My father’s name is Harold, but everyone calls him Duck, on account of my mother. She’s dead now, but my father met her in England during the war, and he married her and brought her back to our town in upstate New York. She was a barmaid in London, and Dad said she called all her customers at the pub Duck, just like Annie at the diner refers to everyone as honey. After Mom came here, the only one she called Duck anymore was Dad, and it caught on until it was the only name anyone used for him.

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Mom never did catch on to living with my father, according to those who had occasion to know. She had probably expected more after she gave up everything she knew to come here. He’d told her stories of his father the judge, their beautiful house with the gazebo, and the rich neighbors with their houses that ring the pond we all share. But soon after the Allies won the war my grandfather died, and my grandmother soon after. Without my grandfather’s pull in the town, and his income, things didn’t turn out as well as expected for handsome but shiftless Duck Stradlater. The gazebo burned down. The money from my grandfather was frittered away, and my mother faded in conjunction with the house and my father’s prospects, until finally she faded away completely and died when I was five. The doctor said it was cancer, but my sister Stella remembers more than I do, and she says it was really Dad who killed Mom, because he broke her heart.

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My mother was beautiful. Stella looks just like her: slender and graceful, with dark chestnut hair and the bluest of blue eyes. My dad says Stella is a real English rose, like my mother was. At the library where Stella works after school and on the weekends, I asked the librarian what that meant, and she said that it’s a phrase they use in England for a woman of fair and natural beauty. I guess that suits my sister, except she’s not a woman yet because she’s only fifteen.

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Mrs. Ellison next door is on the library board and got Stella her job, even though you’re supposed to be grown up to work at the library. Mrs. Ellison is nice, but we do not like her husband, who owns a lot of the town, along with the factory where my dad works when he is sober enough. A lot of the time Dad doesn’t go to work at all, and neither does Mr. Ellison. In the summer, they like to fill up the old metal tub from the garage with ice and beer, and sit down by the pond all day, drinking and pretending to fish. Mrs. Ellison calls them birds of a feather in a tone that makes me think of them as drunken buzzards looking for dead things to rip apart and devour.

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After school, I always go to the library and read while my sister works. I am not beautiful like her, at least not yet; I am a skinny shrimp with freckles and wild hair. Stella says not to worry, that beauty fades and it’s better to have brains. She says if I keep reading in the library I will become very smart, and then I can go to college and get a good job, and get the hell out of Maryville.

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Today is Friday and Stella gets paid. We buy groceries on the way home because if Stella comes home with money, Dad will take it and go down to the tavern with Mr. Ellison, and then we will have to scrounge all week for dinner.

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It is dark and cold when we get home. I am happy about the cold, because soon the pond will be frozen, and instead of it being a place to avoid because Dad and Mr. Ellison are down there drinking, Stella and I will be tying on our ice skates and filling the thermos with hot chocolate. Every day I gingerly step onto the rim of the pond’s ice — all seventy-two pounds of me — to see if it will hold me up without cracking. The edges are frozen, but it is too soon to trust the middle, even though it looks solid from the shore.

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Snow has begun to fall, and the world is pretty until we hear drunken laughter, and come in to find Dad and Mr. Ellison sitting at the kitchen table with an almost empty bottle of Jameson between them. They have not bothered to take off their boots and the floor under the table is wet and dirty. I wipe my feet and leave my boots on, too, because when my father is drinking whiskey, it is a good idea to be able to get out of the house quickly if you need to.

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“My beautiful daughters are home to make my dinner! What are you making for your dear father and our esteemed guest to dine upon tonight?”

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Dad and Mr. Ellison laugh, and Mr. Ellison pours them both another shot.

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“Fried eggs and biscuits,” my sister says while she bustles about, putting things in and pulling things out of the cupboards and the ancient Frigidaire.

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“No holding back! We have a very important guest. I saw the package from the butcher you were putting away.” His words are very slurred.

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Mr. Ellison looks ready to put his head down and pass out, and then I will have to trudge next door to fetch Mrs. Ellison and help her get him home.

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“The chicken is for Sunday dinner,” Stella says.

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A cloud passes over my father’s face, and he stands, knocking his chair over. “Make the goddamn chicken,” he shouts, as he hurls his empty glass against the cupboard, where it smashes and falls into the sink in a rain of icy-looking shards.

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Stella silently removes the chicken from the refrigerator and sets it on the counter. She opens up the cupboard and takes down four plates; opens the drawer and counts out the silverware. “Go set the dining room table,” she whispers to me. “Take your time and make sure it’s perfect. Understand?”

