Read Online Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - Free Book Online Page B

address on the white front—Father somebody or other, it seemed, Albany, New York. He slipped a finger into the breast pocket of his shirt, extracted a single stamp, licked it, and put it in the corner. He placed the envelope at the edge of our table as if a courier might momentarily snatch it away.
    “Oh, it’s changed out here,” the woman with the sweater told him. “It’s not like it was in the forties.”
    “It is in my dreams,” Billy told them. “Just the same.” He winked, ran his hand through his hair. “But then again, so am I.”
    “Oh, aren’t we all?” the sweater lady and her friend both said at once.
    Billy smiled at them with something like gratitude, as if he could not imagine being seated beside two more pleasant and perceptive women. He raised his water glass. “God bless dreams,” he said, and the ladies returned his toast. If there were shoes to be had, I suspect he could have sold them a dozen.
    When the waiter brought our sandwiches he looked at the empty space before Billy with some perplexity and then quickly shifted the extra place mat at our table to Billy’s place. Throughout the letter writing and the simultaneous conversation with the ladies, my father had been sitting back, grinning, watching his cousin be himself and delighting in it—there was no other word—delighting in him. I glimpsed for the first time what it must have cost my father, during all those years of my childhood when Billy was banned from our home until he could show up sober, those same years when my father’s voice would wake us all in the middle of the night, as he shouted into the phone, “Billy, you’re killing yourself” or, more tempered but more desperate as well, “Just let me know where you are, Billy. Just tell me where you are.”
    I moved my elbow against the weight in Billy’s jacket. If it was a flask, it was empty. If it was a breviary, it was rather thin.
    “So how’s everyone?” my father asked, leaning forward to lift his sandwich.
    Billy launched into a familiar litany: his sister Rosie’s kids (Holy Cross and Katherine Gibbs, Queensborough Community and the telephone company) and Kate’s kids (Regis Fordham Notre Dame Marymount Chase Manhattan) and his mother at eighty, who still liked her nightcap. And who he had seen from the old neighborhood and the office and who had invited them out to Breezy Point next weekend and did you hear Kate’s husband is now CFO of the entire organization, which means another addition to their house in Rye, which is already big enough for anybody, if you ask him, so he said to her, Why not take some of that money and feed the poor rather than redoing a house that’s already well done. It’s not like she’s happy with her life or ever has been, if you know what I mean. She told him she could very well feed the poor and put a new guest wing on her house at the same time, which only goes to show she’s not only missed the point of charity but become as addicted to spending money as her husband is to making it.
    “And how was Ireland?” my father asked.
    “Cold,” Billy said, shaking his head as if the weather were a moral deficit. “And wet. A miserable place to quit drinking.”
    My father smiled, indulgent. “But you quit.” It was not a question.
    “I signed on,” Billy said, nodding. “And the day after I signed on I got a car and drove out to County Wicklow. All by myself. To Clonmel.”
    “And how was that?” my father asked—I have to say he asked it casually.
    Slowly, Billy put his sandwich on his plate and sat back, his fingers touching the edge of the table. “Eva runs a gas station
there,” he said. “With her husband. She has four kids.” He paused. “Eva does.”
    My father was stirring his iced tea with a long spoon. He nodded, carefully lifting the spoon and placing it on the tiny plate beneath his glass. He touched the lemon wedge beside it. “I knew that,” he said.
    Billy raised his eyebrows and smiled a