Read Online The Visitors by Patrick O'Keeffe - Free Book Online

my brother, Luke, and I, but on this one trip I was sitting in the back of the car. I was ten or eleven, surrounded by books, and my parents did not speak during the entire trip. I played games. Luke and I always did, on the trips to Maine. My parents made us play games that increased our verbal skills—
    —Like spelling things you saw on the highway?
    —Not like that, my dear—
    —Like what, then, my dear?
    —I forget, my dear. It’s not important. Then my first summer home from college I was in Dad’s law office in New Haven. He looked great. He was going to a gym five mornings a week. I had a boyfriend in college I liked until we liked other people, but that happened later, my dear. Dad excused himself. He went down the hall to a meeting. I was left sitting in Dad’s leather chair. He used to lift me into that chair when I was a little girl, and he’d sit on the chair across the desk, where his clients sat. After he left I opened the top drawer of his desk. I was not snooping. I just slid it open. Wouldn’t you do that, my dear?
    —In a heartbeat, my dear—
    —There was a photograph in there of my dad with a woman. This woman did not look like my mom. This woman, my dear, was more than twenty years younger than my dad. The photo was taken in front of the fuchsia cabin. The woman’s shoulders were tanned. Her shoulders I remember, my dear. Swimsuits hung on the porch railing behind them. And Dad’s motorcycle was there. The helmets were on the ground. Dad kept this motorcycle in the garage behind the cabin. He spent hours working on it. He loved it. I’d look out my bedroom window in the morning and he would be kneeling before the motorcycle, the little parts in a circle around him, and the radio playing in the garage. He used to take me for rides on the motorcycle. I’d wrap my arms around him. We’d ride along the hard sand. The back roads and the village streets.
    —That sounds cool, I said.
    —It was very cool, my dear. But of course my dad and this woman were screwing. He had come back from the cabin two weeks before. He went up there once every year in late spring. His long weekend away from work with his old college buddies. They fished. They went to the bars in the village. They drank scotch and smoked my dad’s cigars. He kept them in this nice wooden box. I used to think when I was a kid if I opened the box I’d find pistols in there. They probably spent most of their time speculating on real estate and retelling their stories about their college days. Their glorious hijinks. And in the photograph, my dad’s striped shirt was opened to his belly button. I was so disgusted. The white hair on his chest. My dad looked like Hugh Hefner with one of his chicks!
    Zoë paused. I handed her the water glass. She took two sips. I was watching the corner of the house.
    —I ran out of the office and got into my car and drove home, my dear. I forget how I later explained why I left, and a little over a month later, Mom called me in tears to say they were divorcing.
    —I know this part, my dear, I said.
    —But I didn’t tell you, my dear, that this was the summer I thought I was going to be a painter. I’d studied it in an art history class that spring. I’d taken classes in high school and college, so I went to an art colony in South Carolina. And a few days after I arrived was when my mom called. Dad then called me. He called ten times a day for a week, but I never picked up the phone. He left messages, crying, apologizing. He said he loved me, but I let him cry, and I cried when I listened to his messages. My boyfriend came to visit. We hiked the mountains. We drove to the beach. We smoked pot I scored from some dude I met. Another message from Mom said Dad had moved into an apartment. I had told Luke about the photograph. And I never again saw the woman. I have often wondered who she was.
    —Maybe they weren’t screwing, my dear. They were just hanging out, you know—
    —They were screwing,