Perry Derkiss

Lisa Blades

He leans forward to kiss his wife. He must bend at the waist. It is the strangeness of his suit that unsettles him first—it tightens across his back, the lining whispers to him do it, don’t. Then he needs to rest his hand on something for support, and he hesitates to touch the edge of the casket. He tries closing his eyes, to picture kissing her like this before, but he doesn’t have much time before his face will reach hers. Where is his memory? He manages to conjure the quilted surface of their bedspread—stitches pinning the heads of bushy blue flowers—but not his wife. He opens his eyes. There are her lips. Under the make-up, he detects a blueishness. He stops. He is ten inches from her face. His ten-year-old daughter squeezes his hand and this, finally, propels him forward to his kiss.

Peggy, his wife, was his first kiss.

He was born motherless, carved from a womb ten minutes dead. He was born myopic, with a harelip, and the children at school made use of his failings, singing, Perry Derkiss—never been kissed. And he sang the song to himself in his head, in his quiet house, where Grandma would go three, four days without speaking. Then on an evening when she had already lowered herself painfully, elbows and knees audible, into her rocking chair, she would close her eyes and say, “Perry, my glasses are upstairs.” But his beard was full by the time he was twenty, and his imperfection was covered. Peggy worked in a diner where he often studied late—Organic Chemistry, Greek, Geology—he could learn anything. She asked his name. Perry was like Peggy. She tried on his glasses. She kissed him. She held him. Slowly, he learned.

After the wake and whiskey sipping, he tucks his daughter into bed. In his slight drunkenness he is aware for the first time of her grief as some¬thing separate from his own. She is quiet, and holds onto his hand even now that she is lying down, so he thinks she must be scared. He smoothes her hair across her forehead. “You look tired,” she says and cocks her head to the side in an examin¬ing glance. Everything—the voice, the phrase, the gesture—is an echo of her mother. She is comforting him, as her mother would have done.

“Natasha,” he says. He says nothing else because the only thing he thinks is that he wants his wife back.

Natasha sits up and hugs him, her arms coiling up under his armpits. He hugs her. He feels the running bumps of her spine through her flannel nightgown. His fingers move up and down, he feels his own body soften.

“Daddy, you should sleep now,” she says.

They let go of each other. He pulls the sheet up to her chin and bends to kiss her. Her mouth is like her mother’s—pink, perfect. He is ten inches from her lips. He recoils, kisses her forehead.

Later, he falls asleep in his pants and shirt on top of his bedspread. He dreams his wife and daughter are lying side by side. They are smiling. Their smiling lips fill his vision completely, to its periphery, and he feels their breath, moist. He wakes with a headache and no memory of the dream. He reaches for his wife and his hand falls flat onto the bedspread. He recoils from space she has left, flips to face the wall, and closes his knees into his body.

Natasha wakes then and calls for her mother. She is crying. He lies there watching three minutes pass on the alarm clock. Natasha calls for him, and he lies there still, in his quiet house. He remembers how to do this.