"What's on your mind, Frannie?"
She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn't sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn't stand. She jumped.
"I'm pregnant," she said simply.
He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. "Pregnant," he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: "Oh, Frannie... is it a joke? Or a game?"
"No, Daddy."
"You better come over here and sit with me."
Obediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.
"For sure?" he asked her.
"For sure," she said, and then - there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn't help it - she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.
"Daddy, do you still like me?"
"What?" He looked at her, puzzled. "Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie."
That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.
"Are you disappointed?" she asked.
"I don't know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?"
She nodded.
"You told him?"
She nodded again.
"What did he say?"
"He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion."
"Marriage or abortion," Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. "He's a regular two-gun Sam."
She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady's hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I'll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady's hands -
Her father said: "I don't want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn't he... or you... being careful?"
"I had birth control pills," she said. "They didn't work."
"Then I can't put any blame, unless it's on both of you," he said, looking at her closely. "And I can't do that, Frannie. I can't lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won't talk about blame."
She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.
"Your mother will have plenty to say about blame," he said, "and I won't stop her, but I won't be with her. Do you understand that?"
She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen the latter - but on his own terms.
She asked quietly: "Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?"
"You asking me to take your part?"
"I don't know."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"With Mom?"
"No. With you, Frannie."
"I don't know."
"Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that's what they say, anyway."
"I don't think I can do that. I think I've fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in."
"The baby?" His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden's hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.
"No, the baby isn't the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jesse is..." She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jesse, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her, the rush to decide and get out from under the threatening shadow of her mother, who was now at a shopping mall buying gloves for the wedding of Fran's childhood friend. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother's favorite sayings.
"He's weak," she said. "I can't explain better than that."
"You don't really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?"