Excerpt from BLISTER
by Susan Shreve
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Blister stood in the window of her father's bedroom on the second floor of the Beechtree Garden Apartments in North Haven. It was Saturday morning in early October — cool, brilliantly sunny, a perfect day to be outside. Her father had suggested that they rent bikes after breakfast and cycle along the towpath by the river — although he should have remembered that Blister had hated biking ever since the first grade, when she plowed her two-wheeler into Boogey Martin at the Halloween parade in Meadowville. Shading her eyes from the sun's glitter, she watched her father walk out of the apartment building in his blue sweats, a baseball cap on backward, slouching, pretending to be eighteen instead of thirty-seven, which was the age he happened to be as of the day before yesterday. He was carrying a load of dirty laundry. She watched him open the door of his sky-blue Toyota, toss the laundry in the front seat, and drive off to the laudromat and the grocery store.
"Be back in an hour," he had said. "I'll just get some milk and cereal, and drop off the laundry. Want to come?"
"No, thanks," Blister replied. "I've got some stuff to do."
"What kind of stuff," he said.
"Just stuff," she said
Which was perfectly true.
Underneath her father's double bed was a blue canvas suitcase that didn't belong to him. She had noticed it the night before, when she had arrived to spend the weekend at the apartment her father had rented when he'd decided that life with Blister's mother was unbearable. She waited at the window of her father's bedroom, just in case he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten something. He was always forgetting something: Her tenth birthday; his wallet, when they went out to dinner at Maxie's Pizzeria; his promise to take her to New York City to see a play on Broadway; her uncle's telephone number. Big and little things he forgot.
"Your daddy's a dreamer," her mother used to say, before the baby died, before she went to the hospital, back when Mary Reed had loved Jack Reed with all her heart. "That's what people always say about him."
Blister checked the clock beside the bed. 7:45. That gave her almost an hour while her father was at the laundromat doing the wash, and then at the grocery store getting breakfast, and going back to the laundromat to change the clothes in the dryer. Enough time for her plans. She pulled the blue canvas bag from under the bed and unzipped it, her heart beating for fear of the secrets she might discover inside the bag, her heart beating for her sins.
The first time Blister had visited the Beechtree apartments was in the middle of September after she had been amazed. Her father's apartment was actually fixed up, a regular decorated place: with bedspreads, and rugs, and pictures on the wall, and flowers in a vase on the table in the livingroom, and new plates and knives and forks, and pots and pans, and soft olive green towels in the bathroom — as if Jack Reed had suddenly gotten rich or domestic or both. It was astonishing how neat things were. When her father had lived with Mary Reed, he didn't even make the bed or wash the dishes or vacuum.
Since the middle of September, she had seen her father twice, two weekends — Friday after school through Sunday lunch. That was the arrangement. Except for the mid-week dinners, which hadn't happened yet. It was the only time she hadn't been. Although she had been thinking of inventing one — attention deficit disorder or depression, like her mother's. She had his telephone number, but the answering machine was always on, so she never got to talk to him immediately; and when she called the bowling alley, he was always someplace else. After school, she sat by the telephone at her own apartment waiting for him to return her call. Which sometime he did, and sometimes he forgot.
From Blister, copyright © by Susan Shreve
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