Further Joy

by John Brandon

  One of the fathers followed a Mexican soap opera. The women were huge-eyed and single-minded, and the story would never end. It would outlive the father and maybe even his daughter.

  To the fathers’ wonder, their daughters drank like thirty-five-year-old women—a glass of wine with dinner, a cold beer at the end of a long hot week. They ate whatever was presented, whatever was handy, with equal zest, whether braised veal or a frozen cheese pizza.

  The fathers could not discern the status their daughters held among their peers. It did not seem to matter that they were not wealthy. It did not seem to matter one way or the other whether they played sports. They were free to earn high grades if they wished. Their daughters were a clique, but took no pride in this. Exclusivity and welcome occurred naturally and were accepted without fuss. It seemed nerds no longer existed as they once had, or sluts. There was peer pressure to do such things as recycle and volunteer.

  Each father understood that he could not tell how attractive his daughter was. Each assumed his daughter was beautiful because she looked similar to the other girls she hung around with, who were without doubt beautiful.

  The fathers did not pal around with one another.

  One of the fathers’ daughters had a suitor, a white boy named Tyrone. The father did not know if the boy’s parents had named him for a joke or a statement or if somehow Tyrone was a family name for them or what.

  One of the fathers was in debt. He’d sold his crepe shop but no one knew at how great a loss. Now he cooked at an upscale breakfast place, folding mushrooms and lobster into omelets. He didn’t know what people thought—that he’d gotten weary of the responsibility of owning, maybe, or that he wanted to stay in shape in the kitchen. He hadn’t allowed his daughter to notice he was broke. He took her out for sushi and then, on his days off, he ate peanut butter sandwiches alone. He had begun secretly rooting against his daughter’s impeccable grades, knowing everything would be easier for him if she didn’t get into a prestigious far-off school. He had sold things out of the back of his garage, exercise equipment and a stately, attic-smelling grandfather clock. He had sold his bottles of fine California red. He had never decided what occasion might prompt him to uncork one of the wines, what sort of joyous triumph he was waiting for, and now he’d never find out. Good things had happened and he’d let them pass, occasionally handling and dusting the bottles but never celebrating with them. His daughter was the sharpest of the girls. She was a math whiz and a shrewd judge of character. He could not stand the thought of her being disappointed in him, of letting her down.

  One of the fathers’ daughters spoke four languages. Fluent Spanish, of course. Enough French to hold a conversation. Also, they had hosted a girl from Zimbabwe for several summers and the daughter had picked up enough of some African tongue to continue learning it on her own. The high school had brought in a tutor for her, a linguist from the university. Though public, it was that kind of high school.

  One of the fathers, years ago, had bought his daughter a boxy antique camera. Later he found it in a spare closet and tracked down film for it on the computer and used it to take pictures of the stagnant canals that snaked through their part of town. He tried to catch the canals at low tide, when clans of exposed crabs lined the oyster beds.

  The fathers depended on their daughters to keep them in the correct shoes.

  When in doubt, the fathers encouraged their daughters to get enough rest and eat vegetables and to tell the truth—timeless, tried-and-true directives.

  The fathers were aware of how far things were going in some quarters. It wasn’t just nose jobs and breast augmentation anymore. Girls were getting their lips plumped. Girls were having their toes worked on, so their feet would look cute in sandals and flip-flops. None of the fathers’ daughters had mentioned any of this nonsense yet, but that didn’t mean they never would.

  One of the fathers hired an escort every few months, an available reward to himself for how far he’d risen in life, and against what odds. The older his daughter got, the less purely he was able to enjoy this practice.

  The era the girls were growing up in had no texture. The music betrayed nothing. The generation preceding the fathers’ had been wild, and the fathers themselves had learned to be jaded, but the girls were past all that. Jadedness, for them, was an old stale religion not worth its costumes. Rebellion, to them, was quaint.

  One of the fathers thought of the afternoon his daughter’s braces had been removed as the moment he’d lost her.

  One of the fathers wished he could work on cars. He wished he could prop his hood in the driveway and hang that competent and hopeful lantern and take a look at a belt or hose and then straighten up to his full height while wiping his hands on a torn green rag. Men like himself, driving by on the street, would notice him and feel lost.

