The Whore's Child

look over at her hopefully, because it meant her spirits were on the mend. My mother enjoyed swearing, but it required effort and imagination; so, when she was depressed or exhausted, her speech became timid and mild.
    â€œYour father’s not a bad man,” she continued, broaching the subject we’d been avoiding for about two thousand miles and which had me pretty puzzled. I mean, I knew my father wasn’t a bad man. He’d never been bad to me, and I’d never witnessed him being bad to her, but her desire to flee did imply there was something wrong with him.
    â€œIt’s just that living with him—being
married
to him— is like being covered with these little cuts all the time. There’s no big gash you can show anybody, nothing they’d believe would really hurt. But these damn little nicks, they suck the blood right out of you.”
    The desert rolled by as my mother’s hair danced in the blowing air.
    â€œI mean,
really,
” she said after we’d gone a good ten miles, each of us pondering the man we’d fled. “Is that goddamn washer necessary?”
    This was one of my father’s quirky habits, manipulating a ring washer on the tip of his tongue as if it were a Life Saver candy. I have to admit, it could be a little unnerving, the first time you witnessed it. At the hardware store, his advice was sought on a great many projects, and my father was a thorough thinker who approached each new problem as if it were his own. He’d listen quietly, nodding at every complication or detail, and then he’d go into a pensive trance as he worked through various solutions, leaving his customer to his own leisurely contemplation. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything for a minute or two, his jaw working thoughtfully, and when his mouth finally opened it would not be to speak, but rather to reveal the silver washer on the tip of his tongue—as if the customer were being invited to reach out and take it, or my father were producing the very part needed to complete the job. Thus he gave the impression of being a man full of nuts and bolts.
    Since this little trick might suggest an intellectual sluggishness, I feel compelled to point out that he was neither stupid nor without a sense of humor, nor unaware that some of his quirks drove my mother crazy. He knew that having a metal washer in
his
mouth made
her
teeth hurt, and so when a playful mood stole upon him, as it sometimes did, he’d attempt to joke her out of what he considered an unreasonable aversion. When he’d driven her to distraction, he sometimes liked to take her in his arms, whisper something sweet in her ear, bend down to kiss her and then, just before the kiss was to be delivered, show her the washer on the tip of his tongue.
    The washer was not my father’s only annoying habit. He ruined various games by losing sight of their objectives and obsessing over minutiae. Playing Scrabble, for instance, he wasn’t content to consult one dictionary when challenging a word of my mother’s, but would refer to as many as he could locate, getting sidetracked whenever he ran across an unrelated word that interested him. “Here’s something,” he’d say, furrowing his brow, while the other players at the table stared at him in quiet disbelief until my mother yanked the dictionary from his hand and hissed at him, “Play, goddamn it.” Delighted, my father would grin and remark that even after all these years of marriage, he could still get her goat.
    Much as I loved him, he was beginning to get my goat too. He liked to help me with school projects, rightly convinced that I was careless and missed things. Mostly, I wanted to be done, so when I got a glimpse of the finish line, I bolted for it; whereas my father loved to linger among the facts and pore over the library books I brought home. “Now
here’s
something,” he’d say again and again, though it was seldom a relevant something. Whenever he helped me, in fact, my grades suffered from his need for inclusion. Two-page reports weighed in at a bloated nine pages, and longer papers swelled to near monograph length. Then he’d go to school to argue the grades my teachers gave me, again losing sight of his objective by revealing that the work was more his than mine. “Slow and steady wins the race,” he always assured me, a remark that never failed to elicit a sarcastic retort from