From our never-ending conversation about stone fruit, Nell veers away. “Daddy,” she says, her fork hovering above lettuce. “What did you think of Duke?”
Her sisters blink. They look at Nell, then me. They hadn’t realized they were allowed to call their father to the stand.
Joe has just taken a bite of buttered bread and for that reason he is slow to answer. “He was a very talented man.”
“Did you like him?”
I can see my husband remembering. Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer. “Everybody liked Duke. Everybody including me.” His eyes wander back to his plate. He’s starving, and I’ve made potato salad, potato salad being my husband’s truest love.
“You ‘liked’ him?” Emily asks. “There has to be more than that.” The girls’ need for information is voracious, limitless, and Nell has just tapped what they had assumed to be a forbidden line—did their father like their mother’s boyfriend?
Joe smiles. “Okay, something else about Duke.” He thinks about this and then comes up with the necessary detail. “He could stand on his hands.”
I look at my husband in amazement. “Oh my god, how did I forget that?”
“He could hold on to the seat of a folding chair and go up straight as a ruler. You’d be talking to him and the next thing you knew he was fully inverted. He even pointed his toes. I’d never seen anyone do that before and I haven’t seen anyone do it since. Duke was an athlete, you know. It’s all over his films.”
Duke used to say it was better than caffeine for waking up, all that blood rushing to the brain.
“If it hadn’t been for Sebastian, I bet he wouldn’t have gone for acting at all,” Joe said. “I think he would have played some sort of sport.”
“Sebastian?” Maisie asks.
“Duke’s brother,” Emily says.
“How do you know Sebastian is his brother?” Nell asks.
We are so tired and still, here we are, amazing one another.
Emily fixes her sister with a look and then we remember, of course, that even if she’s outgrown her condition, Emily is still the clearinghouse of Duke information.
“Sebastian was a tennis player,” Joe says. “He was ranked for a minute, wasn’t he?”
I nod. “Juniors.”
“Wait,” Nell says to me, “you knew about Sebastian?”
“I knew Sebastian.”
The girls all begin to speak at once but Joe ignores them, shaking his head at the memory. “To see how good Sebastian was and to know he didn’t make the pros, it always made me think how good the pros must have been. The only person who could ever make Sebastian break a sweat was Duke, and Duke could never beat him. Never. Do you remember that?” my husband asks me. “How hard the two of them went at it?”
I nod. What I hadn’t remembered was that Joe came to watch them play. Everybody came to watch them, which was one of the countless reasons Duke hated to lose.
“Duke had a great game, but he wasn’t good enough to beat his brother, and Sebastian wasn’t good enough to beat, oh, I don’t know, whoever beat him. We all take our place in the food chain.”
“So what did Sebastian do if he wasn’t a tennis player?” Nell asks, though whether the question is meant for me or Joe or Emily isn’t clear.
“He was a schoolteacher, wasn’t he?” Joe asks.
“History,” I say. Saint Sebastian.
Joe nods again, smiles. He has redirected the topic of conversation so deftly that the girls have no idea he’s done it. He crumples his napkin, picks up his silverware and plate. “Good man,” he says. “Good men. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I have a few things left to do in the barn while it’s still light.”
We don’t remind him that he says this every night. We don’t tell him that he’s too tired already and that whatever it is he thinks he needs to do can wait. We don’t tell him because he doesn’t listen to us.
Emily pushes back from the table. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t be crazy. I know how to check on goats.” He puts his dishes in the sink. “You’ve got your story to listen to.”
