22. Jackson
CHAPTER 22
JACKSON
I caught up with Dad in Cody, Wyoming, a little cowboy town on the Shoshone River. He’d lived there as a kid and he liked to drive through, and catch up with his friends who’d stayed in town.
I found his truck where I guessed it’d be, but he wasn’t in it. He was at the diner across the street, out in the parking lot having a smoke.
“Busted,” I yelled.
He jumped. Tossed his smoke. Then his whole face lit up, and he waved me over.
“What are you doing here?”
I jogged over to hug him. “Came to see you.”
He hugged me tight for a moment, and then he stepped back. Looked me up and down, and his brows drew together. “Okay. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t come see my dad?”
“Sure you can, but you haven’t in years. When was our last road trip? Before you shipped out?”
I winced, because yeah. It had been a while. Before my first tour, just like he said. We’d agreed on another trip when I got back, but then came my second tour, and then I got busy. I’d still planned to call him and set something up, but I always had work, and so did he. And he had his families, all nine of his kids.
“Let’s go get a drink,” I said. “You have time for a drink?”
Dad checked his watch, but only for show. “Sure. Somewhere quiet?”
“That would be good.”
It was quiet here too, quiet all over Cody, but I wasn’t ready to talk yet. I didn’t know how to admit I’d become him, a runaway father — though, that wasn’t fair. He’d run out on three marriages, but not on his kids. He’d always been there for us, even after he left. He’d still called every night to tell us ‘sleep tight,’ and showed up for our birthdays, or if we got sick. And he’d done stuff with us, road trips with me. Hockey with Nick, though it killed his knees. And I’d be there for my kid, but I couldn’t be with Hailey. I couldn’t put her through what Dad put Mom through.
He ushered me into an old tin-roof bar, a hops-smelling shack at the end of the street. A man at the bar shouted out when he saw us.
“Hey, Mack! Happy birthday! What are you, a hundred?”
Dad gave him the finger. My stomach turned sour. Was it really Dad’s birthday? Fuck. Yeah, it was. And here I was with no balloons, no presents. Not even a card to show I cared. I was screwing up everywhere, first ditching Hailey, now forgetting Dad’s birthday. And it was a big one. He was sixty-five.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
Dad rolled his eyes. “You get to my age, it’s just a whatchacallit. Y’know, the Latin for ‘you’re going to die.’”
“Memento mori?”
“Yeah. One of those.” He took a seat at the bar. “Two beers, one for me, and one for my son.”
The barkeep took my measure. “I’m guessing you’re Jackson?”
I nodded. “That’s me.”
He set our beers on the counter, but kept hold of mine. “Your old man never shuts up about you. Well, about all his kids, but especially you. And I just want to say to you, thanks for your service.” He let go of my beer and stuck out his hand. We shook, and his palm was still cold from my glass. “It was good of you to come up here for your dad’s birthday. He misses you kids, you know.”
I swallowed. I knew.
Dad drained off his beer and ordered another. I chugged mine as well to blunt my guilt. It didn’t work, so I gulped my next too. By four beers in, I was feeling lightheaded.
“So, what’s up?” Dad nudged me. I hung my head. “That bad, huh? Want to grab a table?”
We got two more beers and moved away from the bar, to a wobbly table tucked in near the back. Dad snacked on the pretzels while I found my words.
“It’s a woman,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, I figured.”
“How did you figure?”
“You come here unshaven, forgotten my birthday, won’t even look your old man in the eye. What else could it be, but you’ve got yourself dumped?”
“She didn’t dump me,” I said. “But I guess she might sue me.”
“Sue you?” Dad dropped his pretzel. “What did you do to her? I raised you better than that.”
I shook my head, feeling fuzzy. “No, not like that. I mean she’s, uh… Could I start over?”
“I think you’d better.” Dad passed me the pretzels. “And eat a few of these. I think you’re drunk.”
I wasn’t, just tipsy, but I ate a few anyway. They were dry and too salty and they made my throat itch. When my head had quit spinning, I started to talk.
“She’s a client,” I said, looking down at the table. “Or she wasn’t, then she was, and now she’s not again. We met and we had this… I guess this first date, and the day after that?—”
“You mean Hailey Frye?”
I tripped over my tongue. “Wha— You know Hailey Frye?”
“I don’t know her, know her, but I heard from your mom. She sent me the clip of you two on TV. She thought you had chemistry, but I thought no way. An angel like her with some big hairy ogre?”
