Chapter Twenty-Four #3
Something about the way he said it. The person they found in the kitchen, heating water for tea at the stove, looked like someone who was being retracted from himself. Eyes wide, startled, clearly happy to see them both. Cal stuck around. He called Becky, told her he was going to stay over.
Tom couldn’t stop crying.
—
So, yes: water, water everywhere. Water under the bridge. So much goddamn water.
He went back and forth from Toledo a couple of times to shift some project responsibilities at the station and arrange for a leave of absence.
He explained everything to Kathy, thanked her when she offered to come with him, told her he was fine and would call and keep her posted.
Then he threw his arms around her and didn’t leave for another two hours.
When Felix saw Tom walk through the door with two suitcases and learned that he had no set date to go back, he thought, Oh. I really am dying.
—
Mainly, they talked. Around that, through it, sometimes over it, Tom tended to his father—found things he would eat, helped him dress, administered his morphine drops, his Dilauded pills—Felix allowed himself to be tended to, as much as he didn’t like being so needy.
There were good days and bad days. Then—fairly quickly, it seemed to everyone, but especially to Tom—only good half-days. Sometimes just a good hour or two.
It wasn’t long before they got around to the past.
For as much as he didn’t want to, Tom began to see his father’s reasoning for doing what he’d done.
Or, at the very least, he saw that his father was convinced any other course of action would have been bad for the two of them.
He’d known that at the time, it seemed to him now—at eight years old, he’d known—but somehow he’d lost sight of it pretty quickly.
“I was selfish,” Felix said a week or so after Tom had settled in.
His voice had gotten higher in pitch. He was in his robe and pajamas, sitting in the electric-powered recliner Bishop had gotten him.
(Bishop had also brought down the bed from the guest room and set it up in Felix’s den, so that Felix didn’t have stairs to contend with.
Bishop, who Tom had known peripherally for half his life, took a little getting used to as more than just his father’s friend.
But Tom was glad for him, for both of them.
Sad too, for what they faced.) “I worried what you were going to think about it all. It’s really hard to protect your kid from a situation you don’t know how to handle. One that’s half your fault.”
“It wasn’t half your fault,” Tom said, peeling an orange on the couch.
“Your mother and I survived on a lot of presumption about each other.”
“Makes sense.” Tom held up an orange wedge. “Want one?”
Felix didn’t acknowledge the offer. He focused on taking a few breaths, then changed tack slightly. “I couldn’t stand the idea of somehow losing you. I couldn’t lose you. So I got selfish and didn’t tell you. Then I waited too long.”
“You didn’t lose me.”
“Sure I did,” Felix said, squinting at him. “All that silence?”
Tom shook his head. “I think I lost you for a while.”
—
He told Felix about going to see his mother. About wanting to talk to her—right after he found out about everything—but then just holding back and watching her from a distance.
“You didn’t speak to her?”
“No.”
Felix lost what air he had, hearing that. He drew in a breath of lament. “Why not?”
Tom had gained a crease on either side of his mouth in adulthood—like parentheses, Felix thought, more pronounced now than ever. They deepened as he thought about how to answer. “It sounds stupid, maybe, but once I saw her, I didn’t want to make her have to talk to me. I knew she didn’t want to.”
“She might have.”
“No, Dad.”
Disagreeing, or flat-out refusing to accept even the possibility. Felix let the heaviness of that settle. After a time, he said, “How did she look?”
“Tired,” Tom said. “Beautiful.”
—
When he ran errands now, in this town where he’d been born and raised, he felt of an entirely different species—like one of those Star Trek episodes where they zapped down to a whole new society of beings and walked around, hoping to blend in.
Not because he’d become a “city dweller,” or even because he hadn’t lived here for so long, but because none of these people had a dying father, like he did.
Or, none of them had his dying father. It made no sense, but he didn’t even want to look anybody in the eye here.
Not the pharmacist, not the cashiers, not the bag boys at the grocery store.
Nobody who wasn’t an immediate part of what he was going through.
He’d been in town two weeks when June rolled into July, and while he’d been seeing a lot of red, white, and blue crap all over town, there was an explosion of it now.
