Continental Drift

Until finally, one morning in late May, following a particularly vicious argument the night before, a shouting, name-calling fight that began when Bob arrived home from work without the half gallon of milk she’d called and asked him to bring, and he’d stomped to the refrigerator for a beer and found none there, which meant she’d been drinking his beer in the afternoon with her fat friend from Georgia, the redhead whose name he refused to remember because he hated her voice. They’d gone to sleep shuddering with rage and the knowledge that they both were becoming ugly people.

The next morning, Elaine, as usual, wakes first, showers and dresses quickly and wakes the girls. An hour later, showered, shaved, barefoot and wearing a clean pair of khaki pants and a tee shirt, Bob enters the kitchen, passes the girls at the table and Elaine at the sink without acknowledging them, as if the three are familiar bits of furniture, two chairs and a pole lamp reliably in their accustomed places. He opens the refrigerator door and studies its foggy interior, settles finally on tomato juice and closes the door. He has to step around his wife to get a glass from the cupboard, and as he passes her, he looks down at her high, rounded belly.

“Morning,” he says in a low voice.

“Good morning,” she answers, and she looks at her children as if for approval. Wasn’t Mommy polite to Daddy?

Squinting, Emma watches her father carefully. Her puffy, round face is covered with purple jelly. White underpants and a tank top cling to her sausage-like body, making her look more like a miniaturized sumo wrestler than a Caucasian female child. Ruthie, opposite her at the table, ignores her father altogether. Dressed for school in clean corduroy jeans and a striped short-sleeved jersey, she pretends to read the advertising on the back of the Count Chocula box.

“Hi, kids,” Bob says, pouring himself a glass of juice.

Emma continues squinting up at him, as if he were the sun, while Ruthie seems to go on reading about adult daily nutrition requirements.

Bob puts his face next to Emma’s and, grinning, bugs his eyes out. “What’re you so serious about, Flowerpot?”

When the child lets a tentative smile creep over her thin lips, Bob stands up, tousles her thin hair with one hand and empties the glass of juice into his mouth. Then, to Ruthie: “Hey, don’t you say good morning to your father?”

Slowly, like peeling back a gummed sticker, Ruthie removes her gaze from the cereal box and looks into her father’s eyes. Then she looks down, almost shyly. “Hi, Daddy.”

“You want breakfast?” Elaine asks him.

“Sure. Whatcha got?” He’s at the stove, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Eggs, if you want. Bacon’s all gone.” She squeezes the words from her mouth like tiny, dry seeds.

“Fine.” Pushing open the screened door, Bob steps outside and, coffee cup in hand, strolls barefoot from the trailer across the driveway and gets the Ledger from the box. Opening it to the sports section, he checks out last night’s major league baseball scores.

“Sonofabitch. They’re on a tear,” he says as he enters. “They do this every fucking spring. Go on a tear and get me all lathered up, then blow it in August to the fucking Yankees.” He sits at the table next to Emma and spreads out the paper.

“You swear too easy.”

“Huh?” He takes a sip of coffee and goes on reading.

“You swear too easy. I wish you wouldn’t.” She stands with her back to the sink, holding one egg in each hand, as if about to juggle them.

“Do you still love Mommy?” Ruthie suddenly asks, somber, unafraid, but deeply interested in his answer. Emma looks up and watches his face. Elaine too. They all watch him. What’s going on? Have they made some kind of bet on it?

“What’re you telling her?” Bob asks Elaine.

“Not a thing. She asked me the same question. Before you came out.”

“And what did you say?”

She looks at the eggs in her hands and taps them lightly against one another. “I said I don’t know.”

Bob glares at his wife, then turns to his daughter. “Why do you want to know a thing like that, Ruthie?”

“I heard you and Mommy yelling last night. You woke me up.”

Bob closes the newspaper and crosses his arms in front of him. “Aw, honey, I’m sorry about all that. Of course I still love Mommy.”

“How come you said you didn’t?”

Bob looks at Elaine, who turns away and cracks first one egg into the skillet, then the other. He feels emptied out, a metal drum. He doesn’t want this. No man wants this.

His daughters wait for his answer. He looks down at Emma beside him. What can she know? “Did we wake you up too, Flowerpot?”

Nervously, Emma opens and closes her hands, squeezing jelly between her fingers.

“How come you said you don’t love Mommy anymore?” Ruthie repeats.

“Well, honey, it’s like … sometimes grownups say things they don’t mean. That’s all. They get a little mad about one thing, and then they act real mad about another. It’s like when we first moved here, some of the kids at school were mean to you, and now they’re your friends. They didn’t mean it.”