“Well, Charlie Bear, there’s innocent and there’s not guilty, and there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason in between.” He gave her a wink. “Why don’t you drive your old daddy home?”
Charlotte hated going to the farmhouse, even to drop him off. She hadn’t been inside the HP in years. “Where’s your car?”
“Had to drop it off for service.” He tapped his knee harder. There was a rhythm to the beats now. “Did you figure out why Ben called you this morning?”
Charlie shook her head. “Do you know?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but then grinned instead.
She said, “I can’t deal with your motherfuckery right now, Rusty. Just tell me the truth.”
He groaned as he got up from the couch. “‘Seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’”
He left before Charlie could find something to throw at him.
She didn’t hurry to meet him at the car because, despite his harried rushing around, Rusty was always late. She printed out a copy of her statement. She emailed a copy to herself in case she wanted to look at it at home. She grabbed a stack of files she needed to work on. She checked the Facebook page again for new posts. Finally, she gathered up her things, locked up her office, and found her father standing outside the back door smoking a cigarette.
“Such a scowl on your pretty face,” he said, grinding the cigarette on the heel of his shoe and dropping the butt into his coat pocket. “You’re gonna get those same lines around your mouth that your grandmama had.”
Charlie tossed her bag into the back seat of her car and got in. She waited for Rusty to lock up the building. He brought the trace of cigarette smoke with him. By the time she pulled onto the road, she might as well have been inside a Camel factory.
She rolled down the window, already annoyed that she had to go to the farmhouse. “I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”
“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”
Charlie reached into the back seat and found the printout of her statement. “Read this. Silent car until the HP.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rusty found his reading glasses in his pocket. He turned on the dome light. His foot tapped as he read the first paragraph. And then his foot stopped tapping.
She could tell from the heat on the side of her face that he was staring at her.
Charlie said, “All right. I’ll own it. I don’t know the guy’s first name.”
The pages fluttered as Rusty’s hand dropped to his lap.
She looked at him. He had taken off his reading glasses. Nothing was tapping or clapping or jumping. He was staring out the window, silent, his gaze fixed on the distance.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Headache.”
Her father never complained about real ailments. “Is it about the guy?” Rusty said nothing, so she asked, “Are you mad at me about the guy?”
“Of course not.”
Charlie felt anxious. For all of her bluster, she could not abide disappointing her father. “I’ll get his name tomorrow.”
“Not your job.” Rusty tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket. “Unless you plan to keep seeing him?”
Charlie sensed an odd weight behind his question. “Would it matter?”
Rusty didn’t answer. He was staring out the window again.
She said, “You need to start humming or making stupid jokes or I’m going to take you to the hospital so they can make sure nothing’s wrong with your heart.”
“It’s not my heart I’m worried about.” The statement came across as hokey, absent his usual flourishes. He asked, “What happened between you and Ben?”
Charlie’s foot almost slipped off the gas.
In nine months, Rusty had not asked her this question. She had waited five days to tell him that Ben had left. Charlie was standing in his office doorway. She had planned to relay to her father the fact of Ben leaving, nothing more, which was exactly what she’d done. But then Rusty had nodded curtly, like she was reminding him to get a haircut, and his ensuing silence had brought out a sort of verbal diarrhea that Charlie hadn’t experienced since the ninth grade. Her mouth would not stop moving. She’d told Rusty that she hoped Ben would be home by the weekend. That she hoped he would return her calls, her texts, her voicemails, the note she had left on the windshield of his car.
Finally, probably to shut her up, Rusty had quoted the first stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
“Dad,” Charlie said, but she couldn’t think of anything more to say. An oncoming car’s headlights flashed into her eyes. Charlotte looked in her rear-view mirror, watching the red tail-lights recede. She didn’t want to, but she told Rusty, “It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of things.”
He said, “Maybe the question is, how are you going to fix it?”
She could see now that talking about this was a mistake. “Why do you assume I’m the only one who can fix it?”
“Because Ben would never cheat on you or do anything to purposefully hurt you, so it must be something that you did or are not doing.”
Charlie bit her lip too hard.
“This man you’re seeing—”
“There’s no seeing,” she snapped. “It happened once, and it was the first and only time, and I don’t appreciate—”
“Is it because of the miscarriage?”
Charlie’s breath caught in her chest. “That was three years ago.” And six. And thirteen. “Besides, Ben would never be that cruel.”
“That’s true, Ben would not be cruel.”
She wondered at his comment. Was he implying that Charlie would be?
Rusty sighed. He curled the stack of papers in his hand. His foot tapped the floorboard twice. He said, “You know, I’ve had a long, long time to think about this, and I think what I loved most about your mother was that she was a hard woman to love.”
Charlie felt the sting of the implied comparison.
“Her problem, her only problem, if you ask the man who worshipped her, was that she was too damn smart.” He tapped his foot along with the last three words to add emphasis. “Gamma knew everything, and she could tell you without having to give it a moment’s worth of thinking. Like the square root of three. Just off the top of her head, she’d say … well, hell, I don’t know the answer, but she’d say—”
“One point seven-three.”
“Right, right,” he said. “Or someone would ask, say, what’s the most common bird on earth?”
Charlie sighed. “The chicken.”
“The deadliest thing on earth?”
“Mosquito.”
“Australia’s number one export?”
“Uh … iron ore?” She furrowed her brow. “Dad, where is this going?”
“Let me ask you this: what were my contributions to that little exchange we just had?”
Charlie couldn’t follow. “Dad, I’m too tired for riddles.”
“A visual aid—” He played at the window button, rolling it down a fraction, then up a fraction, then down, then up.