The benches and planters were painted red, white, and blue.
The curbs were painted red, white, and blue.
The mailboxes were striped with it. A banner stretched across Main Street, near the courthouse, read Bonhomie is the Spirit of ’76!
Which made no sense. He couldn’t even drive on Main Street one afternoon because there was a barricade across Cooper Road, just west of the roundabout—and even the barricade was draped with red, white, and blue bunting.
People were gathered just beyond it and lined along both sides of the street.
Before taking the detour, Tom, detecting music behind music, shut off the Bellamy Brothers and lowered his window to hear, in the near distance, a marching band.
The sound swelled, and around the gray brick corner of Linneger Brothers Bargain Store they came, turning onto Main, followed by a pickup truck pulling a giant red, white, and blue birthday cake made of tissue and chicken wire.
Behind that, a dozen baton-twirling teenaged girls and, visible through their spinning arms, Shriners zigzagging in their stupid little cars.
The fucking Fourth of July, Tom realized.
The fucking bicentennial, to boot. Happy fucking birthday, America.
That meant all the stores were going to be closed and he might as well go back to the house.
He was filled with frustration at what was happening. He was angry at his father for doing this to himself, though he would never say that—to his father, anyway. He was scared. He had Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins and Bishop there, so he wasn’t alone, but, still, he was scared.
Sometimes, faintly, he thought, Where the fuck is my mom?
—
They watched television together. All five of them, sometimes, sitting around the living room. They watched Columbo and Kojak and McCloud. They watched fourteen-year-old Nadia Com?neci win three gold medals in gymnastics.
Tom and Felix were looking at pictures of Mars in the newspaper one morning when Felix said, “You might want to give her a call.”
They were deep into it now. There’d been some dark days. Tom said, “To tell her what—that you’re dying?”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Felix half-cringed. “But, yeah.”
“You think I want to talk to her now?”
“I don’t know. Do you? Would you rather tell her afterward?”
Too much. Tom waved his hand.
“Write to her.”
“Do you want to see her?”
“Don’t flip your lid—is that the expression? If she walked through the door, I’d be okay with it.”
“What would you say?”
“I’d say hi. But I’m talking about you doing it—if you want to. Don’t worry about everybody else. They’ll understand. If you want to, I mean, you should. It’s up to you.”
“Sounds like you want me to. Like you think I ought to.”
“Thomas Aquinas Salt. If I knew what was best for you—” But Felix never finished that thought.
He started coughing, and coughing was like running up a mountain.
When he was finished, his thoughts had moved on.
Tom almost brought him back to what he was saying.
Later, he would wish he had. It was just the needling sort of half-sentence that could stick with a person for the rest of his life.
He used to be convinced he had this figured out, convinced that his father didn’t understand anything about him.
Now he saw that his father had looked at him the same way, with the same conviction.
Of course he had. But Tom had been stubborn about it.
He’d had to put them behind him, in tow, and wait until they finally fell away, like those stages of the Saturn V separating and tumbling behind what was left of that rocket that just had to get to the moon.
His father, in one of their often-interrupted conversations (because he had to cough, or catch his breath, or rest), had told him about Augie (and about how Augie had, in a circuitous way, been responsible for Tom’s middle name).
Tom couldn’t imagine a struggle like what Felix had gone through, losing Augie and almost dying at the same time.
Hiding who he was—for decades. Even while there was, to this minute, some ugly little nook tucked away inside him where his anger still kicked at the walls because of what they’d hidden from him and Skip, he couldn’t imagine having to be them, with the problems they faced.
Who knows? He might have done the same, in their place—except for leaving a little kid; he couldn’t see himself ever doing that.
“I know your mom loved you,” his father said in another of their conversations, when they weren’t even talking about her; he was telling Tom about coming home from the war, the long train ride with his ribs still bandaged and his arm in a sling.
“You’re just saying that. How do you know that?”
“I saw her with you. I saw something in her eyes when she looked at you that I never saw before—or since. We didn’t really know what we were doing, she and I, but we were excited.
I was excited, anyway. About having a child.
About having you.” He smiled a little beneath the hose that lay across his upper lip. “I still am.”
—