“Not anyone.”
“Okay, Josephine, maybe not anyone, but most of us who grew up there at that time. Driving to a lake after sunset with a six-pack of beer that you’d talked someone into buying for you, drinking that beer with your friends, girls in their bathing suits who you’d never touched slipping into the velvet water. Those nights that stirred together the familiar with some hoped-for possibility. And I was watching my daughter while remembering this, and she laid her book down on her chest then, and her eyes followed the slow circling of the fan until she closed them, opened them again, following the fan, and then closed them, and when I looked closely they still seemed to be tracing the fan’s path under her eyelids and lashes.
“She was so—pretty lying there. I could see her as my daughter, but also see her as someone who was almost a woman, young and beautiful, on the edge of this final wave of summer, stretching out over the shore as if the crest of the wave had hands with this infinite capacity for gentleness, and they would leave her nestled in the shimmering and soft sand without her so much as turning over in her sleep. And in the living room, I found myself standing next to her as she lay on the couch, then kneeling down, her eyes still moving under her lids, maybe following in a dream, now, the circling of a waterbird, and I leaned over and kissed her on the lips, leaving my own lips lingering there for probably several seconds.”
He stopped there, and knew the woman probably couldn’t see him wincing because he still recognized the source of the kiss while for another moment he held off the memory of its consequence.
“And then what happened?” the woman asked, a thickness in her voice.
“Her eyes snapped open, of course. She said, ‘Dad!’ My face must have seemed larger than the moon. I pulled away instantly, and she sat bolt upright. The book that had been on her chest fell to the floor. I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, Claire. I can’t believe I just did that.’ And she said, ‘It’s okay.’ And then, as if this would explain it, I said, ‘I’m just so proud of how beautiful you’ve become,’ which made it only worse, of course. Her eyes looked glassy, and then I sort of backed into my armchair, and she stood up and walked toward the stairs to go up to her room. I felt a moment of panic and said, ‘Your mother shouldn’t—’ but Claire stopped almost midstride and glared at me, and I didn’t finish my sentence, and then she went upstairs without looking back.”
He had never been a great storyteller, and now, telling this story, he wondered at how memory worked, his eyes closed, capturing images of Claire on the couch, on the stairs, but never in continuous motion, not like a film, but more like a flipbook where, when possible, someone paused while thumbing through to see how the illusion of motion was created. But it wasn’t always possible to linger like that, and the storytelling was fluid even if the memory was not, as if it had collected evidence and assembled its case.
They sat without speaking for a while, long enough that when the dog barked again, and roused him, he was sure minutes had passed.
“It’s getting late. I’ll have to go soon,” she said.
For the first time he had an unexpected impulse to ask her to stay.
“Okay,” he said weakly.
She shuffled her feet on the dirt floor, and then stood up and quietly opened the door. He thought she was gone, but then she said a few words to Azhar, and came back in and closed it, and he listened to her sweep away the image of the cow that Azhar had drawn earlier. She set the broom against the wall, and then he heard her walk back to the window, and when she spoke he was sure she was turned away from him.
“Claire,” she said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Claire is driving east. She’s left her husband to attend to the motel while she’s gone, and their daughter is three years old now, old enough to be without her mother for a few weeks, though Claire worries about this, and she comforts herself by knowing that her husband’s mother—the kind of grandmother that children dream of living in a gingerbread house—will be there to help.”
“Despite everything,” he interrupted, “the thing about the run-down motel and cleaning other people’s sheets. And hanging diapers on the clothesline. I would have hoped for more for Claire.”
She walked back from the window then, and pulled the chair closer than it had been and sat back down.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “Why would you think this has anything to do with what you had hoped?”