The Whore's Child by Richard Russo

what he considered an unreasonable aversion. When he’d driven her to distraction, he sometimes liked to take her in his arms, whisper something sweet in her ear, bend down to kiss her and then, just before the kiss was to be delivered, show her the washer on the tip of his tongue.
    The washer was not my father’s only annoying habit. He ruined various games by losing sight of their objectives and obsessing over minutiae. Playing Scrabble, for instance, he wasn’t content to consult one dictionary when challenging a word of my mother’s, but would refer to as many as he could locate, getting sidetracked whenever he ran across an unrelated word that interested him. “Here’s something,” he’d say, furrowing his brow, while the other players at the table stared at him in quiet disbelief until my mother yanked the dictionary from his hand and hissed at him, “Play, goddamn it.” Delighted, my father would grin and remark that even after all these years of marriage, he could still get her goat.
    Much as I loved him, he was beginning to get my goat too. He liked to help me with school projects, rightly convinced that I was careless and missed things. Mostly, I wanted to be done, so when I got a glimpse of the finish line, I bolted for it; whereas my father loved to linger among the facts and pore over the library books I brought home. “Now
here’s
something,” he’d say again and again, though it was seldom a relevant something. Whenever he helped me, in fact, my grades suffered from his need for inclusion. Two-page reports weighed in at a bloated nine pages, and longer papers swelled to near monograph length. Then he’d go to school to argue the grades my teachers gave me, again losing sight of his objective by revealing that the work was more his than mine. “Slow and steady wins the race,” he always assured me, a remark that never failed to elicit a sarcastic retort from my mother. “Lenny, you just
think
you won. All the other contestants finished long ago and went home.”
    “Your father lacks a sense of . . .” she explained to me now, as we rolled into the outskirts of Tucumcari, New Mexico. “Sense,” she finally said. “He lacks a sense of sense.”
    Explaining my father’s character deficiencies really cheered my mother up. By then it was early afternoon, and we’d planned to drive on through to Flagstaff, but Tucumcari seemed to be having a festival of some sort. A banner stretching across the highway announced “Cowboy Days,” and the streets were full of men in cowboy hats and boots and jeans and shirts with metal snaps instead of buttons. A country western band was set up under an awning nearby, and some people were dancing in the hot sun.
    “This is more like it,” my mother said immediately, pulling into a motel that had a sparkling swimming pool and a sign out front in the form of a twenty-foot-tall cowboy boot. She pointed up at it as we pulled our suitcases out of the trunk. “That’s what your father doesn’t have the sense to pour piss out of.”
    I frowned. All this talk about my father had made me lonesome for him. I’d have given a lot to see him standing there, grinning at me, working his silly washer on the tip of his tongue.
    “That’s western humor,” my mother explained. She’d been west once before, years earlier, after her parents had sold their house in Maine and moved to Phoenix, where they lived in a trailer park with a big swimming pool and lots of other retirees from cold climates. “Your father don’t have the sense to pour piss out of a boot. Try saying it.”
    I didn’t want to try it, and I said so.
    “Sure you do,” she said, and it was clear to me that we were going to stand there holding our suitcases in the blazing sun until I played along.
    “Dad doesn’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot,” I said.
    She contemplated my sentence. “Not ‘doesn’t have,’ ” she said. “We’re in the West now. There’s no such thing as