Page 16 - Demo

Kelly opened his eyes and blinked against the late- them—that he’d made a decision.
summer sunlight that filled the living room. The couch had the habit of wrapping bits and pieces of itself around his sleeping body so that getting up was like trying to get out of those rope nets they had at Camp Winnipetaski when he was a boy. The teenage counsellor that would slowly climb up the net, after watching Kelly flounder in front of his campmates just long enough, always asked the question. “What,” the acne-faced adult-in-training would say with dis- gust, “is your problem?”
He would leave. For good.
Kelly sat up with a grunt, yawned, and stared dully around the living room. Bailey had said the same words to him last night. What is your problem, Kelly? It was the tone of her voice; disdainful with her lips curled like whips ready to strike. As if being married to him was an act of public shame, a burden, a source of pain. Her question had supplied its own answer: he didn’t have a problem, he was the problem. He stood and promptly tripped over one of Brixton’s baby rattles, barely avoiding cracking his head on the glass coffee table in front of the couch. He sat back down, praying that he hadn’t woken them up. It was Satur- day, he had two whole days to spend with his son, and he should not be feeling this way.
En route to the kitchen for coffee, he placed Brixton’s rattle on the counter, but not before soaping it up and giving it a quick wash. You couldn’t be too careful with germs, and he wanted to assert himself in his fa- therly role as much as he could. The time he’d spent on the road, in airplanes, in motels—sales rep for a farming machinery firm—were all becoming lost op- portunities for him. He just wanted time with his son.
It had been a bitter fight. In the solitary silence of three a.m. suburbia, their anger had finally suc- cumbed to their parental fatigue. She reproached his constant interference with the baby, and he accused her of not allowing him to be a father. She went on to say such hurtful things—he didn’t want to think of
Until the birth of his son, he hadn’t minded the trav- elling. Ten days on the job selling farm machinery, three days at home. That had been his life and he was happy. He liked airports and airplanes and the feeling of being on the move. “I’m only here until Monday,” he would tell clients in Jefferson City. “I’ll be in Topeka until the 10th.” The impermanence of his situation rendered him garrulous and cheerful, the kind of traveller that frequent fliers avoid. Yet his earnestness, his genuine kindness, and his enthusi- asm for farm machinery—later transferred to his son —won over most who simply didn’t have the heart to ask him to stop.
9
it hadn’t been for Bailey. At his elbow for all of his slip-ups, she commented and directed and gave him
Win the Game
He gave the rattle a gentle, half-hearted shake. Brix- ton, at thirteen months, would grab two rattles and shake them desperately, before angrily tossing them across the floor as if they’d disappointed him. Just the past week, he’d told that story to agricultural fair vendors in Des Moines, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kan- sas, even to the young woman, barely in her twenties, who sat beside him on the plane home. “I don’t have children,” she’d said at last, picking up her phone. “Well,” Kelly had said to her. “It’s the only story I’ve got. I don’t get time to make any others.”
Enthusiasm is a fickle thing, he thought, in the face of failure. Bailey wasn’t just shouting empty words. He had struggled with his duties towards the child. But what father hadn’t dropped the contents of a diaper on the bed or accidentally clipped a tiny toenail too short? The latter had resulted in some blood, yes, and plenty of wails, but these things happened. You had to take your mistakes in stride and with humour, something he would have been able to achieve if
david PatteRson