Calicoed

My old man and his band of codgers are biking the Appalachian Trail. This, apparently, is Guinness-like. The average age of the bastards is something so old I can’t recall.

     I’m here in his house waiting for him to call. The old coot and his congregation of geezer friends are due into Hellfire, West Virginia any time now, where there is civilization, a payphone. He’s going to call his wife and check in. His wife’s the one with everything planned out. My father and I being estranged doesn’t sit well with her. She tells me if only I could know the man she knows. She’s talking about a Renaissance-type recovered-thing, capable of leading a platoon of brittle-legged yahoos on mountain bikes through rocky terrain and into record breaking immortality. And she asks, “Do you know why he’s doing this? Do you?”

     His wife called—all hopped-up and bewildered—my house three counties over, where I’d been ironing cotton pants. Her cat had run away and she was afraid of a Doberman a few doors down and couldn’t leave the house and miss my father’s call. By the time I arrived she was standing outside in warmer clothes than the late spring weather required, half in porch light, half in darkness, clutching the cordless phone and some loose-leaf paper. I was to make Missing Cat signs, she explained, and described him, the calico-colored cat named Moonshine. She was going to have a look around the neighborhood. “If the phone rings,” she said, “by Heaven’s, answer it; it’ll be Dad.” I’d started in with protests until she got all adder-eyed and grumpy and scurried away saying, “Don’t break my heart.”

     So I’m settled in the kitchen where a glass of iced tea waits next to a newspaper clipping—poorly clipped—from the local rag. The article I’ll not read is accompanied by a picture of my father who is leaning against his mountain bike with a triumphant grin crawling out of his muffled beard. He is wearing some co-fangled helmet and tight biker gear sizes too small and this image sends me to the wall-papered kitchen wall to unplug the phone cord and then root out some bourbon I knew I’d find cowering behind the phonebooks on the high shelf the wife can’t easily reach. The stuff melts the ice in the tea. Then I set to work on those Missing Cat flyers trying to describe what calico looks like.

     There are kinds of kindness better suited for people different than my father and me. It takes heart to be the woman my father’s wife is. I figure he already called earlier tonight and his wife already spoke with him and then came up with this Missing Cat business, begging him to call back in fifteen minutes or whatever—when she knew I’d be here—to surprise him, and we’d talk for the first time in some time and he could tell me that he was doing this biking thing for me as a way to cycle out the bad blood that was and pump in some over-arching good here now; Can’t you see? And his wife believed I could see, bless her.

     Of course, I’d let his collect call catch the dial tone.

     From the kitchen window I can see Moonshine wending through the petunia. My best guess is that my father’s wife is crouching behind the hedge too curious to miss the moment. I couldn’t say if she’s close enough to hear anything from where she is except maybe inflection. I drink my tea slowly, appreciating it, letting my father’s wife really feel the burn in her legs, writing, he looks like swirled butterscotch and fudge.

     When I’m good and done I pick up the phone and talk proudly into the dead to my old man.