Daley's Girls

DALEY'S GIRLS / Catherine Brady MY FATHER CAME HOME from work on weeknights long after we had eaten our supper and gotten into our pajamas. The six of us watched from the living room while he sat at the kitchen table to have his supper. My mother set down his dinner before him, steam rising from the plate she'd kept warm over a pot of boiling water. Loading his fork with his knife, he bent to his dinner, not looking up from the plate until he had pushed it away from him, empty. Then we could approach him. It was a favorite game of ours to tackle my father and plead with him to show us his keys. If he was in a good mood he would pull the heavy key ring from the pocket of his kahki work pants and fan out the keys in the palm of his huge thick hand. In would poke my finger or one of my sister's, tiny, pink, translucent. "What's this one for?" "This one?" Belching, he would say, "the shop," the car dealership where he was foreman of the mechanic crew, or "the boss's office," but most of them he would let us guess at, leaving us to imagine all the possible worlds we'd never seen but which he had access to. Sometimes he would let one of us trace the new scars and scratches on his rough palms, across the sworled knuckles, the calloused joints. We would ask him where he got the scratches. "In the shop," he would say, that work world where he spent his day strange and omnipotent, its own answer, but we would ask again, and he would answer, "Fell over a hen and a duck pecked me." He was no more informative about the town in Ireland where he grew up, or his marriage to my mother in Belfast, or what brought them to America. I would ask my mother what my father did, since he would not tell us. "Oh," she would say vaguely, "He runs the shop for Mr. Knowles and on Saturdays he takes care of his lawn for him and does the Harpers' and Ashtons' lawns as well." She'd think for a monent, as if it were as much a mystery to her as to us children. "He works hard, Sally. I don't think they could run the shop without him." Her territory was limited to the house itself, a limit imposed by her six daughters. We were each born roughly a year and a half apart, and with Peggy, the baby, only three, we were a physical yoke of unrelenting need. My mother would not, she said, trust her babies to a stranger. Once a week my father took her grocery shopping, packing the six of us in the car, and on Sundays he took all of us to mass. When there was a decision to make—whether to purchase a new car, to repair or replace the leaking washing machine—he made the decision and notified her. "You know best, Joe," she would say, not looking up from sewing a The Missouri Review · 7 button back onto a shirt while one of us was still in it, snapping the thread with her teeth when she'd finished. My father's work remained a potent mystery for most of my childhood, tantalizing, for that knowledge seemed to be the source of his enviable power over us. The only clues I had were the occasional visits to our house by the men who worked for him in the shop. They came when my parents had anything old to sell or give away—a worn out sofa, the battered playpen, the washing machine that had rusted out. Like my father, these men wore khaki pants creased with grime, and the skin of their hands, too, was crosshatched with black grease, their knuckles swollen, raw. My father startled us by calling them, to their faces, Pollack, Dago, Hillbilly, but these men, who mumbled when they spoke to my mother, laughed loudly and roughly at the names he had for them. The summer I turned nine, when my...