“Oh. That’s a nice law,” said Rosie. “I wish we had something like that in England.” Rosie had never been out of the U.K., if you didn’t count a Club 18-30 holiday to an island in, she was fairly certain, the Mediterranean. She had warm brown eyes and a good heart, even if geography was not her strongest suit.
“It’s not a nice law,” said Fat Charlie. “It’s not a law at all. He made it up. Most states don’t even have school on Presidents’ Day, and even for the ones that do, there is no tradition of going to school on Presidents’ Day dressed as your favorite president. Kids dressed as presidents do not get big bags of candy by an act of Congress, nor is your popularity in the years ahead, all through middle school and high school, decided entirely by which president you decided to dress as—the average kids dress as the obvious presidents, the Lincolns and Washingtons and Jeffersons, but the ones who would become popular, they dressed as John Quincy Adams or Warren Gamaliel Harding, or someone like that. And it’s bad luck to talk about it before the day. Or rather it isn’t, but he said it was.”
“Boys and girls dress up as presidents?”
“Oh yes. Boys and girls. So I spent the week before Presidents’ Day reading everything there was to read about presidents in the World Book Encyclopedia, trying to choose the right one.”
“Didn’t you ever suspect that he was pulling your leg?”
Fat Charlie shook his head. “It’s not something you think about, when my dad starts to work you over. He’s the finest liar you’ll ever meet. He’s convincing.”
Rosie took a sip of her Chardonnay. “So which President did you go to school as?”
“Taft. He was the twenty-seventh president. I wore a brown suit my father had found somewhere, with the legs all rolled up and a pillow stuffed down the front. I had a painted-on moustache. My dad took me to school himself that day. I walked in so proudly. The other kids just screamed and pointed, and somewhere in there I locked myself in a cubicle in the boys’ room and cried. They wouldn’t let me go home to change. I went through the day like that. It was Hell.”
“You should have made something up,” said Rosie. “You were going to a costume party afterwards or something. Or just told them the truth.”
“Yeah,” said Fat Charlie meaningfully and gloomily, remembering.
“What did your dad say, when you got home?”
“Oh, he hooted with laughter. Chuckled and chortled and, and chittered and all that. Then he told me that maybe they didn’t do that Presidents’ Day stuff anymore. Now, why didn’t we go down to the beach together and look for mermaids?”
“Look for…mermaids?”
“We’d go down to the beach, and walk along it, and he’d be as embarrassing as any human being on the face of this planet has ever been—he’d start singing, and he’d start doing a shuffling sort of sand-dance on the sand, and he’d just talk to people as he went—people he didn’t even know, people he’d never met, and I hated it, except he told me there were mermaids out there in the Atlantic, and if I looked fast enough and sharp enough, I’d see one.
“ ‘There!’ he’d say. ‘Did you see her? She was a big ol’ redhead, with a green tail.’ And I looked, and I looked, but I never did.”
He shook his head. Then he took a handful of mixed nuts from the bowl on the table and began to toss them into his mouth, chomping down on them as if each nut was a twenty-year-old indignity that could never be erased.
“Well,” said Rosie, brightly, “I think he sounds lovely, a real character! We have to get him to come over for the wedding. He’d be the life and soul of the party.”
Which, Fat Charlie explained, after briefly choking on a Brazil nut, was really the last thing you wanted at your wedding, after all, wasn’t it, your father turning up and being the life and soul of the party? He said that his father was, he had no doubt, still the most embarrassing person on God’s Green Earth. He added that he was perfectly happy not to have seen the old goat for several years, and that the best thing his mother ever did was to leave his father and come to England to stay with her Aunt Alanna. He buttressed this by stating categorically that he was damned, double-damned, and quite possibly even thrice-damned if he was going to invite his father. In fact, said Fat Charlie in closing, the best thing about getting married was not having to invite his dad to their wedding.
And then Fat Charlie saw the expression on Rosie’s face and the icy glint in her normally friendly eyes, and he corrected himself hurriedly, explaining that he meant the second-best, but it was already much too late.
“You’ll just have to get used to the idea,” said Rosie. “After all, a wedding is a marvelous opportunity for mending fences and building bridges. It’s your opportunity to show him that there are no hard feelings.”
“But there are hard feelings,” said Fat Charlie. “Lots.”
“Do you have an address for him?” asked Rosie. “Or a phone number? You probably ought to phone him. A letter’s a bit impersonal when your only son is getting married…you are his only son, aren’t you? Does he have e-mail?”
“Yes. I’m his only son. I have no idea if he has e-mail or not. Probably not,” said Fat Charlie. Letters were good things, he thought. They could get lost in the post for a start.
“Well, you must have an address or a phone number.”
“I don’t,” said Fat Charlie, honestly. Maybe his father had moved away. He could have left Florida and gone somewhere they didn’t have telephones. Or addresses.
“Well,” said Rosie, sharply, “who does?”
“Mrs. Higgler,” said Fat Charlie, and all the fight went out of him.
Rosie smiled sweetly. “And who is Mrs. Higgler?” she asked.
“Friend of the family,” said Fat Charlie. “When I was growing up, she used to live next door.”
He had spoken to Mrs. Higgler several years earlier, when his mother was dying. He had, at his mother’s request, telephoned Mrs. Higgler to pass on the message to Fat Charlie’s father, and to tell him to get in touch. And several days later there had been a message on Fat Charlie’s answering machine, left while he was at work, in a voice that was unmistakably his father’s, even if it did sound rather older and a little drunk.
His father said that it was not a good time, and that business affairs would be keeping him in America. And then he added that, for everything, Fat Charlie’s mother was a damn fine woman. Several days later a vase of assorted flowers had been delivered to the hospital ward. Fat Charlie’s mother had snorted when she read the card.
“Thinks he can get around me that easily?” she said. “He’s got another think coming, I can tell you that.” But she had had the nurse put the flowers in a place of honor by her bed and, several times since, had asked Fat Charlie if he had heard anything about his father coming and visiting her before it was all over.
Fat Charlie said he hadn’t. He grew to hate the question, and his answer, and the expression on her face when he told her that, no, his father wasn’t coming.
The worst day, in Fat Charlie’s opinion, was the day that the doctor, a gruff little man, had taken Fat Charlie aside and told him that it would not be long now, that his mother was fading fast, and it had become a matter of keeping her comfortable until the end.