Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter Read Free Book Online Page B

making my way over to him in the dark room. He laughs quietly. There’s nowhere else to stand but in front of him, stretched out on the bed, his feet crossed at the ankles and sheathed in white gym socks.
     
    Sorry, I say, for blocking your view.
     

    It’s no biggie, he says. He takes my hand again, pulls me onto the bed next to him, and we lie like that, side by side, looking up at his ceiling, at the flickering pattern the leaves make on his ceiling, at the flickering blue light between each leaf.
     
    Have you heard of fucking? he asks, raising his voice over Danny’s mother’s screams.
     
    I think so, I tell him.
     
    Good, he says.
     
    Oh, definitely, I say.
     
    After a few minutes he reaches down, pulls my nightgown up. I’m going to look at you, he says. I hear the toilet flush, try to keep my voice as quiet as possible when I say, Okay.
     
    He doesn’t pull my underwear down like I thought he might. Instead he uses two fingers to yank the crotch over to the side, and I have to open my legs a bit wider. I can feel the breath from his nostrils down there, he is taking deep, calm breaths. It smells a little, he says. Not a bad smell, but definitely a smell. An odor, really. But again, not bad.
     
    Oh, good, I say. That’s good.
     
    Hang on, he says, and jumps off the bed, pushes things around on his desk. Danny’s father brandishes an axe, smiling, laughing. When Peggy’s brother comes back he has a magnifying glass and a flashlight, and when he is next to me again he pulls the panties over with one hand, holds the magnifying glass in the other, bites the flashlight between his teeth. He prods a little, the way my mother does to her pizza dough on Friday nights, then pulls the two folds apart.
     
    Wow, he says, the flashlight bobbing up and down. It’s so ugly, but in a very great way. You know? I want to look at it forever.
     
    The flickering pattern on the ceiling flickers faster, the wind picking up and faintly whistling, and I remember my dad telling me at breakfast that it would rain tonight, folding one corner of his paper down to look at me, then snapping it back up once I’d said, Oh, really? Oh yes, he’d said, we are going to have quite a storm.
     
    It’s this thought, the thought of my dad in his work clothes in our yellow kitchen this morning, reading the paper, letting the dog lick bacon grease from his fingers, that makes me want, more than ever, to get out of Peggy’s brother’s room. I have to go, I tell him.
     
    Wait, he says, holding me by the hips, spitting the flashlight over the side of the bed and tossing the magnifying glass over with it. He locks eyes with mine, and I feel dared, I recognize the dare whirling behind his eyes, feel his heartbeat pick up against my thigh, and then he is lowering his head, I see the heart-shaped bit of his scalp at the top of his head, I feel his soft lips, hear the same smacking kiss my mother used to place on my forehead at night, hear him say, I just really wanted to kiss it. And then he lets my underwear go, lets the crotch snap back in place, he pulls down my nightgown, says Don’t step on my magnifying glass on your way out.
     
    When I leave, Danny’s father is limping through a snowy maze.
     
    In the living room the girls say Where the h-e-double-hockey-sticks were you? and You missed it—Grace and Peggy just touched each other’s boobs for fifteen whole seconds, and It’s your turn—Truth or Dare?
     
    Dare, I say, and I’m dared to go outside in the rain and roll naked in Peggy’s mother’s garden. Which of course I do, because the garden is right underneath his window, and maybe somehow that makes me part of what comes through his window, part of what’s flickering on his ceiling, part of those shapes, part of that light, part of that blue blue light.
     

LOVE SONG
     

    It was my birthday and Daddy picked me up and he was drunk and we drove to the mall and I waited at a Ruby Tuesday’s and ate me a pot of French