“Where’s everyone else?” he said.
“Your daddy’s drinking buddies, they gone off drinking. They going to have a memorial fishing trip off a bridge, in his memory.” Mrs. Higgler poured the remaining coffee out of her bucket-sized traveling mug into the sink and replaced it with the steaming contents of a freshly brewed jug of coffee.
Mrs. Dunwiddy licked her fingers clean with a small purple tongue, and she shuffled over to where Fat Charlie was sitting, his food as yet untouched. When he was a little boy he had truly believed that Mrs. Dunwiddy was a witch. Not a nice witch, more the kind kids had to push into ovens to escape from. This was the first time he’d seen her in more than twenty years, and he was still having to quell an inner urge to yelp and hide under the table.
“I seen plenty people die,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “In my time. Get old enough, you will see it your own self too. Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.” She paused. “Still. I never thought it would happen to your daddy.” And she shook her head.
“What was he like?” asked Fat Charlie. “When he was young?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy looked at him through her thick, thick spectacles, and her lips pursed, and she shook her head. “Before my time,” was all she said. “Eat your cow foot.”
Fat Charlie sighed, and he began to eat.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, AND THEY WERE ALONE IN THE HOUSE.
“Where you going to sleep tonight?” asked Mrs. Higgler.
“I thought I’d get a motel room,” said Fat Charlie.
“When you got a perfectly good bedroom here? And a perfectly good house down the road. You haven’t even looked at it yet. You ask me, your father would have wanted you to stay there.”
“I’d rather be on my own. And I don’t think I feel right about sleeping at my dad’s place.”
“Well, it’s not my money I’m throwin’ away,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You’re goin’ to have to decide what you’re goin’ to do with your father’s house anyway. And all his things.”
“I don’t care,” said Fat Charlie. “We could have a garage sale. Put them on eBay. Haul them to the dump.”
“Now, what kind of an attitude is that?” She rummaged in a kitchen drawer and pulled out a front door key with a large paper label attached to it. “He give me a spare key when he move,” she said. “In case he lose his, or lock it inside, or something. He used to say, he could forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his neck. When he sell the house next door, he tell me, don’t you worry, Callyanne, I won’t go far; he’d live in that house as long as I remember, but now he decide it’s too big and he need to move house…” and still talking she walked him down to the curb and drove them down several streets in her maroon station wagon, until they reached a one-story wooden house.
She unlocked the front door and they went inside.
The smell was familiar: faintly sweet, as if chocolate chip cookies had been baked there the last time the kitchen was used, but that had been a long time ago. It was too hot in there. Mrs. Higgler led them into the little sitting room, and she turned on a window-fitted air-conditioning unit. It rattled and shook, and smelled like a wet sheepdog, and moved the warm air around.
There were stacks of books piled around a decrepit sofa Fat Charlie remembered from his childhood, and there were photographs in frames: one, in black-and-white, of Fat Charlie’s mother when she was young, with her hair up on top of her head all black and shiny, wearing a sparkly dress; beside it, a photo of Fat Charlie himself, aged perhaps five or six years old, standing beside a mirrored door, so it looked at first glance as if two little Fat Charlies, side by side, were staring seriously out of the photograph at you.
Fat Charlie picked up the top book in the pile. It was a book on Italian architecture.
“Was he interested in architecture?”
“Passionate about it. Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Mrs. Higgler shrugged and sipped her coffee.
Fat Charlie opened the book and saw his father’s name neatly written on the first page. He closed the book.
“I never knew him,” said Fat Charlie. “Not really.”
“He was never an easy man to know,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I knew him for what, nearly sixty years? And I didn’t know him.”
“You must have known him when he was a boy.”
Mrs. Higgler hesitated. She seemed to be remembering. Then she said, very quietly, “I knew him when I was a girl.”
Fat Charlie felt that he should be changing the subject, so he pointed to the photo of his mother. “He’s got Mum’s picture there,” he said.
Mrs Higgler took a slurp of her coffee. “Them take it on a boat,” she said. “Back before you was born. One of those boats that you had dinner on, and they would sail out three miles, out of territorial waters, and then there was gamblin’. Then they come back. I don’t know if they still run those boats. Your mother say it was the first time she ever eat steak.”
Fat Charlie tried to imagine what his parents had been like before he was born.
“He always was a good-looking man,” mused Mrs. Higgler, as if she were reading his mind. “All the way to the end. He had a smile that could make a girl squeeze her toes. And he was always such a very fine dresser. All the ladies loved him.”
Fat Charlie knew the answer before he asked the question. “Did you…?”
“What kind of a question is that to be asking a respectable widow-woman?” She sipped her coffee. Fat Charlie waited for the answer. She said, “I kissed him. Long, long time ago, before he ever met your mother. He was a fine, fine kisser. I hoped that he’d call, take me dancing again, instead he vanish. He was gone for what, a year? Two years? And by the time he come back, I was married to Mr. Higgler, and he’s bringing back your mother. Is out on the islands he meet her.”
“Were you upset?”
“I was a married woman.” Another sip of coffee. “And you couldn’t hate him. Couldn’t even be properly angry with him. And the way he look at her—damn, if he did ever look at me like that I could have died happy. You know, at their wedding, is me was your mother’s matron of honor?”
“I didn’t know.”
The air-conditioning unit was starting to bellow out cold air. It still smelled like a wet sheepdog.
He asked, “Do you think they were happy?”
“In the beginning.” She hefted her huge thermal mug, seemed about to take a sip of coffee and then changed her mind. “In the beginning. But not even she could keep his attention for very long. He had so much to do. He was very busy, your father.”
Fat Charlie tried to work out if Mrs. Higgler was joking or not. He couldn’t tell. She didn’t smile, though.
“So much to do? Like what? Fish off bridges? Play dominoes on the porch? Await the inevitable invention of karaoke? He wasn’t busy. I don’t think he ever did a day’s work in all the time I knew him.”
“You shouldn’t say that about your father!”
“Well, it’s true. He was crap. A rotten husband and a rotten father.”
“Of course he was!” said Mrs Higgler, fiercely, “But you can’t judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god.”