Straight Man

wouldn’t guess?”
    He shrugs, studying me. “You might. I wouldn’t have.”
    The glass door slides open then, and the second Mrs. R. comes back out with a third deck chair. Her face is beet red, and she emits the kind of snorting sound pot smokers make when they can’t hold it in any longer. Rourke studies his wife impassively while she sets up her chair on the other side of the deck. “Life always pays you back,” he remarks. And you don’t have to know him all that well to know he’s thinking about his first wife, a lovely, unintellectual woman he belittled into leaving him, thus creating space for the second Mrs. R. I slide back my deck chair and stand.
    “By the way, is that mutt of yours loose?”
    “Occam? No. He’s in the house.”
    “I thought I saw him in Charlene’s garden earlier. There must be another white shepherd around. How the hell did you slip past all the reporters?”
    “You know me, Reverend,” I tell him. “Just when you think I’m cornered …”
    He nods, as if to suggest he knows all too well how slippery I can be. “Herbert’s calling for a strike vote this afternoon.”
    “With a week left in the term?”
    “To prevent the seniors from graduating,” he explains. “That’s as close to real political clout as we can muster.”
    “Herbert on his department’s list?”
    “So he says.”
    I nod, risk a grin. “Not a bad list, sounds like.”
    I’m standing next to the railing, the long drop to the road behind me, so I’m glad when he smiles back. “I thought it was excellent, top to bottom. I could almost vote for it, in fact.”
    Another snort from the second Mrs. R. A thin trail of marijuana smoke is tracking upward from her corner of the deck.
    When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I call back up. “Hey?” From where I stand, I can see only my colleague’s feet up on the railing. “I have this idea that maybe the fourth is one of us two?”
    “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” the voice of my old enemy condescends. “You’ll luck out some way.”
    “What are you in such a good mood about?” my daughter wants to know when I turn up at her kitchen door as she’s about to leave for work.
    “Who?”
    “You,” she explains. “You’re grinning.”
    “I’ve been excommunicated. The pope and his Vatican goons are hot on my trail. Find me a fast horse and saddle it up. Meanwhile, I need to borrow your shower,” I tell her, pausing to look her over, this kid whose diapers I used to change. She looks like she’s passed a dark, thoughtful night and emerged from the experience in better shape than she’d have predicted.
    “Go ahead,” she says. “You paid for it.”
    “I did?”
    Julie nods sheepishly. “The money you and Mom loaned us? So we could finish the kitchen and master bath? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
    “I’m not sure I ever knew.”
    She studies me knowingly. If she’s spent the night trying to figure things out, at least she’s succeeded in pegging me. “That’s one of your great fictions, isn’t it? That Mom never tells you anything. That way you can pretend there are things going on behind your back, things you don’t approve of.”
    “There
are
things going on I don’t approve of,” I tell her.
    “Right,” she says. “Like you wouldn’t have loaned us the money when we needed it. Like you’re too reasonable, too logical. Like Mom’s the one with the heart and you’re the one with the brain. That’s your public posture. Except everybody knows better. Remember the day I fell off my bike when I was little? Remember how you cried?”
    “How
you
cried, you mean.”
    She shakes her head. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. Why can’t you admit you cried? You
cried
, Daddy.”
    “Well,” I admit.
    “I only cried until it stopped hurting,” she reminds me. “
You
couldn’t stop. I was afraid to look in the mirror when I got home. I thought it must be horrible. I expected to see half my face gone. I kept looking in the mirror for the part that made you cry.”
    “You were my daughter,” I remind her.
    “I know,” she says. “I understand. It’s just …”
    I wait for her, wishing I could help out, but in truth I feel as helpless now as I felt then when her back wheel slid in the gravel, then caught, and she flew over her handlebars. Was that how my mother felt there on the cellar stairs, when she pulled me to her and told me we would forget? At the time it felt like the