By Ryan McIlvain

Ryan McIlvain is the author of Elders (2013) and The Radicals (2018). A former Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford, McIlvain has taught writing and literature at Rutgers, Stanford, and USC.

 

 

 

Dad came home that afternoon from a last-minute grocery run, honking the horn from the driveway. I’d just turned thirteen, or maybe fourteen—springtime in any case, the air cool outside, greening.

“Take this to your crazy mother,” Dad said when I came to the car window, handing me a trio of Stop & Shop bags stretched taut with milk and butter and other dinner ingredients—and of course Dad’s soda and candy bars. A boyish sweet tooth into his early middle-age, and a damnable tendency to procrastinate shopping—it was the Sabbath! Dad had skipped church that morning, yet he was dressed for home teaching. He took that seriously. A pair of clip-on ties between us, baggy khakis, white socks, and black dress shoes.

When I got back to the idling car, Dad and I left for the McClintocks. Every month, Dad said, Let’s go hometock the McClinteaches, and he said it again now. His particular brand of Christian duty required him to check up on a family in the ward, in this case the six-spoked McClintock wheel, held together on a high school math teacher’s salary and carried around in a dying station wagon. For my part, I contributed the monthly home teaching lessons: a boy’s exegeses, though really I considered them better than most Mormon homilies—better organized, better phrased. I already thought of myself as something of a writer.

Dad drove us in his rickety gray Taurus, the foot wells flooded with Mountain Dew cans (“Get me another Mormon beer, son!”), the cup holders deep with gum and candy wrappers, a grime-glued collection of coins at the bottom. The car’s scent was sweet, its surfaces sticky. There was the time Dad picked me up from basketball practice and bought us Frosties on the way home, asking about the team and my progress in it, riffing on the Military Hard-Assed Father from The Great Santini (“My children excel at sports!”) and then, in an apparent non sequitur, starting into the scene from Shine where the Old Country Father explodes over the bathwater soiled by his son. You shit in the tub? You disgusting animal! How dare you shit in the tub! Arm flailing ecstatically with the invisible wet towel, until Dad’s wrist caught the Frosty in my hand and sent the cold brown gelid sauce all over my shorts, the seat, the side console. “Oh no, no,” Dad said, but he wasn’t angry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did it get on you?” I was laughing. “I’m sorry,” Dad said, “I’ll get you another one. I’m really sorry.”

He turned the car around, still apologizing, filling the air with unexpected tenderness. “I get carried away sometimes,” he was saying. “I hope I didn’t ruin your shorts—you like those ones, don’t you? I’m really sorry, Sean.”

At the McClintocks, Dad and I sat on a low, caved couch, leaning forward to get our postures sufficiently solemn. They’d been dealt a blow, Sister McClintock told us, looking over to her husband who looked at the floor. The two of them sat at either side of the longer couch, bookending their usually fidgety children, three younger boys and then Jill, an uneasy friend of mine with carrot-colored hair, known to lord her year of seniority over me. This afternoon, though, all the lordliness had gone out of her. She looked as drained and chastened as her little pale siblings, her thin, tall mother, her stockier father. A paisley swath of green oak leaves spangled in the window, turning matte-side and shine-side, filtering complicated light into the room. At last Dad spoke up and said he hoped the family knew they could count on us. If there was anything we could do—

“There is,” Sister McClintock said, not unkindly, but first they’d hear the lesson we’d prepared. The family’s eyes shifted over to me; they knew the ...