A Perfect Day Read Online Free

been sir or, as I grew older, Chuck.
    Charles (Chuck) Harlan had run away from home at the age of seventeen and joined the military during the last years of World War II. He had seen combat in the Navy. But I didn’t hear it from him. He saw the kind of action a man doesn’t talk about lest he unearth something he’d spent years burying. I blame those years for who he was. I have to blame something.
    He married late in life to Irene Mason, a woman fifteen years younger than him. She was also from a military family. She was a staunchly religious woman who bore four sons in five years. She died at the age of thirty-four in childbirth with her last son. Me.
    Chuck remarried four years later to a woman he met in the administration building at the university. Colleen Dunn. I’ve always considered Colleen my mother. Colleen was also younger than Chuck, ten years or so, but the gap in age was the subtlest of their differences. When I was old enough to understand the contrast in their personalities I was astonished that the two of them had ever come together. Truly, love is blind. Or maybe just stupid. They couldn’t have been more mismatched.
    In the words of her friends, Colleen was a party waiting to happen. She was a large woman with an extra chin or two and a lap that could hold four boys and often did. What I remember most about her is that she liked to laugh. She sometimes drank too much, nothing hard, dessert wine or sherry and she never drank alone. Unlike Chuck’s first wife, she went to church only for us children. I knew her feelings about church but still considered her closer to God than Chuck. Though Chuck never missed a church service, he lacked the graces of faith my mother held in abundance: love, gentleness and mercy. It was as if religion was simply an extension of the military world he had left: a world of rules. Chuck was big on rules. He ruled the home with an iron Bible.
    Every now and then it would come down on one of us. One afternoon he caught Stan, my oldest brother, looking at pictures in the women’s undergarment section of a department store catalogue. Even though Stan was only eleven at the time, Chuck whipped him with his belt so severely that Stan couldn’t walk. He crawled to his bedroom, where he remained until the next morning.
    In the end, Colleen stayed with us for nine years: probably eight and a half years longer than she would have had there not been us boys. She stayed as long as she could to protect us from Chuck.
    The day she told me she was leaving I suppose that I wasn’t all that surprised. Even at the age of thirteen I realized that if there ever had ever been a connection between Chuck and Colleen, it had long been severed. Her laughter was gone. I suppose she went to find it. Right or wrong it didn’t lessen the pain any. I told her that I hated her. I might have even told her that I was glad she was leaving. I’ve always regretted those words and hoped she knew them for the bald-faced lie they were. In my heart I wished that she would take me with her. But she didn’t. And Chuck never left.
    Looking back I realize that I spent much of my life seeking Chuck’s approval. But I learned not to expect it. It would be like waiting for a train after its route had been cancelled. I was both amazed by and envious of Allyson’s relationship with her father. What a difference a father can make. Allyson was confident and independent. I was insecure and fearful. To this day I don’t know what drew her to me.
     
    I flew in to Portland, where I waited nearly three hours for a commuter flight to the small Medford airport. My thoughts were bent on Allyson and what I was walking into. I had called from the Portland airport and spoken briefly to her, but she wasn’t herself. It was like talking to a stranger, and from her voice I knew that Carson’s death was very close.
    The taxi left me in the dirt-and-rock driveway that led to the Phelps residence. The hills of Ashland were a quilt