Page 17 - Demo

advice. “I don’t want you to think I’m controlling you,” she said one day after Kelly had—unwittingly —buried Brix in a pile of stuffies he’d tossed into the child’s crib. “But why don’t you give Gil a call? I think he’s at Pine Valley this morning.”
“Give her space, Kelly. Bailey needs her chance to be a Mom, and you’re always in the way.”
But Kelly tried to avoid golf. And last night, he’d only been trying to help. After a stop at the Quik- mart for diapers, he’d burst in the house with a
list of Saturday father-son activities to share with Bailey, but she’d informed him that Peyton’s Mom’s support group was coming; babies were required accompaniment.
“How am I in the way? I’m only home once every two weeks.”
Peyton was Gil’s wife, Bailey’s bestie, friend-group captain, and local playdate organizer. They had a four-year-old daughter, Katrina; Peyton had a You- Tube channel about the girl in which she gave brash parenting advice that paradoxically included a lot of four-letter words. She teased Kelly incessantly about his fatherly devotion. “Them man-titties
This was the seventy-two-year-old’s answer to every- thing: get away. Kelly recalled that, as a toddler himself, he had pulled on the man’s trousers one day when Arnie was exiting the kitchen door, his dinner on a red plastic tray, en route to something urgent in the garage.
of yours don’t give any milk, now do they?” she’d hollered at him once, giving his nipples a furious squeeze. “So why don’t you just leave the Mommy- ing to the Moms?”
“Play?” the man had answered. “I’ve got projects to do.”
In the preceding months, Kelly’s obsession with the child, as Bailey soon labelled it, became a family topic. If he picked up the baby, she would admonish him for being too rough and forgetting to support the neck. If he tossed the child a ball, he was treating him like a dog. If he fed him, it was too fast. He couldn’t put on a onesie or even burp the infant without calling down a landslide of comments on his head. Eventually Bailey just said it, flat out. “Why don’t you just leave the baby to me, Kelly?”
“No, you can’t. You’re too little.” The man had paused. “The garage, Kelly. It’s my space. You need to under- stand.”
His own father, Arnie, who had spent Kelly’s child- hood hiding out in the garage, backed up his daugh- ter-in-law.
Kelly sipped his coffee in the kitchen and looked out at the checkerboard of backyards and fences that stretched left and right. All was quiet—the normal weekend hubbub of suburban family living hadn’t yet got under way. The swing set that Bailey’s brother had installed a few weeks earlier looked abandoned as the chains moved faintly in the breeze. It was where the boy had first said the word. It had been
“It doesn’t matter. You’re in the way, I’m telling you. Go play golf or something. That club champion—don’t you play with him?”
“I want to play with you.”
“I can help you.”
Bailey showed little sympathy, too, for his practically fatherless childhood. “Really, Kel,” she said one day. “What father ever spends time with his children?”
a hot summer morning in August and the pure blue above that went on for eternity and the child swing- ing and laughing. Little Brix smiled at Kelly and said it. “Da-da.”
Was he really such an awful Dad?
~
The fight had come upon them like something external, unfamiliar. Fate, maybe. They’d eaten their take-out in silence and watched their shows, then gone to sleep. Brixton woke at two a.m. and Kelly got out of bed.
(continued on next page)
10