Mr. Kehoe came home late, but he never seemed drunk. He was unfailingly polite. Despite the fact that he’d been there since she was two years old, it always felt to Eileen as if he’d just moved in.
She took to cooking extra for him and bringing a plate to his room. He answered her knock with a smile and received the offering gratefully. Her father grumbled about charging a board fee.
Mr. Kehoe had a smear of black in a full head of otherwise gray hair. It looked as if he’d been streaked by a tar brush. When he wasn’t wearing his tweed jacket with the worn cuffs, he rolled his shirt sleeves and kept his tie a little loose.
He started battling through fitful bouts of coughing. One night, she went to his door with some tea; another, she brought him cough syrup.
“It’s just that I don’t get enough air,” Mr. Kehoe said. “I’ll take some long walks.”
Even through severe coughing fits he managed to play the clarinet. She’d stopped trying to hide her efforts to listen to it. She sat on the floor beside his door, with her back to the wall, reading her schoolbooks. In the lonely evenings she felt no need to apologize for her interest. Sometimes she even whistled along.
One night, her father sat quietly on the couch after dinner with a troubled look on his face. Eileen avoided him, occupying her usual spot by Mr. Kehoe’s door. Heat rattling through the pipes joined the clarinet in a kind of musical harmony. She looked up and was unnerved to find her father looking back at her, which he never did. She concentrated on her beautifully illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The day before, when she’d told him that Mr. Kehoe had given it to her, her father had grown upset. She’d seen him knock on Mr. Kehoe’s door a little while later and hand him some money.
She was absorbed in “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” when her father startled her away from the door. She barely had time to step aside before he had thrown Mr. Kehoe’s door open and told him to quit making that racket. Mr. Kehoe apologized for causing a disturbance, but Eileen knew there had been none; you could barely hear him playing from where her father had been sitting.
Her father tried to snatch the clarinet from Mr. Kehoe’s hands. Mr. Kehoe stood up, clutching it, until its pieces started coming apart and he staggered backward, coughing wildly. Her father went out to the kitchen and turned up the radio loud enough that the neighbors started banging on the ceiling.
When she came home the next day, Mr. Kehoe was gone.
For almost a week, she didn’t speak to her father. They passed each other without a word, like an old married couple. Then her father stopped her in the hall.
“He was going to have to leave,” he said. “I just made it happen sooner.”
“He didn’t have to go anywhere,” she said.
“Your mother is coming home.”
She was excited and terrified all at once. She’d started thinking her mother might never come back. She was going to have to give up control of the house. She wouldn’t have her father to herself anymore.
“What does that have to do with Mr. Kehoe?”
“You can move your things over there tonight.”
“You’re not getting another lodger?”
He shook his head. A thrilling feeling of possibility took her over.
“I’m getting my own room?”
Her father looked away. “Your mother has decided that she’s moving over there with you.”