"When y'all gonna get your own telephone?" Mr. Freeman asked after I hung up.
"Mom disapproves of telephones," I said as I placed the dime on his coffee table. "She thinks they're an impersonal means of communication."
My first stop, as always, was Junior's. It was the fanciest bar in Welch, with a picture window, a grill that served hamburgers and french fries, and a pinball machine.
"Hey!" one of the regulars called out when I walked in. "It's Rex's little girl. How ya doin', sweetheart?"
"I'm fine, thank you. Is my dad here?"
"Rex?" He turned to the man next to him. "Where's that old polecat Rex?"
"I seen him this morning at the Howdy House."
"Honey, you look like you could use a rest," the bartender said. "Sit down and have a Coca-Cola on the house."
"No, thank you. I've got kites to fly and fish to fry."
I went to the Howdy House, which was a notch below Junior's. It was smaller and darker, and the only food it served was pickled eggs. The bartender told me Dad had gone to the Pub, which was a notch below the Howdy Housealmost pitch black, with a sticky bar top and no food at all. There he was, in the midst of a few other regulars, telling one of his air force stories.
When Dad saw me, he stopped talking and looked at me the way he did every time I had to track him down in a bar. It was always an awkward moment for us both. I didn't want to be fetching him any more than he wanted his ragamuffin daughter summoning him home like a wayward schoolboy. He looked at me in this cold, strange way for just a moment, then broke into a hearty grin.
"Hey, Mountain Goat!" he shouted. "What the hell are you doing in this dive?"
"Mom says you have to come home," I said.
"She does, does she?" He ordered a Coca-Cola for me and another shot of whiskey for himself. I kept telling Dad it was time to go, but he kept putting me off and ordering more shots, as if he had to gulp a whole bunch of them down before he could face home. He staggered off to the bathroom, came back, ordered one for the road, slammed the shot glass down on the bar, and walked to the door. He lost his footing trying to open it and sprawled on the floor. I tried to help him up, but he kept falling over.
"Honey, you ain't getting him nowhere like that," a man behind me said. "Here, let me give you a lift home."
"I'd appreciate that, sir," I said. "If it's not out of your way."
Some of the other regulars helped the man and me load Dad into the bay of the man's pickup. We propped Dad up against a tool chest. It was late afternoon in early spring, the light was beginning to fade, and people on McDowell Street were locking up their shops and heading home. Dad started singing one of his favorite songs.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home.
Dad had a fine baritone, with strength and timbre and range, and despite being tanked, he sang that hymn like the roof-raiser it is.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me
Coming for to carry me home.
I climbed in next to the driver. On the way homewith Dad still singing away in the back, extending the word. "low" so long he sounded like a mooing cowthe man asked me about school. I told him I was studying hard because I wanted to become either a veterinarian or a geologist specializing in the Miocene period, when the mountains out west were formed. I was telling him how geodes were created from bubbles in lava when he interrupted me. "For the daughter of the town drunk, you sure got big plans," he said.
"Stop the truck," I said. "We can make it on our own from here."
"Aw, now, I didn't mean nothing by that," he said. "And you know you ain't getting him home on your own."
Still, he stopped. I opened the pickup's tailgate and tried to drag Dad out, but the man was right. I couldn't do it. So I climbed back in next to the driver, folded my arms across my chest, and stared straight ahead. When we reached 93 Little Hobart Street, he helped me pull Dad out.
"I know you took offense at what I said," the man told me. "Thing is, I meant it as a compliment."
Maybe I should have thanked him, but I just waited until he drove off, and then I called Brian to help me get Dad up the hill and into the house.
*
A couple of months after Erma died, Uncle Stanley fell asleep in the basement while reading comic books and smoking a cigarette. The big clapboard house burned to the ground, but Grandpa and Stanley got out alive, and they moved into a windowless two-room apartment in the basement of an old house around the hill. The drug dealers who'd lived there before had spray-painted curse words and psychedelic patterns on the walls and the ceiling pipes. The landlord didn't paint over them, and neither did Grandpa and Stanley.
Grandpa and Uncle Stanley did have a working bathroom, so every weekend some of us went over to take a bath. One time I was sitting next to Uncle Stanley on the couch in his room, watching Hee Haw and waiting for my turn in the tub. Grandpa was off at the Moose Lodge, where he spent the better part of every day; Lori was taking her bath; and Mom was at the table in Grandpa's room working on a crossword puzzle. I felt Stanley's hand creeping onto my thigh. I looked at him, but he was staring at the Hee Haw Honeys so intently that I couldn't be sure he was doing it on purpose, so I knocked his hand away without saying anything. A few minutes later, the hand came creeping back. I looked down and saw that Uncle Stanley's pants were unzipped and he was playing with himself. I felt like hitting him, but I was afraid I'd get in trouble the way Lori had after punching Erma, so I hurried out to Mom.
"Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately," I said.
"Oh, you're probably imagining it," she said.
"He groped me! And he's wanking off!"
Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. "Poor Stanley," she said. "He's so lonely."
"But it was gross!"
Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go," she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't," she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger than that." She went back to her crossword puzzle.
After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa's. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy.
*