A Very Good Cure

MAYBE it was a sign when the phone rang, and he was actually there to answer it, for seldom was he there, and even seldomer did he pick the bloody thing up. When a voice said, “Terrance?” the skin on his back clutched up in a chill for he knew the voice, familiar as the sound of his own, though he hadn’t heard it in years. “Terrance,” the voice said, “it’s me, Blackie—it’s your da.”

To be sure, the voice was feebler, shot through with something decrepit, not the strong vibrato he remembered as a lad, a drowsy head on the oul’ man’s chest. “Blackie,” said Lafferty.

“The Black is back,” his da said, and Lafferty heard him hold the phone away to cough. “Listen, Terrance, son—I’d like to see you.”

“You’d like to see me? You’d like to see me?”

“I know I haven’t always been there for you, boyo, but I did bring you into the world, and now, by God, I’m leaving it,” Blackie said. “That must count for something.”

“It must, must it?” So silly a thing to say, Lafferty knew, but he said it nevertheless.

He heard Blackie’s sigh on the phone. His voice, far away, fading fast: “Here. See. I told you it’d be no use.” Another voice came on, a woman’s voice this time, warm and soft as a wool blanket, full of throat. “Terrance,” she said, “my name is Kitty. I’m a friend of your da’s. Now you listen to me. For if you don’t, you’ll be regretting it the rest of your life.”

“I doubt that,” Lafferty said. But he listened.

When the listening was done, he stood for a long time at the window, looking down Blue Bucket Lane. The sky over Kilduff was gray, a chill in the air of the early spring afternoon, yet the leaves of the hedges out front managed to capture light enough to glitter a bit in the breeze. He stood for a long time, soaking up the quiet of the house, letting it seep into his bones, turned into a statue by a voice on the phone.

The thing of it was, it was an odd bit of happenstance that his own da should reach out to him after so many years just as Lafferty had learned he himself was going to be a father, for the very first time. They’d only just learned that Peggy, his wife, was pregnant at last. They’d been trying. Sure, there’d been a time or two when she’d been up the pole before—Lafferty couldn’t be sure of the particulars, as he’d had to take Peggy’s word for it, and they’d not always been on the most trusting of terms. But that time or two was by accident, despite Lafferty and his randy ways, not because of them, and that time or two had resulted in miscarriage, as though God had looked down upon Lafferty’s dread and regret and said, very well then, if you didn’t really mean it, neither did I. This time was intentional, and this time they were taking every precaution ordered by the doctor and the book, and this time God would be smiling down (this time they were sure). Lafferty was ready, eager. It was time, after all, that he grew up. For time had just seen your man turn forty.

A flash of fur caught his eye, a squirrel, a rat maybe, a rodent of some kind or other scurrying into the hedgerow across the way. Just as he was becoming accustomed to the idea of fatherhood, here he was, having to reacquaint himself again with the idea of sonhood. A car came up the lane—the little brown Ford—Peggy home from work. She pulled in and climbed out carefully; she was scarcely showing, but she did everything gingerly, as though she were ten months pregnant, not two. Lafferty watched her walking toward the house, the wee thing tucked up inside her...