Electrical Storm
A tin chandelier radiated light across the farm table, reflecting the dings and nicks under the varnish. Seating in our kitchen was an eclectic mix, and no two chairs matched. Dad’s favorite was a high-back upholstered in velvet. After being on his feet and bending over a worktable during the day, he’d take two aspirin and rest his lower back against a heating pad. An auction guide and a pile of mail lay sprawled in front of him. I brought him cold can number two of Iron City Beer. As he popped the top, I leaned into the back frame of a Shaker chair and strategized my approach.
Being nineteen was dodgy. No longer a child, I still needed permission for Travis to visit. It’s not like I could hide him for four days—not easily, anyway. I determined that a direct approach would be best, but waited until Dad swallowed enough gulps of beer. When he neared the bottom, I ambushed. “Could a friend of mine who’s a boy visit for the Fourth of July weekend?”
Midswallow he unnaturally jerked. “This weekend? What boy?”
“One I met in North Carolina. His name is Travis, and he lives in Kentucky.”
Dad pushed his auction guide aside. With his alert detection turned on high, he tightened his eyelids and contorted his mouth.
Initiating damage control, I clarified. “He’s not a boyfriend. Just a friend.”
“Rachael, any boy that drives from Kentucky to Canton will be looking for more than friendship.”
My tongue brushed across my crooked eyetooth and I hiccupped. Placing a hand on Dad’s, I patted down his concern. “Trust me. Travis is a friend.”
He didn’t look convinced, and I hesitated. I hadn’t told anyone about Travis being gay. “His preference for romance falls in the same category as Mom’s.”
Dad grimaced. “He likes older women?”
Steadying eye contact, I said, “Dad, he’s gay.”
Polishing off the last few drips from the bottom of the can, he went silent for a beat. “We’re tight on space with Trudy in the house.”
I picked at furniture polish stains on my palm. “I noticed.”
Our normally meticulous home had exploded with medicine balls, jump ropes, and a Suzanne Somers’s Thigh Master. The butcher-block island was a clutter of herbal bottles with funky names like bilberry fruit, wormwood, and black walnut hull. They reminded me of ingredients for a witch’s brew, and I had vowed not to consume anything Trudy offered.
Dad put the tab top inside his can and rattled it. “I agreed to let your mom and her friend stay in the studio above the shop.”
“I’m surprised you’re okay with that.”
His eyes closed. “I don’t know what I’m okay with anymore.”
“No one’s at Trudy’s; maybe Travis could stay there. If she okays it.”
Coming to terms with his estranged wife paying a surprise visit had sputtered and clunked the gears in Dad’s head, sending the life he’d adjusted to without her amuck. Now Mom and her “girlfriend” were in Canton for a celestial summer of horoscope plotting, levitation, and channeling. Neither Dad nor I knew how to react. On the plus side, the complicated female dynamics in our lives weakened his normally regimented focus on rules and regulations.
I had an ulterior motive for having Travis stay at Trudy’s that I didn’t mention to Dad. In addition to providing me with cerebral solace, I thought he and I could kibosh the tidy thief folklore. If he stayed there without incident, we could convince Dad and Trudy that the apartment was safe for habitation, giving Dad and me some elbowroom to adjust to my gypsy mom.
“When’s this boy coming?” Dad asked.
I bear-hugged his neck. “You’re gonna love Travis.”
EDMOND PUT THE SOLDERING gun down and took off his protective glasses. The garden design of the Tiffany chandelier hanging above our heads reflected the gleam of the overhead light, and blocks of color danced on the worktable. Green-saturated hues that mixed in darks and lights reminded me of the pond behind our house before dawn when sleepy daylight woke the grasses and reflected the algae that clung to its perimeter.
