A pause. Raymond could feel himself stuck in that feeling again. The one that said he was hurting his father without meaning to. So he volunteered more in an effort to make things better.
“I’m just making some new friends is all.”
“Glad to hear that. So, other boys, then?”
“No,” Raymond said, wishing he could leave it at that, but knowing he probably couldn’t.
“So it is a girl.”
“I don’t think I’d call her a girl. She’s over ninety.”
“Oh,” his father said again. In fact, his father said “oh” a lot. Words did not seem to come easily to the man, nor in great quantities. “Why does your mom think otherwise?”
“I don’t know. I told her it’s just a friend thing, but she won’t listen. She just figures I have a girlfriend but I don’t want to admit it.”
“So you’ve told her what it isn’t but not what it is?”
“Pretty much. Yeah. I don’t think she’d understand. It’s hard to explain why I like to be around this new friend. I mean, at first it was just because she needed me to be. She’s blind, and she needs some help, and the person who was helping her just got killed. But that’s not the only thing. I like spending time around her. We talk.”
His father nodded a few times but said nothing.
Their tea and champagne arrived. They sipped in silence for another minute or two.
“Since when do you drink tea?” his father asked. As if he had only just awakened and noticed it there.
“Pretty much the last couple of weeks.”
“Oh.”
Then another silence. But this one was different. His father was trying to fight his way up through it, and Raymond could feel that. Feel his struggle. He wondered how much of the time that was true. How many of their silences were not fully voluntary on his father’s end of things.
Maybe they shared more in common than Raymond had realized.
“When I was a little younger than you,” his father began, “maybe in my early teens, there was a guy in our neighborhood. Used to walk his dog down to the playground. The dog had a ton of energy, so the other boys used to play with the dog, but I used to sit on the bench and talk to the man. The Colonel, we called him, because he used to be a colonel in the army. Career military, retired. He was an older guy. Fifty, maybe. Maybe even sixty. I liked him because he talked to me like a man, not like a kid. And because he seemed to have more of a handle on life than the other adults I knew. So maybe it’s something like that?”
“Yeah!” Raymond said, realizing too late that he was nearly shouting. “Yeah, almost exactly like that. I listen to her talk, and I feel like she understands the world. How to live in it, you know? Then I listen to other people talk, and it sounds like they’re just faking it.”
Except his father hadn’t been faking it. At least, not just now, as he’d told Raymond the story about the Colonel. But Raymond wasn’t quite sure how to wrap that into words and acknowledge it.
“I think your mom is capable of understanding that.”
“I’d hate to say it to her.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s one of the people who’s just faking it.”
“I see. Well, you’re a thoughtful young man. You’ll work it out in your own way.”
Raymond almost asked his father why he’d waited so long to pay Raymond a genuine compliment, but he couldn’t bear to see the man’s face fall again, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
His father pulled out his wallet and selected two twenties, sliding them over the table to Raymond.
“Thank you,” Raymond said.
“Don’t flaunt it in front of Ed.”
“No. I won’t.”
Raymond had already decided that if his father gave him money, he would order an omelet to take out. To take back with him at the end of the day. Spinach, tomato, and cheese. Any kind of cheese. With sour cream for the top.
He could warm it up for her in her oven.
Maybe it would be more food temptation than she could resist.
“Come in, Raymond,” she said through the door.
Raymond opened the locks with his keys. Or . . . her keys, really. But lately they had stayed with him.
She was sitting up on the couch, which seemed like shockingly good news to Raymond. She had changed her clothes—changed into the red housedress with the pinstripes. Her hair was clean and braided.
Then he remembered that Isabel and the kids had visited her the day before. She had probably put herself together nicely for their visit. Whether she had done so again since, Raymond couldn’t tell.