother. How many times a year do you figure?” His jaw clenches and his Adam’s apple bobs. Still, no remorse. “Once a month would be around four thousand and change. Once a week would make it roughly a thousand. So, my mother was worth a thousand dollars a week to you. That’s like keeping a family on the side, just for fucking.”

His fist slams into the wall and an apple-sized hole devours it. He pulls his hand out, cradles his fingers, then examines the wall. He touches all around it, murmuring, apologizing—to the house, to my mother.

“Did my dad know?”

“We didn’t tell him.”

It’s answer enough. “He knew.”

“I used to watch her swim in the mornings. Even after,” he says. He doesn’t look at me. Can’t. “That’s when your dad figured it out. It was a little more than a year after Enola was born. He was coming down the steps and I was going up. He passed me and asked if Leah knew. I said there’s nothing to know. There wasn’t by then, hadn’t been for a good couple of years. Next thing Paulina says he’s looking to move you all upstate.”

Away from anywhere that might be a good place for a man who works on boats.

“I loved her,” Frank says, softly. “Every day even after I knew it couldn’t continue, I loved Paulina. We stopped because I loved her, him too. Then she was gone.” He pulls his hat from his head, crumpling it in his hands. “If you stay out of the house for a while, I can fix it up. I’ll get Pete and we’ll start working, but it isn’t safe here now. You could get hurt. I loved you, too, you and Enola. It would have killed me if he took you all away.”

Picture life over again. Picture the things I sometimes wished. Frank as my father. The family across the street would be strangers, people who occasionally got our mail by mistake, people we’d see as we took out our boat. But where is Alice? There would be no Alice.