My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Ken said something more about the police and their ill habits. Rodgers listened to his children in front of the fire. They were worrying over the baby. His daughters were noting, for perhaps the hundredth time, how much she resembled Connie.
    Just before dinner, in fact, they had converged outside his study and yammered on about the likeness. The same button chin andgenerous forehead. Wasn’t it uncanny? Rodgers had stooped over his desk and felt a pulse of rage bang bloodily behind his eyes. He imagined storming into the hallway and telling them what he really thought: that the child, with its drooping cheeks and fat lips, looked like a little Jewish gangster. That he half expected a cigar to be poking from the corner of its mouth.
    In moments such as these, he wanted nothing more than the peace of an empty house, an end to the polite dismay his children forced onto him.
    It was expected he would join them soon, and find his place at the edge of them, his two daughters and his son with the new baby. But he knew, without a strong sense of wanting to know, that he would not be terribly missed if he stayed put.
    It was not that he didn’t love his children. He did. There were photos all around, photos with the right sorts of smiles, or nearly so. But he had always felt overmatched by the demands of their love, the red wailing and grubby hands and later the expectant gazes and sullen protests. It was Connie to whom he ceded a true concern. And she who had run interference between him and the world of his deficiencies.
    He could hear her, the soft lilt of her voice, as she stood at the stove and hummed a Beatles song, that one about a silver hammer. If Connie had been there, with him in Newton, she would have known how to handle the situation with Mary Martin, how to undo his panic. He wouldn’t have been stoned in the first place, if she had been there. Or he might never have answered the phone. And if she were here, tonight, he would be in the other room with her, with their children, together. She was the one who made that possible, coaxed from him feelings that brought him closer to the center of things.

    Ken shook his head. “That’s a crazy story,” he said. “Crazy.”
    Rodgers said nothing. He had thought to answer, but found he could not. The feeling was not one of drowning, more that the breath had been sucked out of him. He was seized by the urge to tear his new turtleneck off, felt this might ease his breathing, cool his skin, though he merely looked to the table in hope of finding water there.
    â€œWe should probably join the others, huh?” Ken said.
    â€œYes, of course.”
    The young man got up and offered an awkward wave and left.
    Rodgers listened absently to the discussion in the other room. “Where’ve you been?” his son asked Ken, and Ken murmured something and the group laughed. “Maybe we should make him drink wine more often,” his son said. Then the group discussed plans for the next day. A late brunch, a trip to the nautical museum. The baby began to cry and was given over to her mother to be fed. There was a momentary humming. Rodgers knew that his absence was being charted.
    Those last months had been so quiet. The children were gone, sunk into hectic lives and cowed, truthfully, by their mother’s illness, or perhaps afraid to interfere with his grief. They had proved adept, this last year, at matching him silence for silence. Their conversations remained stiff, and a little hollow. They made him wonder: Is this all there is to fatherhood, or have I missed something?
    Connie had been dreadfully quiet. She spent mornings by the sun window, perched in her favorite rocking chair, and afternoons sleeping in the den. She moved with the deliberation of one who hopes to obscure suffering. Rodgers watched her grow gaunt. He felt, in her presence, small and boneless.
    In moments of duress, such as after treatments, he adjusted pillows and