All the Love in the World

by Lori DeBoer

I'd heard about people drowning unwanted kittens in the river, but I hadn't thought of my husband as the sort to do so. That would be my father's solution and he told Marty as much at breakfast the other morning. The tea kettle whistled, and my husband had his nose in the sports section.

My father turned to him said, "Marty, I'll take care of those kittens for you."

"How's that?" he said, without looking up.

"I'll just drown them in the river."

Never mind that my dad for once remembered Marty's name, those kind of niceties escaping him these days, as though the people who surrounded and loved him were beneath his notice. Something in my father's manner, the threat in his voice, opened the past. All of a sudden I was nine and heartbroken. I was nearly fifty years beyond that now and, though I'd never left Iowa, I hadn't gone back to my father's farm since I'd left for nursing school. The farm was just an hour from here. I reminded myself to breathe deeply. My hand shook when I picked up the tea kettle. I wanted to dump the boiling water on my father's sorry head, but a lot of good it would do me.

Marty shifted in his chair, took another sip of coffee and set down the paper. He looked at my father, as though considering the offer.

"Well, Frank, that's a mighty interesting offer," he said.

My father just looked hard across the table, his arms folded across his chest. "Wouldn't make good mousers anyway."

"Let me think on it," Marty said.

I gave Marty the stink eye. Sometimes I felt like I was living with two nuts, and was heading that way myself. My twelve-hour shifts at the hospital didn't help. Neither my father nor Marty seemed to care as long as they had three meals a day and clean underwear. They probably didn't even care about the clean underwear. I slammed my cup down, just to make a point, but dumped tea all over myself. "Christ," I said, jerking my hand to my mouth.

"Watch your language, Suzy," my father said and glared at me. "Or I'll tell Dad and he'll take you out back."

His eyes, though faded and rheumy, looked dangerous. I'd expected some trouble when my father came to live with us in March, a couple months ago, because our trailer wasn't exactly roomy and things were tight since Marty had been laid off with a bunch of other union guys from the packing plant in Ames. It had been a year without work for him, except for carpentry jobs here and there. Thank goodness our two girls had finished community college, were supporting themselves, and lived on their own. I'd expected Marty to get depressed, but he had not. What I hadn't expected was that my father would be the one who would act up, for his anger to drown everything. I started mopping up the spill with a towel.

"Phyllis. My name is Phyllis," I muttered, scrubbing the counter, hating how he called me by the names of his sister or aunt, the names of the dead. "Get it right."

Marty had started feeding the stray in the first place, spending last fall plying her with food from our refrigerator. I'd come home from the hospital in Ames, tired from the hour drive, feet and back achy, and there would be Marty, crouching in the Johnson grass, feeding the cat the chicken I'd had in mind for my supper. It took him months to woo her, which gave him something to do with his days, I supposed. She would now take food from his hand, but good luck petting her. She wandered as she pleased.

The kittens had arrived in April, a month after my father had moved in with us. He couldn't live by himself anymore. He got lost. He wandered in the night. Twice, he'd been found standing in the middle of the highway, buck naked. My mother would have been humiliated if she'd known, but she wasn't bound to suffer him anymore and so the task fell to me. Marty hadn't said much, but what was there to say? The cat was so skinny we hadn't figured she was pregnant. Then she disappeared for a week. I could tell by the amount of time Marty spent sitting on the back steps and smoking that he was worried.