Who: Gabriel Reed (and les enfants) What: Father's Day (a narrative) When: Now.
It's the kind of sleep that is drug-thick and heavy, that lies like a blanket and blocks out the light. Gabriel sleeps until he wakes, until the light is a byplay of dappled shadows on white walls and then he is clean shaven and soft, blue shirt. He pays no attention to the date, he thinks nothing of Sundays and what meaning they might once have had. He is a man for whom the work-week is strictly shuffled into order, one day after the next and an oblivion-gap of puttering through white house, echoing spaces and a too-clean kitchen. He selects a book, something dry that talks of carving, of knives and wood and the grain in a pared-down monotone that feels soothing. He is clean soap and coffee and he sits with his back to the garden in the kitchen and the note pinned to the board as a reminder.
And then the bell rings.
There are no packages due. No inconsistency with his plans. Gabriel thinks not of deliveries he has not made, nor of the neighbors. He does not think of Sunday. He is adrenaline silver-hot down his spine, the spider-crawl of it through his veins until his pulse quickens in the old way, the before-December way of being alive. The house is not stocked, there are few groceries and the living room contains only the large, white couch but there is a gun in the kitchen drawer and one upstairs in the bedside table and one stashed in a cabinet (locked) near the front of the house. Now he palms the nearest, the familiar fit of it beneath calloused fingers. He has not forgotten how. He has not forgotten this.
He is adrenaline-swept, the limp obliterated, walking on bad knee as if there was nothing to hold him back as he creeps forward, sight-line of the yard in front obliterated by trees, by the foliage cheerfully suited to family neighborhood. He peers, grim-eyed through spy-glass and the gun fumbles in fingers gone senseless, is scrambled into the nearest drawer with a clatter and a flick of a key withdrawn.
Gabriel opens the door onto a cab driver, onto the eager arms and sticky kisses of children who have been cooped up too long, a pursed-lips maid who sits in the cab and refuses to get out. Gabriel has starfish hands in his hair, has his hand on Phee's head and Ernest heaved to his shoulder and he walks them back inside the new house, walks them inside with explanations as to why it is so barren, why their rooms are earmarked but empty. He has painted their names on their doors, they stand ajar, ready.
He does not call her, the woman who has sent them home. Home. He does not call anyone at all, Gabriel is with his children, in his home and everything is forgotten in the sound of their chatter.