  One of the fathers thought of one of his daughter’s friends while he lay awake at night. He thought of her during slow moments in the day, too, but in the day he only felt fond of the way she walked and the way she carefully formed words with her lips. At night it was something worse. He didn’t think in terms of being in love. He had, apparently, been in love twice before. He knew there was no dependable advantage, when smitten, to doing something about it. There were numerous disadvantages. The father had never been addicted to anything, had never been unable to control himself. He would weather this, just another secret to keep. In so many ways, he was lucky. His daughter was lucky. Her friend, with her feline face and muscled calves and shabby fingernails, was lucky—lucky to be desired by a man who did not act on his wanton fixations. When the father picked all the girls up from somewhere in his restored classic Jeep, he hoped the girl he thought about at night would sit in the passenger seat. He had no way to encourage this. When it happened, when she hopped up beside him and the rest piled in back, he felt overcome, dizzy, like he’d had whiskey and a rich dessert. Her teeth were gleaming and slightly crooked and her skin was the color of honey when the sunlight shines through it. On the inside of her ankle was a pale beauty mark in the shape of a tropical fish. Her tummy sometimes peeked out. There were soft depressions behind her ears. She regarded the father with a comfortable sort of formality. There was no chance she understood him, but she trusted him. When she was in the front seat she didn’t lean back toward the others to join the gabbing. She listened, an amused outsider, same as the father. He wondered what she would do if she ever noticed how he looked at her, but she would never notice. Or she already had. This was the father’s problem alone, not the girl’s. It was best to keep his visions plain, he knew, but the nights were soundless and aimless and in the dark he would imagine the two of them living on a meadowy ranch out west or holing up down in Central America, local children running into town to fetch them produce and rum. He imagined teaching the girl how to cook, imagined going on weekend excursions for the purpose of buying hats. He even imagined scolding her coarse etiquette, imagined her taking up cigarettes. They would buy a horse. They would read the longest novels ever written. He imagined her coming down with a swift and exotic illness, and nursing her back to health, giving her medicines with his palm cupped underneath a spoon, placing cold rags on her forehead, leading her on leisurely walks over mild hills until the gold color returned to her limbs. He imagined her desire returning as she became hale. He wouldn’t rush her, he would wait until they were lying on the humid porch during the hottest part of the day and she sighed and pushed the tiny soft arch of her foot into his hand. He even allowed himself to imagine the fallout. His own daughter’s injury. The other father’s rage. A fistfight. The law. The shame. Except that nothing was going to happen. He was unfamiliar with the abandon that caused people to commit murder or rape or break into houses over a fix, that made gamblers end up homeless, that caused old ladies to hoard knickknacks and canned goods and small pets until their houses were condemned, that turned the upbeat overweight into the grotesque obese who couldn’t leave their apartments. No, his mind was like his lawn; it
could grow unruly, but there was a snug, irresistible pride in trudging out into the heat and mowing and clipping and raking. He had seen the girl in sundresses. He had seen her in men’s-style pajamas. He had seen her in a soccer uniform. He had seen her in a thin, stiff coat and high boots. He had seen her in a faded clay-colored towel almost the same shade as her skin. He had seen her in a ball gown and in a middle school graduation gown. He had seen her in a beat-up sweatshirt, eager to paint houses for the less fortunate.

  The fathers knew it was important to have meals with their daughters. For one father, breakfast was convenient. For another, dinner. One of the fathers regularly picked his daughter up from school and took her for salads in the quaint town center of their neighborhood. One of the fathers was only free on Sundays and he took his daughter to brunch on the water, and he’d recently begun to feel, sitting there just the two of them in the midst of so many hungover, sated couples and sprawling wedding parties, oyster shells and champagne everywhere, that something was not quite natural about his and his daughter’s lingering over this sunny midmorning luxury, that this familiar indulgence had curdled.

  The fathers remembered their own childhoods lovingly, remembered that first summer they were allowed to walk down to the old pier without any adults and fish an afternoon away, many years younger than their daughters were now. They remembered the storm beginning to assemble on the horizon as they pulled lunch out of a plastic grocery bag—a sandwich of whatever pastrami had been left after their father’s work week, a peach, a warm can of ginger ale. They remembered taking their shoes off and setting them in an out-of-the-way spot where they wouldn’t get knocked down into the swells. They remembered getting their bait stolen by pinfish, getting their lines tangled. They remembered the clouds rising, advancing, snuffing out the sun. They remembered pointing at the lightning in the distance and tasting a metallic tang on the breeze. Soon everyone else on the pier began reeling in and packing up and shuffling toward land, throwing in the towel—first the young professionals on a day off, wearing bright ball caps and expensive deck shoes, then those women of indeterminate age that had always frightened and interested the fathers when they were boys, with their platinum hair and harsh laughs and sculpted manly arms, and finally the pier hounds, their mustaches unkempt and shorts ratty, who fished for their dinners most days. The storm had been racing in, aimed directly at the pier, and then it seemed to hold itself in place a moment, offering a fair chance to anyone who’d not yet fled. The fathers found their shoes then. They remembered the sky growing dark as night, the thunder seeming to come from beneath them. That was when the snook finally started hitting, forced landward by the storm. They remembered throwing the wriggling creatures back, too small to keep anyway, and slicing a finger while dislodging a hook, knowing that this moment, with fish caught and the line up and blood dripping onto the planks of the pier and the lightning close enough to blind them, was when they should run for cover. But they didn’t run. Something inside them wanted this danger. If the storm washed them off the pier, they would drown. The lightning could fry them crisp. Yet they baited and dropped their hooks once again. They remembered being fascinated at being alone, remembered turning and looking back at the beach, which was abandoned and which seemed itself to be bracing for a siege. They remembered the first fat drops of rain hitting the backs of their hands. The angry front was now hanging over them like a cliff. They remembered not being able to account for their stubbornness, not understanding why the thing that ought to chase them off was holding them still. The gusts rocking the pier. The surf pounding the pilings below. They remembered those days and prayed, knowing it wouldn’t be so, that whatever fates their daughters were testing were as wholesome as rough weather.

