Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty Eight
Ben
I don’t point the truck anywhere in particular. I just keep driving.
The radio’s on low—some late-night DJ telling a story about a song that came out before I was born. I take turns without deciding to, roll through neighborhoods I know by muscle memory, pass the river twice, then a third time.
The lights on the bridge throw long, dragging smears on the black surface, and I catch myself thinking, stupidly, that if I drove long enough, I could outrun the way my chest keeps cinching down and then letting go like a bad stitch.
When the truck stops, it’s not because I aimed for it. But something in me must have.
The old condo is cleaner than it is in my memory. The city resurfaced the parking lot since the last time I was here; the pothole that used to swallow hubcaps is gone, replaced with tidy white lines.
New porch lights. New landscaping—small trees that will throw real shade in ten years. The same rectangle of building, but softened. Family-friendly. The kind of place that looks like it would be on a brochure.
Still, when I look at the second-floor unit with the little rusted balcony—now painted, not rusted—I feel something shift inside me. It’s not the paint or the lights or the trees. It’s the way my body recognizes the room beyond it.
This is where my dad and I perfected the art of silence. The long, low kind that stretches through a dinner eaten in separate rooms and an evening and a weekend until you wonder if your voice is a muscle that can atrophy.
This is where he packed a life into boxes while I wrote a midterm on a school computer two states away. Where a woman I didn’t know opened the door on a chain and said, “Oh, honey,” and it cut me sharper than if she’d just slammed the door in my face.
A different family lives there now. It’s their porch light.
Their welcome mat. Their bikes chained to the stair rail.
I sit in the truck in the dark and watch the light spilling from a window that used to be ours.
A kid moves through it in profile and then vanishes, and for a second, I’m ten again at a table for two, waiting for conversation to happen to me.
I could have tracked him down. Greg Hoffman. I know men who know men who would find a mailing address for me for the price of a favor. A phone number. I could have knocked on a different door and asked the questions I didn’t know how to ask.
Why wasn’t I enough? Why didn’t you say goodbye? What kind of person leaves a kid with a key that doesn’t work and calls it moving on?
But I didn’t try to find him. Why bother?
I keep telling myself he wasn’t worth it. Maybe that was true. Maybe it was cowardice wrapped in logic. Either way, I didn’t. I built a bar and a life and became a person who made something of himself.
The words in the Pint today should have slid right off. Three old men, pissed about… what? A beer they didn’t like. A kid with my last name standing behind a bar.
Thief.
Good-for-nothing.
Sham.
I don’t know them. But I know the way those words found parts of me I’d rather keep boarded up.
The Hoffmans are from here. My family. My grandfather ran a place once. My father moved us away before I ever knew my grandfather, then moved back here long after the chance to get to know him had passed.
Maybe those men sat on stools my grandfather wiped down, and they think I’m stealing a name to make a buck. Maybe they knew my father and think his rot passed down in the blood like hair color.
The passenger door opens and the dome light snaps on. I don’t jump. I’m too far inside my skin for that.
Jason slides in like he’s done it a thousand times—because he has. He shuts the door gently, like he’s trying to keep from waking something. The light clicks off, and we’re back in the half-dark where I can’t see his face but know exactly what it says.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. It comes out as if I meant to say it lighter and then forgot how.
He sighs and leans back, watching the condo just like me. “Paige called me.”
Of course she did. Shame cinches tight under my ribs like a too-tight belt. I was supposed to go to her. I was supposed to talk film festival logistics and taste mini cupcakes, and be a person who keeps his promises. One ugly afternoon, and I ran like I was twelve. “Is she mad?”
“She’s concerned,” he says. Which is worse and better at the same time.
“How’d you find me?” I ask.
He doesn’t bite. He stares out at the lit window like it’s a TV, then says, “Who were those guys?”
Of course he knows. Of course she heard.
“I don’t know.” It’s all I can say.
“Locals?” he asks.
I shrug; a useless little lift that’s half apology. “Didn’t look like tourists. Didn’t look like they were there for a beer, either.”
“What did they say?” He’s gentle with it, like I’m on a ledge.
I blow out a breath, scrub a hand over my face. “Ordered the Hoffman Heritage, then wanted to send it back. Accused me of cutting it. They called me a thief.”
I can’t say the rest. Not about being a good-for-nothing and not about how I didn’t deserve Paige.
He’s quiet for a beat. “And you left.”
