The Whore's Child

do? Hit
him
?”
    â€œShe just wants to see you.”
    â€œI’m right here.”
    â€œShe thinks you’ll be angry.”
    â€œI
am
angry.”
    â€œNo, that she didn’t come to see you in the hospital. She feels guilty.”
    â€œShe didn’t know I’d be grateful?”
    â€œShe thought you’d be hurt. Like you were. Like I was.”
    â€œThirty years we’ve been married and you still confuse me with yourself,” I tell her. “I didn’t want Julie at the hospital. I didn’t want
you
at the hospital. Heart surgery would’ve been a different story.”
    â€œThere are times I think you could use heart surgery. A transplant, maybe. This is our daughter we’re talking about.”
    â€œOne of our daughters,” I correct her. “The other one is fine. So’s our son.”
    â€œSo is Julie.”
    I would like to believe her, but I’m not so sure. Before the wedding, I’d wanted to take Russell aside and ask him if he knew what he was doing. In time Julie might turn out fine, as well as the other two, but she somehow wasn’t quite ripe yet. Not for the colleges she’d been in and out of. Not for a husband. Not for adult life.
    As I am not ripe for intervention. My daughter may not be an adult, but she’s acting like one—getting married, having houses built, borrowing money. And I don’t, on general principle, like the idea of trespassing once people have slept together, because they know things about each other that you can’t, and if you think you’re ever going to understand what’s eating them, you’re a fool, even if one of them happens to be your own daughter. Especially if one of them happens to be your own daughter.
    â€œWe cannot tolerate physical abuse,” Faye says. “You know I’m fond of Russell, and it may not be all his fault, but if they’re out of control, we have to do something. We could end up wishing we had.”
    I would still like to debate the point. Even as Faye has been speaking, I’ve been marshaling semivalid reasons for butting out of our daughter’s marriage. There are half a dozen pretty good ones, but I’d be wasting my breath.
    â€œJulie thinks they should separate. For a while, anyway,” Faye says. “That makes sense to me. She wants to insist, and she wants you to be there.”
    I’m not thinking of Julie now but of my own parents. If I want your help, I’ll call you in, I remember telling my father during the early days of my own marriage when we had no money and things seemed worse than they really were. Maybe it’s that way with Julie and Russell. Maybe things seem worse than they are. I wish for that to be the case, almost as fervently as I wish I hadn’t been called in. But I have been.
    I start out on foot, explaining to Faye the exercise will do me good, though in truth I just don’t want to sit on top of another motor. Julie and Russell’s house is only a half mile up the road, and up until the operation I’d been running two miles a day—usually in the opposite direction. Seeing their house rise up out of the ground has been an unsettling experience, though for some time it did not occur to me why, even when I saw the frame. Only when the two decks were complete—front and back—did it dawn on me why they’d wanted to use my contractor. My daughter is building my house.
    â€œWell of course they are,” Faye said when I voiced this suspicion. “You should be flattered.”
    â€œI should?” I said, wondering exactly when it was that I’d stopped being the one who saw things first.
    â€œTheft being the sincerest form of flattery. Besides, they’re a mile away. It’s not like people are going to think it’s a subdivision.”
    â€œHalf a mile,” I said. “And what bothers me is that Julie would
want
to build our house.”
    Their mission tile is already visible, but halfway up the hill I have to stop and let the nausea pass. Off to the side of the road there’s a big flat rock that looks like a feather bed, so I go over and stretch out. It takes every bit of willpower I can muster not to unzip and check things out. Instead, I lie still and watch the moving sky. When I finally stand up again, I’m not sure I can make it the rest of the way, though this is the same hill I was running up a few months ago when I