“I started without you,” Raymond said, holding up a half-eaten slice of pizza. “Sorry. I was hungry.”
“I don’t blame you.” His father was a big man with a deep, booming bass of a voice. Yet utterly unintimidating. Raymond had gotten his height from his father, but not his thin frame. “I had an emergency. A patient with a lost crown. I can throw a slice in the microwave. It’s okay.”
“Don’t use the microwave. It kills the crust. Warm a piece up in the oven. Or I will. If you’re too tired.”
His father shrugged. “Tastes fine to me from the microwave.”
He disappeared into the kitchen.
Raymond heard the beeping of the microwave oven.
Not two minutes later, his father came out with a slice on a paper plate. He dropped heavily onto the couch beside Raymond and loosened his tie. Clapped Raymond on the knee. Then he kicked off his shoes and put his sock feet up on the coffee table.
Raymond stared at his father’s feet for a moment. “Might as well get that feet-up thing out of your system before Neesha comes home,” he said, “huh?”
“I’ll say. What are you watching?”
Truthfully, Raymond had to struggle to remember. He had to look at the screen for clues. He had been switching from channel to channel, and his mind had been somewhere else most of the time.
“Um. Some kind of mystery about extraterrestrial life, I think. It’s not very realistic.”
“What have I missed so far?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been paying very good attention.”
He had been mostly worrying about Mrs. G.
They sat staring at the screen together. Raymond wondered if his father was paying any better attention than Raymond was. They didn’t speak. They mostly didn’t speak when together.
Raymond figured he got along fine with his father. They had no beefs with each other, and never argued. But they went nearly two weeks at a time without seeing each other. And then, when they got together again, neither one of them seemed to be able to think of much to say. If anything.
On Sunday, midmorning, they sat in their favorite restaurant together. The brunch place. The one where Raymond had taken Mrs. G.
“I asked your stepmother to join us,” his father said. “But she brought some work home that she has to get done by tomorrow.”
Raymond stared at his menu, even though he already knew what he wanted. At first he thought he would let the statement go by. Just let it stand, the way he always did.
Then, to his surprise, he shook off the complacency that had always held him down in the past.
“You make excuses for her every time she ditches spending time with us. But she doesn’t like me, and I don’t know why we can’t just talk about that out loud. It’s so obvious. It’s not like I don’t notice.”
He watched his father as the words sank in. Watched the dark skin of his face crease and fall.
Raymond regretted having spoken. The idea had not been to hurt the man, but apparently that was what Raymond had done.
“You’re misunderstanding the situation, Raymond.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you. But I don’t think I am.”
“In a way you are. I’m not saying she’s not closed off to you. Of course she is. But when you say she doesn’t like you, I can tell you have a wrong impression. You think it has something to do with you, but it doesn’t. She doesn’t dislike who you are. She probably doesn’t even know who you are. She looks at you, and all she can see is a whole life I had with another woman before I met her. That’s her problem.”
Raymond said nothing. Just studied his menu. He figured what his father had said was probably true. It certainly had a ring of truth to it. He wasn’t sure this new perspective improved the situation, though.
The waiter came to take their order. They both ordered omelets. Raymond ordered tea with milk. There were packets of sugar in the middle of the table. He didn’t have to ask for them. His father ordered champagne.
“So you have a girlfriend now,” his father said when the waiter had moved off again. “That’s big news.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend. Mom got that wrong.”
“Oh.”
A pause. Raymond could feel himself stuck in that feeling again. The one that said he was hurting his father without meaning to. So he volunteered more in an effort to make things better.
“I’m just making some new friends is all.”
“Glad to hear that. So, other boys, then?”
“No,” Raymond said, wishing he could leave it at that, but knowing he probably couldn’t.
“So it is a girl.”
“I don’t think I’d call her a girl. She’s over ninety.”
“Oh,” his father said again. In fact, his father said “oh” a lot. Words did not seem to come easily to the man, nor in great quantities. “Why does your mom think otherwise?”
“I don’t know. I told her it’s just a friend thing, but she won’t listen. She just figures I have a girlfriend but I don’t want to admit it.”
“So you’ve told her what it isn’t but not what it is?”
“Pretty much. Yeah. I don’t think she’d understand. It’s hard to explain why I like to be around this new friend. I mean, at first it was just because she needed me to be. She’s blind, and she needs some help, and the person who was helping her just got killed. But that’s not the only thing. I like spending time around her. We talk.”
His father nodded a few times but said nothing.
Their tea and champagne arrived. They sipped in silence for another minute or two.
“Since when do you drink tea?” his father asked. As if he had only just awakened and noticed it there.
“Pretty much the last couple of weeks.”
“Oh.”
Then another silence. But this one was different. His father was trying to fight his way up through it, and Raymond could feel that. Feel his struggle. He wondered how much of the time that was true. How many of their silences were not fully voluntary on his father’s end of things.