“I kicked them out,” I say. “Then I left.”
He tips his head. “You okay?”
The honest answer is no. Also yes. Also, I don’t know. “Felt like driving,” I say instead.
He nods. I can feel him cataloging me beside me the way he does with clients at the gym—breathing, posture, tells. He’s known me too long not to see the old wiring sparking. He lets the quiet sit for a second, then, “Ended up here.”
I stare at the balcony. “Muscle memory.”
It’s easier than telling him it’s because this is where I learned that life can change on a dime; that everything we have can be taken away in a second. That I could have a home one day—and nothing the next.
Well, a house, anyway.
He settles back, shoulder hitting the seat.
“You think they knew your dad?” Jason asks eventually. “The old guys.”
“Maybe.” I don’t have a better word than that. “They’re older. Maybe my grandfather.”
Jason’s jaw ticks. “Or maybe they just like the sound of their own voices,” he says, and I can hear the steel underneath. “Old guys with a grudge don’t equal truth.”
“They were aiming for something,” I say. “And they hit it.”
He’s quiet for a beat. “Ben… I need you to separate three things for me. One: the beer in the glass. Two: the name on the board. Three: the kind of man you are.
They aren’t the same thing, no matter how hard some asshole wants to braid them together and make them one.”
I keep watching the lit window. “I don’t know anything about him,” I say.
“My grandfather. William. Just a recipe card and a story I filled in with… hope, I guess.” I swallow.
“What if he wasn’t the man I made him out to be?
What if he was just like Greg? What if I’ve been propping myself up on a ghost who doesn’t deserve it? ”
Jason huffs out a breath. “Okay. Worst case? Your grandfather was a jerk. You still brew a clean Heritage that half this town loves. You still pay your staff on time. You still bring my mom flowers on her birthday. A bad ancestor doesn’t retroactively turn you into a thief.”
I shake my head. “But the name. ‘Heritage.’ What if I’m selling a fairy tale?”
“Then we figure it out,” he says, matter-of-fact. “We check the story instead of letting three random guys write it for you.” He tips his chin at the building. “You don’t have to worship the guy to tell the truth about him.”
“How?” My voice scrapes. “I’ve got a stained index card and a beer. That’s it.”
“We start simple,” he says. “I’ll ask Dad—he remembers more local history than he lets on.
Gwen’s got a quilting circle that knows every family tree from here to Cairo.
” That almost makes me smile. “We hit the historical society, newspaper archives, and old licensing records. Paducah had a Guild in the sixties—somebody’s still got a ledger.
And we find people who actually knew William Hoffman. ”
I rub my palms on my jeans. “And if we find out he was… Greg with better yeast?”
Jason shrugs. “Then it is what it is. It doesn’t change who you are.
You walk around town and say the name Hoffman, and people think of you and what you’ve brought with you to this town as an adult.
Not some dick who ran off on his kid as soon as humanly possible.
The legacy you’re going to pass on to your kid? The only thing that matters?”
He turns, makes me look at him. “You are not your dad.”
“It’s not even about the beer, Jase. It’s… the other part.” I clear my throat. “The not-good-enough for Paige part.”
He shrugs. “You never even saw these guys before. The fuck do they know?”
I huff out a laugh that isn’t one. “Enough to say it out loud.”
“Yeah? Here’s what I know out loud,” he says, voice even but with an edge.
“Paige isn’t a prize someone wins by pedigree.
She is a grown woman with a spine and a brain who picked you.
Not a version of you. Not the you you-think-you-should-be.
You. And if anyone in this town wants to run their mouth about whether you’re ‘good enough,’ they can come say it to me first.”
“That’ll go great,” I mutter.
“It will, actually,” he says, finally turning so I have to meet his eyes. “Because this isn’t a merit badge thing. It’s a behavior thing. You show up. You tell the truth. You take care of your people. You keep doing that, and you’re good enough. Period.”
I blow out a breath.
“And if I screw up?” I ask, because the part of me that expects to fail is always the loudest.
“You will,” he says, no softness, no performance.
“So will she. So will I. Everybody does. The question is what you do after. Like today…” He tips his chin.
“You screwed up. You should’ve texted. You shouldn’t have made her worried.
A text. ‘I’m okay. Talk about it later.’ That’s it.
Then tomorrow, you tell her where your head went.
Not some pretty version of it. The real one. ”