Midway through freshman year, my shoulder had dislocated when I fell out of a handcrafted milk crate dorm loft bunk onto linoleum. Besides a small lump on my collarbone that never went away, it had healed but left one odd quirk. The muscles near my shoulder sensed stormy weather. I didn’t need the weatherman to tell me it was going to rain. My dodgy shoulder had become as precise a predictor as a barometer, and as the day progressed, the ache had strengthened.
By midafternoon, gusty breezes bounced the underside veins of the aged buckeye tree leaves in front of O’Brien’s How’s Your Art, and above, thick gray clouds collided as an approaching darkness engulfed the sky. A strike of lightning cracked. Like the rolling storm, my mind was turbulent, and I struggled with the knowledge that my mother had released her sexuality and that it favored her feminine side. If she was in love with Betts, causing a rift would be tricky.
Dad had left to give an estimate on a scratched dining table caused by the owner’s daughter sliding a heavy twig basket across its surface. When distant thunder rumbled, Edmond and I moved to stand between the workshop’s open barn doors.
I taxed a large quantity of brain cells in an attempt to spin the “new her” positively. Maybe Mom would encourage me to find my soul mate, and I began to formulate a side agenda—asking her to take me for my first gynie visit, but I hadn’t come up with a smooth approach. When I returned to college, I was going to lose my virginity, and I figured I needed to be on birth control for when the moment struck.
Edmond and I enjoyed our break and continued to watch the horizon.
“The Tiffany is exquisite. Who brought it in?”
He drew a finger across his chin. “Geneva.”
“Geneva McCarty?” I snorted. “Does Dad know?”
Rubbing at the calluses on the underside of his palm, he shrugged.
Nearby, the sky erupted with a rumble. I wrinkled my nose. “You and I both know they don’t get along. If their shopping carts passed inside the Valu-King, they wouldn’t speak. If he finds out we’re restoring something for her, he’ll go mental.”
Like eagle feathers, the layered clouds moved swiftly, and my mind raced, dislodging my earliest memory of Geneva. Before the holidays—I must’ve been five or six—she had rung our doorbell. Mom and I were busy icing the wall of a gingerbread house. I devoured the purple gumdrop chimney while Mom answered the door. “Geneva?” her voice cracked.
Dressed in an icing-covered apron that matched Mom’s, I peered around a corner at the open front door. With whirling snow behind her, she stepped past my mother and into our foyer. Geneva handed me a brown-paper-wrapped package. It was heavy and square, like a book. “I want your daddy to have this, and someday it will be yours.”
Mom wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ll see that John gets it.”
Before Geneva left, she said, “It’s something that should be kept in the family. Somewhere safe.” Cupping my chin in her fur-gloved hand, she winked. Mom closed the door behind her and took the package from me, placing it on Dad’s rolltop desk. While she poured herself some brandy from a bottle in the kitchen pantry, I snuck over and placed the package under the tree.
A boom thundered close by. “Work pays the bills. Besides,” he said, patting my back, “we have extra help for the summer. Repairing that chandelier gives you experience with grinding glass and soldering.”
“What happened between them, anyway? I mean Geneva is at least thirty years older than Dad. Did they have—relations?”
Edmond rattled his head. “Rachael.”
“With the whole Trudy thing and all, I thought maybe Dad—you know.”
“Phooey.”
A fat raindrop fell on my cheek, then another on my shoulder. “Did a check bounce? Or did we screw up a painting for her, or what?”
The wind swayed branches, threatening to shake loose leaves into a shower of confetti. “It isn’t my business, how it all started.”
“Come on, Edmond, I’m nineteen. What’s the big secret?”
Supersized raindrops splattered the pavers and in seconds turned into a downpour. We stepped back. He slid the barn doors closed, leaving them cracked open just a few inches. “It’s not my place.”
NOTE TO SELF
Travis’s accommodations have been secured. YAY!
Geneva McCarty. Is she the client from hell, and Dad just doesn’t want to deal, or is there something more?
I’m a big girl. If I’m going to do the deed, I need to take precautionary heed. Do medical tables really come equipped with stirrups?