New Risk Fiction by Quinn Dalton
There
was a woman that summer whose boyfriend nearly killed a guy for her. She was a waitress at Angel’s Tavern on College Street. I saw her during the last visit I had with my father before he left. The bar was deserted by then, most of the university students gone for summer break. My father had taken me there to tell me he was leaving, too. I wanted to say something to make him change his mind, but I could think of nothing, and so I stared at the yellow-and-purple flashing jukebox which kept playing the same Kool & The Gang song since no one had put any money in. My father ordered a beer, a soda, and a basket of onion rings when the waitress came to check on us. She was dark-haired with arched, movieperfect eyebrows that made her look heartbroken even as she smiled down on us. She was small and bow-lipped and pale; she looked like a character out of Jane Austen’s imagination, my favorite writer right then. I was 14 and feeling the ache of being born at the wrong time ‚— too late for corsets and carriages, parlors and parasols, for fathers who wore suits to breakfast and remained constant to their wives. “You want anything else?” my father asked me. He winked at the waitress, and she smiled back. He was doing the indulgent daddy routine, and she was eating it up. He had a good ten years on her; even I could see that. I hesitated. By the time my father had finally gotten up that day, holding his head, my mother had left for work and the sky was already sun-white. We’d split the last of a box of Froot Loops and then he’d suggested we go
48 O.Henry
August 2012
downtown. I didn’t want to say no to him or to this girl, who was a woman as far as I was concerned, just exactly the kind of woman I wanted to be — soft-spoken and sweet and too delicate for the heat, flushed all the time, sweat pearling on her upper lip. But I shook my head, and my father, watching her walk away, said, “What’re you gonna do all summer?” I knew he was asking out of curiosity only. “Help Mom out, I guess. Hang with my friends.” I kept the friends part vague; I only had two girlfriends, and neither of them were within biking distance. I wanted my father to believe my life was more exciting and complex than it actually was; as if I could intrigue him enough to stick around. “That’s good,” he said. “You should help Mom out.” He took a drink from his bottle, and looked past me through the front windows, which let in the fuzzy, washed-out afternoon light. “This town is dead,” he said. “I like to think of it as quiet,” I said, exactly echoing my mother’s response to this frequent complaint. My father shook his head, then pinched the bridge of his nose and smiled down at the table. The skin of his hands was cracked and leathery from years of working in the sun. “You two are going to be fine,” he said. “Better off, as a matter of fact.” The waitress brought the onion rings and my father ate, and we both watched her wiping down tables. No one had come in and used them for the entire time we’d been there. I wondered, but decided not to ask, what my father’s plans were. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction — a stand I felt The Art & Soul of Greensboro