  THE INLAND NEWS

  It was breakfast time, and Sofia was in the kitchen with Uncle Tunsil. He was eating a lemon with sugar and had a glass of milk waiting for him. Sofia was working on a bowl of colorful cereal meant for children, crunching it down in the quiet morning. Uncle Tunsil gazed out the front window. The lemon tree was out there, and also a colossal nut tree that had been struck by lightning and rendered half dead. The branches that shot out over the house were pale and bare, while the branches over the road hung lush in their own shade.

  Uncle Tunsil took down his milk in one steady draft, then looked toward Sofia. “I’ll be right on the other side of the glass, and I’ll make sure he’s aware of that. We’ll just see how this goes. I’m a long sight from comfortable with it.”

  “I’m pretty tough,” Sofia said. “That’s something you might have noticed about me.”

  Uncle Tunsil had already spent too much energy making sure Sofia wasn’t frightened, telling her she could back out anytime she wanted, squaring what he was going to allow her to do with his conscience. When she’d first offered her help, her uncle had balked, and she’d had to remind him she was an adult who’d been through a lot in her life and could handle herself. She’d stayed on him two days straight about it. And she’d known he would relent. The two of them had gone years without any mention of the unexplained events of Sofia’s childhood, but when Sofia finally brought up the topic, he hadn’t shied away from it. Courage was a settled fact of Uncle Tunsil’s makeup, and though he was charged with keeping order, there was something unaffiliated about him. He operated according to a reserved but staunch open-mindedness. He didn’t care what people thought, didn’t mind that some folks would snicker at his pursuing a case this way. And he understood this was important to her. There was a part of her she’d tamped down into a shadowy corner and she wanted to try to bring it out.

  Sofia didn’t know what to expect out of the experiment. She had warned her uncle that if she did in fact discover anything, it likely wouldn’t be anything concrete, that she might only get a feeling, and probably not even that. Uncle Tunsil had tried to muster his familiar easy grin, and had told her a feeling would work fine. A feeling was exactly what they were lacking.

  He started the faucet running and set his milk glass and lemon dish in the sink. There were some other dishes in there from last night. Sofia was finished with her cereal and he took her bowl too. He found a rag and started washing, his forearms flexing. He had a beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. It would’ve made someone else look like a fool.

  “I keep thinking would your momma have let you do this,” he said, raising his voice over the running water. “I suppose we know the answer to that. That’s what I’m always thinking, what she would’ve said.”

  “If my mother were around, she wouldn’t still be telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I’m the boss now. I’m the boss of Sofia.”

  “Whether she’d let me do this, is maybe what I mean. You’re the boss of Sofia but I’m the boss of the police station.”

  The salt and pepper shakers on the table were in the image of a farmer and his wife. Sofia touched the top of each one, then licked her finger. When she or her uncle mentioned Sofia’s mother, it was usually to say they missed her on a holiday or to praise her cobbler or, most often, to admire what a hard worker she’d been. She’d been able to leave enough money for Sofia’s college, no small accomplishment.

  Sofia said, “Her way to deal with this, to deal with me, was to… not deal with it. And maybe that was the best thing for me back then. I’m sure it was.”

  Uncle Tunsil was nodding, putting some elbow grease into one of the dishes. “You want to find out about yourself and that’s fine. You want some answers, like everyone wants. I’m still allowed to say this thing makes me nervous.”

  “Think of it this way,” Sofia said. “It’s just talking to some guys who might be lying. For girls, that’s old hat.”

  Sofia was behind her uncle, so she couldn’t see if he’d smiled at what she said. Wisps of steam were rising up from the sink and vanishing.

  “A murder case,” he said. “I reckon if there’s a time to pull out the stops.” Sofia saw her uncle’s shoulders heave and then settle, but couldn’t hear his sigh. A sh
aft of sunlight was finding its way in at a low angle, spotlighting a swath of the kitchen floor.

  “I expect I ought to be tickled,” he said. “You know, professionally. Analyzing crime scenes and supervising interviews instead of, I don’t know, busting some poor guy for buying beer for the trade school kids.”

  The man who’d been killed was named Barn Renfro. It was an understatement to say no one in town had been fond of him, but the murder, the first in the city limits in over ten years, had people uneasy. Sofia’s uncle wasn’t one for a witch hunt, but he was going to be as thorough as he knew how. So far he didn’t have much to go on. Sofia didn’t know if he had any real hopes that she could help him, or if he was purely humoring her. If he held strong beliefs about anything—from the supernatural to politics to cornbread recipes—he kept them hidden.