I struggled to process that. Dad knew about Hailey? What came out of my mouth was “You still talk to Mom?”
Dad punched my arm. “Of course. We’re your parents.”
“Do you still talk to Marla and Kathy as well?”
“How else would I keep up with all of you kids?”
I’d never given much thought to Dad and his exes, or if they’d kept up with him post-divorce. Somehow, I’d decided he just talked to us kids, but of course he didn’t. How would that work? He always knew when we needed to talk, or when something big was up in our lives. Where else would he get that, if not from our moms?
“What did Mom say? About me and Hailey?”
“She said you got a job with her, on her big tour. I checked out her music. She’s pretty good.”
I guessed Mom hadn’t told him about our ransom scare. Maybe she didn’t want him driving while stressed. She always had worried about him on the road, and maybe she still did, even now they were through.
“So, what’s going on with her?” He nudged my arm.
“Mom was right. We had chemistry. Still do, I guess. That night was, I guess you might say our first date. We hooked up, and we were safe, so don’t start in on that. But somehow she’s pregnant, and it’s got to be mine. And when she told me?—”
Dad grabbed me. “She’s pregnant?”
My face went hot. “Yeah, but?—”
“I’m gonna be a granddad?” He let go of me, jumped up, and pumped his fist at the ceiling. “Congratulations! Another round! Hey, Quentin, my son here’s just made me a granddad!”
The barkeep winked at me. “Congratulations.”
Dad went up to the bar and brought us back two more beers, plunking them down so hard they sloshed.
“This is unbelievable. My first grandkid. The way you slunk in here, I thought you had cancer, or you got dumped, or fired off that tour. What’s the matter, embarrassed you aren’t married? You can fix that, you know. You get down one one knee?—”
My anger surged up again, blunted by beer. I laughed without meaning to. “Because that worked so well for you?”
Dad’s smile disappeared in the blink of an eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I should’ve shut up right there, but I kept going, bullish. “It means you were miserable, you and Mom both. You were never home, and she was alone. All you did was fight, and you hated each other. I can’t marry Hailey and put her through that.”
Dad pressed his weathered hands hard to his face. He pushed his hair back. Shook his head side to side. I couldn’t quite read the look on his face — angry, maybe. Hurt and confused. He scratched at his stubble.
“You think I hated your mom?”
“Me and Nick heard you when you thought we were sleeping. All of those whisper-fights, then you broke up.”
Dad rubbed his chin some more. “You heard us? Fuck.”
“Those walls were like paper.”
“I never hated your mom.” Dad thrust his chest out, full of defiance. “She never hated me either, or not that I knew. We just grew apart, was all. We?—”
“You were never home!”
Heads turned toward us, and I scrunched down, embarrassed. Dad’s shoulders slumped, and he looked sad. When he spoke at last, he didn’t sound like himself. His voice was too quiet, and rough as grit.
“Don’t you remember when it was just you? Before Nick was born, before you started school? We all used to travel, us three as a family. Your mother loved it, and so did you. It felt like the good times would last all our lives, and we were happy. I promise we were.”
I frowned at the table, trying to remember. Nothing much came at first, and then it did — fragments of memories I’d thought were just dreams, or maybe something I’d seen on TV.
“Did we have a camper? Yellow and green?”
“Yeah, the banana boat. That’s what we called it.”
“And Mom used to drive it behind your truck?”
“And you’d take turns, who you’d ride with. We went so many places, Yellowstone. Mexico. The Appalachian Mountains. Remember the snake?”
I closed my eyes and I saw it, the snake in our camper, coiled in Mom’s pink-flowered Panama hat. “That was real? The snake in Mom’s hat?”
“Yeah, it was real. All the good times were real. But then you started school and Nick came along, and your mother stayed home with you, and she got bored by herself. So she got a job, and she loved that, and when summertime came, she didn’t want to come driving. She sold the banana boat and…” He shrugged helplessly. “We grew apart.”
I massaged my brow. What Dad said made sense. But it didn’t change anything. I was still me. I’d always be just like him, a rolling stone.
“What are you thinking?” He nudged me again.
“I’m thinking, I get it, but it wasn’t just Mom. You kept marrying women who wanted one life — a husband and kids and a white picket fence — and you couldn’t change for them. You wanted the road. I want that too, and I can’t change for Hailey. Isn’t it better I?—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Dad held his hands up. “Hold it right there.”
