Chapter Two #2
And as infuriating as my son is sometimes, he’s still my son.
My number one priority. I know what I have to do; it’s my duty as his father.
He’s the biggest reason why I opted out of the family business.
I didn’t want to miss Colton’s firsts, putting the almighty reputation before my boy.
I didn’t want Miranda to ever be in a position like my own mother, always needing an extra set of hands around the house while Wagner Waters was out on the tides, tinkering on the never-ending to-do list of fixing traps and mending lines, or at the bar with his good ole’ boys’ crew—one Roger here is a part of.
“I’ll pop in Friday to grab my last paycheck,” I tell him, before stomping across the shop bay and hauling Colton out by the scruff of his neck.
“Ow!” Colton tries jerking out of my grasp, but I don’t let go until we get to my Harley.
“Your bullshit just cost me my job,” I hiss, thrusting his helmet at him. “Get on, I’m gonna smoke a butt, and then I’m bringing your ass to school, where you should have been after you assured me you were going this morning.”
He scoffs, but offers no rebuttal. I step away from him, while he gets the helmet on and climbs onto the seat, and light up my smoke. I want to quit smoking, but cripes—how can I, when it’s the only vice that stops me from screaming at Colton?
My son lost his mother, and I get that he’s hurting, but I just don’t know how or why it needs to come out with this reckless behavior.
I got into some mischievous shit back in my day, but not to this extent—nothing arrestable, at least. Not to mention, I smartened my ass up as soon as I found out Miranda was pregnant with Colt.
Getting your high-school girlfriend pregnant at just seventeen, however, isn’t the way I’d recommend smartening up to Colt. Thankfully, it doesn’t appear I have to worry about that. I don’t even think he has a girlfriend. Though, I’m sure he’d never tell me if he did.
This disconnect with my son—his recent uptick in petty behavior—it’s all weighing heavily on me. How do I reprimand him when he’s obviously lashing out because he’s hurting? He shouldn’t get to act out and get away with it like this because of his pain. I’m fucking hurting too, damnit.
I lost my wife, the woman who made me a father and whom I vowed to spend the rest of my life with. We were just eighteen years old when we got married. I’m going through shit too. I lost someone important to me as well. Only—and no one in the world knows this—I was going to lose her either way.
The brain aneurysm got her first. One day, out of the blue, she passed away while at work. I was—and still am, really—totally stunned by the void she’s left behind.
But, for over a year before her death, Miranda and I were bickering constantly, and she was looking into filing for divorce.
I hadn’t wanted a divorce, however, and I pleaded for her to stay.
I thought I could fix us, I guess. I thought we were going through the normal stuff everyone who has a baby together and marries young goes through. Growing pains or something.
People in my world, they don’t divorce. You stick it out, you go through your rough patches, or you settle into the notion that’s what you signed up for when you got married. You man up, and you stick it out.
Not Miranda, though. She wasn’t going to stick it out. She was going to take Colt and leave. In the heat of the moment, whenever we’d get to fighting, I know we both said some hurtful shit to one another—none of which neither of us truly meant. We were both hurt people, hurting each other.
She wanted out, and I wouldn’t let her go without a fight. In the end, that’s all the communication we ever had, and I still feel guilty about it to this day. Instead of being honest with her, we kept spiraling out of control.
She had repeated, over and over, about what a cold, unfeeling shell of a man I became, and she was done with it—done with me.
She said I couldn’t open up to her and just talk about my feelings.
And, yeah, maybe she was right, and maybe I’m also to blame for being the one who my son learned to express himself through outbursts from, rather than hashing things out.
I can count on three fingers the amount of times, in the last couple of years, that my son and I really sat down and talked about anything.
Not his football season, not his video gaming, not his social life.
He keeps that all pretty close to the chest, unless he’s vandalizing shit, I guess.
That stuff, he’d shout from the rooftops—or, I suppose, he’d spray-paint it on the rooftops.
But what can I do? I’m about as good at initiating heart-to-hearts with my son as my dad is with me, my grandfather with him, and his father before him. It’s just not a thing we do, talking about our feelings.
“Gonna smoke that filter too, or what?” Colton huffs. “I could have walked to school by now.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have, and we both know it.”
He scoffs and rolls his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. He only laughs when a seagull decides to drop a messy load on my front wheel fender.
“Looks like someone else doesn’t care for your stupid old-man chopper either.
You and me both, dump duck,” he commiserates.
“Would be cooler if it was a street bike…”
Wow, nice. How did I go from being the ‘cool dad’, the one who was still young enough himself to go out and actually do stuff with him—like toss a football around in the yard, get invites out to the tree house with him, or teach him how to play guitar with me—to this level of disconnect?
I stub out my smoke and make my way over to my bike, climbing onto the front and gripping the handlebars. When I start it, it purrs loudly. I kick the stands up with my heels, give the throttle a couple of revs and hear the rip of the engine, before I take off out of the shipyard.
Once and for all.