The Laundry Room (Part 3)
Kathryn M. Burke
There was one Friday evening when Jonathan seemed to be on tenterhooks, as if waiting for something to happen. I'd never seen him so jittery. It was an excited, almost ecstatic jitteriness, but still it bothered me. What the hell could be going on? What was about to happen?
I found out when the doorbell rang. Opening the front door, I stood staring at--my father.
No one can deny that Patrick Ryan looked good. His face, topped by a shock of untidy black hair, was classically handsome, and for as long as I can remember my heart did a little pitter-patter whenever he turned those dark, penetrating eyes in my direction. His frame was solid, muscular, almost like an athlete's, and those biceps could pick up any female with ease--not that he would ever hurt a girl (or anyone), but you felt the quiet strength of those arms and the equal strength of his firm thighs as you sat on his lap.
Usually his broad smile made his eyes twinkle, but at the moment his expression was brooding, uncertain, even a little afraid.
"Holy cow!" I cried. "Dad, what are you doing here?"
"May I come in, please?" he said in his low, resonant voice.
"Of course," I said, stepping aside.
Everyone was in the living room. We'd been getting ready to watch some dopey movie on TV, but that plan went out the window with Dad's arrival. Maureen, with a girlish squeal, leaped up from the sofa and actually jumped up into Dad's arms. He had to catch her by the thighs (actually by the butt) and hold her up as she pressed against his chest, throwing her arms around his neck and plastering messy kisses all over his face.
Mom, however, sat in an easy chair as if she was a marble statue. After several moments of absolute silence, she began breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling rapidly. I thought she was either going to faint or burst into tears or rush out of the room. But she just sat there.
"What are you doing here, Dad?" I said again. "I mean, it's wonderful to see you, but you should have let us know you were coming."
"Jonathan didn't think that would be a good idea," he said slowly.
"Jonathan?" I said, perplexed. "What does he have to do with this?"
"I found him through some computer searches--you know, the Internet, social media, stuff like that," Jonathan said with mock humility. Actually, he was supremely self-satisfied that he'd not only located Dad but had persuaded him to pay us a visit. "I thought it would be best if we talked things over."
"
You
thought it would be best?" I said. "Where do you get off--?" I stopped abruptly. I was going to say,
Where do you get off interfering in our family?
But he was already an integral member of the family, wasn't he? As I thought of that, another thought flitted through my mind and made me shiver:
How much did Jonathan tell Dad of what goes on in this house?
"He's right," Dad said. "We need to talk about some things."
"Like what?" I said.
There was an awkward silence for a while. Then Jonathan exploded:
"Like how naughty Maureen has been!"
"Me!" Maureen squawked. "What have I done?"
"You know what you've done," Jonathan said in the voice of a district attorney cross-examining an obviously guilty suspect. "You need to spill the beans."
"I didn't do anything--really I didn't!" Maureen cried. But I could tell from her tone of voice that she was lying.
"Maureen, dear," Dad said in a quiet, sad voice, "we might as well confess the truth. Do you want to, or shall I?"
"I'll do it," Maureen said glumly.
"Will somebody tell me what's going on?" Mom said in a shaky voice. It was the first words she'd uttered.
"Oh, Mom," Maureen cried, "I really didn't mean any harm! I just wanted to--"
"You'd better not hold back," Jonathan said menacingly.
"Okay, okay! Jeez, you'd think I'd chopped someone's head off." With a huge sigh, and doing her damnedest not to look Mom in the face, she began.
"You remember that time, Mom, a little more than a year ago when you had to go stay with your sister, Tara? I guess she'd had an operation and wasn't doing so well afterwards, and so you went there for about two weeks to take care of her. You thought that Dad, being a man, couldn't manage by himself and would probably starve to death if he didn't have a woman around to tend to him. Fiona was away somewhere--"
"Yeah," I cut in, "I was visiting my stupid boyfriend in Texas. I'm glad I gave
him
the boot."
"--so it fell on me to do the job. I was happy to, since I love this old place and looked forward to being kind of the 'mistress of the house'--you know what I mean? It began pretty well, and Dad and I had a lot of fun getting to know each other all over again. It had been five years since I'd lived with him, and we'd kind of grown apart.
"But I have to say, doing all the cooking and cleaning and looking after the house--well, it made me feel kind of like"--her voice dropped suddenly--"a little wife."