“I’m just saying?—”
“You’re just saying. You’re talking out your ass.” He lifted one hand to count off on his fingers. “First off, I left Marla because she met someone else, and maybe that was because of my travel. But you know she was married when she met me. And she met her fourth husband when she was still with her third. So I’d say her cheating was at least half on her. And Kathy, you know I loved her to death. I stayed home with her all through her chemo. But she got sick of me home all the time, and she kindly suggested I go and stay gone. She said I smothered her. I was too much. But it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just them. And our marriages did work, at least for a time.”
I realized I was gawking, my jaw hanging loose. I’d had no idea about Marla’s cheating, or about Kathy kicking Dad out. I’d known she was sick when her kids came and stayed with us, and I’d heard they broke up soon after that. But I’d assumed Dad left. “So, Kathy left you? ”
Dad stuck up another finger like he hadn’t heard me. “ Secondly , I still believe in true love. I still love your mother, and Marla and Kathy. I always will, and I love you kids. And one day, I’ll meet the one that’ll last, and we’ll coast through our golden years in a new yellow camper. And thirdly ? —”
“Wait, Dad?—”
“How old is Hailey? She’s got to be, what, around twenty-nine? Thirty?”
“Twenty-seven,” I said. “Her birthday’s next month.”
“So she’s old enough to know what she wants, and she wants a rock star life. That’s perfect for you. You both like adventure. You love the road. You’re both kind of type-A, so you’ll need to watch that, watch your ambition doesn’t butt heads with hers. But she seems a lot like you, so why wouldn’t you try? Why wouldn’t you fight for the love you can get?”
I swallowed, dry-mouthed. Took a sour sip of beer. “Because… what if I hurt her? If I let her down?”
Dad breathed out through his nose. “Look at yourself.”
I looked down at myself, and he smacked me again.
“I don’t mean literally. I mean, look where you are. She’s, where, in LA?”
“In Vegas, right now.”
“And you’re in a bar in buttfuck Wyoming, while she’s back by herself with your kid in her belly. Damn it, Jackson. Was I such a shit father?”
I snapped to attention. “What? No! You’re great.”
“I’m being serious. Did I let you down?” He grabbed me and shook me, then stopped and let go. “I tried to be there for you, God knows I did. I’d call, I’d swing by…”
“Dad. You were great.” My eyes stung, and I blinked. “I mean, I missed you sometimes. And I was pissed when you walked out on Mom — or when I thought you did. I guess there was more to it. But if I called, if I texted you, you’d get right back. You’d come when I needed you, no matter what. You were the only dad—” I choked up.
“What?”
“When I was deployed, you wrote every week. Every mail call, there’d be a postcard from you. Sometimes a package, something to eat. And you kept texting every damn day, every night, every morning, if I answered or not. I’d have no service for weeks at a time, then it’d come back and I’d get floods of texts. The guys would make fun of me, but… I was glad you were there. No matter how bad it got, you were still there.”
He cleared his throat. “If you love someone, you’ve got to show up.”
My whole stomach plummeted down to my boots. I dropped my head in my hands and groaned straight from my belly. “Oh, man, what’s wrong with me?”
“Son? You okay?” Dad gripped my shoulder, but I shrugged him off. I didn’t deserve comfort. I was lower than dirt.
“I ran out like a coward. On her and our baby. That’s not how you raised me, not you or Mom.”
“You’ve been a dumbass,” said Dad. “I won’t debate that. But you care for her, right? You want to be there?”
I’d thought of nothing but Hailey the whole drive up, if she was sleeping. If she was eating enough. If Mina was getting her enough time off. I’d been thinking, too, was she writing music? Singing, maybe, in her suite? To our baby? I should be there with her, singing along. Letting our baby hear my voice with hers, not raised in anger but in harmony.
“I need to get back,” I said, and lurched to my feet. Dad pulled me back down.
“Not yet. You’ve been drinking.”
“But—”
“You’re no use to her dead.” Dad tightened his grip. “Get a room for a few hours and sleep off those beers, and when you’re sure you’re steady, you head on back.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
“Come here, you damn fool.” He got up from the table and pulled me into a hug. “Your first kid’s a miracle. Everything’s new. You get on back there and you make this right, and then when the kid comes, I need pics, okay? First smile, first spit-up, I want it all.”
I wanted that too, every damn moment. What had I been thinking, running away?
Hailey might not want me back, but I had to try.
For us, for our baby, I had to try.