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I understand. My sister is getting me away from our father’s rage and Mr. Ellison’s gaze. My sister does not like the way Mr. Ellison stares at us. She says he’s the kind of man who looks hungry even after a five-course meal because what he’s really craving is never on the menu.

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I carry the dishes into the dining room and set them on the table, and then I tuck myself in the corner by the doorway so I can watch the kitchen without being seen. My sister is standing at the counter cutting up the chicken with her back to the table. My father has turned his chair so both he and Mr. Ellison have a clear view of the back of Stella’s navy blue skirt and pink blouse.

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“She’s just like my wife, don’t you think? Same hair, same creamy skin, same bad attitude.”

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“She surely is, Duck. Adelaide was a lovely woman till the cancer got her.” He tries to bring the whiskey glass to his mouth but misses his lips.

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“Same ass, too,” my father says.

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My sister turns around, her face red and scowling. “It’s mom’s old skirt from the attic. I needed decent clothes to wear to the library.” Then she goes back to the chicken, because she thinks the food might distract my father from his brewing wrath.

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“It sure looks good on you, honey,” He turns to Mr. Ellison. “What about it, Fred? You’re a connoisseur of the lady flesh. How much would a piece of ass like that cost over at Mabel’s place?”

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Mr. Ellison suddenly seems a little more alert. He narrows his eyes, looking. “She’s mighty fine, Duck,” he whispers, and then he leans over the table as if he’s hoping to have a conversation my sister won’t hear. “I myself would pay a considerable amount for something that fine. Say $300?”

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My sister wheels around holding the cutting board full of chicken parts and slings it all at the table, knocking over what’s left of the Jameson and befouling Mr. Ellison and our father. “What the hell is wrong with you? I’m your daughter.”

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She storms past the table, but our father grabs her arm and twists it, and she cries out.

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“Now you listen here, missy. Don’t you go getting mad and telling tales to Patricia next door.”

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I don’t understand exactly what is happening, but I know my father is hurting my sister, and he might let Mr. Ellison hurt her, too. And that he’s been hurting both of us for a very long time.

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I rush to the dining room table and throw the plates on the floor as hard as I can, and they make a splintering crash. When my father comes running through from the kitchen, I am standing next to the doorway and I stab him in the back as hard as I can with a fork. Blood runs. He bellows in pain, and I turn and run through the kitchen and out into the yard. He follows through the falling snow, and I am sure that if he catches me, this time he will kill me.

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I run onto the pond, knowing that I am a child who weighs seventy-two pounds, and my father is a grown man who weighs maybe three times as much. When I’ve run almost all the way across, I stop and turn to see my father standing, crouched in the middle of the pond, the ice cracking underneath him. He looks at me, and I see the realization on his face as he falls through the ice and struggles in the frigid water, calling my name.

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It takes only a few short minutes.

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When I finally look away, Patricia Ellison is waiting by the side of the pond wearing her apron but no coat, with her arm outstretched to me, and I carefully make my way off the ice to her, knowing that she must have seen what happened. We say nothing as we hurry back to the house, her arm around me in the cold. My sister is on the porch and she embraces me, crying. I am amazed that she is shedding tears for him.

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It takes me years to realize that those tears were for me.

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Mrs. Ellison walks into the kitchen where her husband’s head is on the table among the chicken parts, and shakes him awake.

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He is startled. “Where’s Duck?” he slurs. “Where’d Duck go?”

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“He’s drowning in the pond!” She shakes him again and screams, appearing to be hysterical. “You have to go help him! Quick, Fred! The pond!”

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He lurches up from the table and rushes outside. He falls down the porch steps but picks himself up, and then he’s across the yard and stumbling out onto the pond, calling out my dead father’s name. When he’s almost reached the dark hole in the center of the pond, the already fractured ice breaks for the second time that night, and flailing in the cold water, Mr. Ellison is soon reunited with his buddy, Duck.

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It occurs to me that my father’s nickname did not suit him.

…

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I think Patricia paid off some people to not ask too many questions, such as why my father had a dinner fork stuck in his back when they fished his body out of the pond. When Patricia left town, she gave my sister the life insurance money she’d received for Mr. Ellison’s death, and it paid for my college and to fix up the property where my sister still lives, now with her husband David and their three children.

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I visit sometimes. On pretty summer days, we like to sit down by the pond and drink while we pretend to fish.

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