Black Irish by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

Everyone was watching TV, curtains drawn. Blind, dumb, and deaf. You know that.”
    “ ’Tis a good place. I wish I was back there.”
    Abbie stared at him, trying to control her breathing.
    “I don’t want to talk about that now. Are you going to sleep now? Why don’t I help you into bed?”
    Her father said nothing, just stared at the blanket.
    If you wait up for me, why won’t you talk to me? Why won’t you ever talk to me about something important?
    Abbie went into her bedroom, undressed slowly. She checked her shape in the mirror, turned to the side. She’d been losing weight lately, mostly because of working twelve-hour days. Her skin had gone beyond pale—which contrasted nicely with her dark hair—all the way to anemic-looking. Her wide-set eyes, bright and intense, stared back at her. Her glossy black hair was pulled back in a ponytail; everything else took too much time. Her cheekbones were high—maybe there was some Native American blood in her family, on her father’s side—her nose was pert, and there was a tiny shell-like scar above her left eye, the origin of which she’d never known.
    Abbie turned in the mirror again, sighed—what good was it to lose a few pounds and look generally good if your skin looked like that?—and turned on the stereo. She pulled off her boots and it felt like her feet would bloom like balloons. Too many long days in a row. She lay down on the bed.
    The disc player kicked into the CD she’d left in there the night before. Eighties music, preferably British and preferably sad, was allshe seemed to be able to listen to lately. Yaz’s “Only You” came on, with its swirling, hypnotic video-game beat. The singer breathed out in a husky voice, “Looking from the window above, it’s like a story of love,” and Abbie closed her eyes. She hated when people said they didn’t write songs like that anymore, but they didn’t write songs like that anymore. The searing pain of the vocal was backed by a ridiculous synthesizer beat that seemed so innocent an eight-year-old could play it. The contrast pleased her somehow.
    Abbie began to drift off. Suddenly, she heard a sound like someone being strangled. She snapped awake and raised herself up on her elbows. Her father cried out, then sighed. A minute later she heard the soft rattle of his snore. She went into his room, using the light from the hall to see. They’d moved everything from his home off Abbott Road and preserved it here. It was like having a museum exhibit—Irish widower cop, circa 1977—in her spare bedroom. Commendations from the Department, his wife’s laminated funeral card from Reddington Funeral Home pinned to the wall above his bed, a calendar from his old church in the County, and a stack of library books on the Korean War on the rickety bedside table. There were no pictures of Abbie, no pictures at all.
    He’d forgotten to take off his watch. She reached down and pulled the old-fashioned expanding metal bracelet open, like an accordion, and slid it gently over his knobby wrist. She looked at the watch, saw that it had stopped running. Her lips pressed together for a second, and she wondered how long it had been sitting dead on her father’s hand.
    Abbie made a mental note to take the watch to the jewelry store for a new battery and laid it on his nightstand. Then she went back to her room, undressed, and got into bed.
    The Alzheimer’s is slowly getting worse
, she thought as she lay under her white comforter. Not only that, he’d had two fainting spells in the last six months. The doctors hadn’t been able to explain why, and that worried her. Now he’d forgotten to take off the watch. It used to be part of his nightly ritual to lay it on the nightstand along with his comb and his loose change.
    She thought of the disease as a destroyer of memories, tunneling through her father’s brain. She wondered which ones it would silently take tonight. Maybe the boyhood fall off a tall rock at Spanish