Mama was sweeping the floor, raising clouds of dust everywhere; it settled like mist through the shafts of morning sunlight that streamed in from the living room windows.
Daddy lay on the couch with his broken leg in a cast propped up on the coffee table. He wore the new brown and white plaid robe we gave him while he was in the hospital, and his face was scruffy with dark wiry whiskers that must have been weeks old. He watched the dust falling and narrowed his eyes as Mama moved from corner to corner of the room, dragging the broom in short strokes behind her.
“Billy!” he growled at me, from out of nowhere.
His voice startled me. I was sitting on the bottom step of the nearby stairs, sifting through a pile of tinker toys on the hardwood floor. I was trying to make a car, but I couldn’t find one of the round pieces to make a fourth wheel. “What, Daddy?” I said to him.
Daddy didn’t look at me, but at Mama. “I told you how I broke my leg, didn’t I?” he said. “How I really broke my leg?”
Daddy’d been home from the hospital three days, now, and I was sure he’d told me a hundred times how he’d broken his leg. “Uh-huh,” I said: “You fell down the stairs when you were drunk.”
He watched Mama working for a few seconds. “Well,” he said matter-of-factly, “I lied about that.”
Mama didn’t hear this, or else she didn’t care. She started sweeping her pile of dirt onto a piece of newspaper. “I said, I lied about that,” he said again, louder. He didn’t take the slits of his eyes off Mama.
“You—lied?” was all I could think to say. Daddy would have taken the belt to me for lying. To hear him actually admit that he’d lied was boggling. I wondered what would happen to him for lying.
“That’s right,” he said. “The way it really happened was, I was in a car accident.” He smiled in a not-so-happy way. “I was in a bright red convertible with this woman—a real beautiful woman—and we had a car accident when she tried to kiss me. I broke my leg on a telephone pole. Broke the pole right in two.” He motioned in the air with his hand like an axe, and clucked his tongue. “Just like that!”
“Wow!” I said, jumping from the stairs to the couch. “A telephone pole? You broke a telephone pole with your leg?”
Mama’s shoulders stiffened a little, but she didn’t stop her cleaning. And Daddy didn’t stop staring at her.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling even more. “We were driving over to the Silver Dollar for some beer. We’d just come from her place—we’d had a real good time back at her place.” He said the words real good time slowly, as if he was trying to make me understand what they meant.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Then what? How did the accident happen?
Mama picked up the newspaper full of dirt and stuffed it into the brown paper trash bag, then carried it into the kitchen. Daddy followed her with his eyes, and then chuckled as if what he’d said was somehow funny.
“Then what happened, Daddy?” I said again.
Daddy picked up the paper, or what was left of it after Mama’d taken part of it, and opened it up. He read and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Daddy?” I said. “Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” he said finally.
“About how you broke your leg.”
Daddy turned a page of the paper and began reading again. “I told you already,” he said. “I got drunk and fell down the stairs.” He got a sour look on his face then. He crumpled the paper and threw it on the coffee table, next to his propped-up leg. He twisted his neck around so he could see out the living room window. “It’s too nice a day to be inside the house,” he said, squinting from the light. “Go outside and play. And take Karen and Debbie with you.”