marry his pregnant girlfriend, and my mother had little reason to defend him, she told my older sister and me that there were many different kinds of intelligence and stupidity, and that Greg Liddiard—her former boyfriend, poetry pal, whatever he was—hardly had the market cornered on any of them.
My father, by his own admission, felt pretty stupid himself. He wanted both me and Elise to understand he’d been blindsided. You think you know a person, he said. You think you have a good idea of what’s going on in your own home. Once he understood the real story, he said, he was all done playing the dupe. Less than two minutes after Greg Liddiard ran shirtless out the door and down our long, icy driveway to his van, which was still parked in the curb of the cul-de-sac, my father used his cell phone to call my mother on hers.
“She must have seen the number,” he told me, still incredulous. “Okay? Veronica? She must have known it was me.” He clearly remembered that my mother’s hello did not sound particularly guarded, not particularly friendly or unfriendly. She did not sound like a liar, a betrayer, a thief of his life energy, of his very life. She sounded, he said, matter-of-fact.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re home?” There was activity in the background, people shouting. At first, he pictured her subbing at the elementary school or the junior high, answering her cell phone in front of a room of bored or hostile young suburbanites as they misbehaved and switched identities and asked when their real teacher would come back. But it was Saturday. My mother was working her volunteer shift at the food pantry for the homeless shelter. How altruistic! He imagined her stacking cans of soup, wearing an apron, a self-righteous expression, and also her wedding ring.
“Yes,” he said. “I am home, Natalie. And I think you better come home, too. In fact, you better come home right away.”
She must have picked up on his tone. He said she was silent for a long stretch. Even with the background noise, he could hear her breathing on the other end.
“Yes,” she said finally. “We need to talk.”
He laughed. He actually laughed. He was nervous, he said, freaked out, standing in their bedroom, looking in the mirror at his own middle-aged face and realizing just how much was about to change. My parents had been married for twenty-six years. My mother was a junior in college when they met, my father in his second year of law school. Their union had survived early parenthood, a flooded basement, and the deaths of both of their parents. They had been allies against my sister’s first boyfriend, Kyle, who had been nice enough at first, but who threatened to set himself on fire in our driveway after my sister broke up with him. My parents were married when Reagan was president, when the first Bush was president, when Clinton was president, and then the second Bush as well. They had planned vacations, funerals, and my sister’s wedding, together.
“Oh my dear,” he said, almost tenderly, his voice wistful, or at least it was each of the several times he told this story to me. “Oh Natalie,” he said to my wayward mother. “I’m afraid you have no idea.”
From this point on, the story gets even more slippery. Though unsolicited, my mother and father have each given me a different account of the Day of the Sleeping Roofer, and what happened after she came home. My father said he confronted her with the note, the shirt. My mother said he didn’t need to. He said she sat down at the dining room table, still wearing her long wool coat. She did not appear exactly devastated. If anything, he said, she seemed disoriented, her big eyes staring at the striped wallpaper and crown molding that she herself had picked out and nailed on, as if she’d never seen them before. My father repeatedly emphasized that she looked a little demented—her hat crooked over her curly hair, her cheeks bright red from the cold. He said she didn’t have anything to say for herself. He said he watched her stare at the wallpaper for a while, her runny nose unwiped, and then he went upstairs to get his travel bag, which was, conveniently, still packed, ready to go. He carried it back downstairs, past my catatonic mother, and out the side door to the garage, his heart, he said, a brick