Chapter Forty-One
Bryan
The next day is overcast and Susie leaves before the snow comes. There’s another week before classes start, and I normally enjoy the mostly empty campus, but not without her. I long for her, for her warmth, her laugh, her relentless untouched optimism.
As I finish cleaning the kitchen, the phone rings. I expect Harry to be on the other end.
“Bryan?”
Mom’s voice, sad and resigned, reaches inside me and before she says more, I lean against the wall, my heart and soul on alert and shore up against oncoming devastation.
“Bryan…”
I hear the crack in her voice as she says my voice a second time and I stiffen, as if that’ll help. “Your father is gone.”
Gone? The word doesn’t register, like it’s in a foreign language and has no meaning to me, makes no sense. I don’t say anything, suspended between knowing and not knowing, waiting for her to explain.
There’s a sniffle and then she goes on. “He committed suicide.”
Suicide. The word falls like an anvil on my head, crushing me. My chest squeezes unbearably and I force myself to breathe, to slow down the panic. I need to keep calm.
Mom’s still talking and I try to pay attention. “He wrote a note, said he didn’t want you to be worried about him or the farm. Didn’t want to be in the way of your life and dreams and…”
She lets out a quick sob while I try to comprehend her words, keeping them in some kind of holding silo in my head until she’s finished.
“He said he knew you weren’t really a farmer?—”
“Dammit. Damn him!”
My words echo against the walls of the kitchen. “I am a farmer.”
I have an overwhelming need to yell this to him, to shake him until he understands. I didn’t need him to hammer it into me from childhood with punishing, relentless demands from me. It was always there in my soul. A reflection of his.
My chest tightens again, and so does my grip on the phone, but I hold my shit together, feeling like he’s hammering me from the grave now.
“Suicide?”
I manage the word, plucking it from all she said and comprehending, but not understanding. “Fucking suicide?”
It makes no sense.
She sobs, and my heart lurches.
“He didn’t regret teaching you the meaning of hard work,”
she says as if she didn’t hear my question. Or maybe she doesn’t know the answer. Hard work? Maybe I owe my ability to outwork anyone, anywhere, anytime, to him.
“He left you behind,”
I choke out the words. “What happened to honoring our family, the people we’re supposed to take care of?”
“He did. There was something he didn’t tell you.”
I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t. Dread assembles in my chest, but I almost scoff aloud. What could be worse than him committing suicide? After telling me I don’t matter?
“What is it, Mom?”
I ask in a gentle voice as I listen to her quiet crying.
“He was dying. Stage four cancer?—”
“What the hell?”
My chest explodes with my voice as a hundred realizations storm me, knocking me back. He must have been in pain. He must have needed my help. Needed me. He was too proud to admit to pain or weakness, pushing himself too far.
Like I might do.
No. I would have said something. To someone. To Susie. To Liz? Not anymore. To Eldy. To Coach Hammer. Eventually.
Calming myself enough to speak, but not enough to ease the white-knuckle grip I have on the phone, I take a shaky breath and cut through Mom’s sobs. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I’m angry at him, not you.”
“Don’t be angry.”
Silly words from a smart woman, like asking a toddler not to cry when he’s in pain. Like my old man did.
But I’m no toddler. I know how to control my emotions. I need to rein them in starting now.
I need to let myself feel the hurt without pushing back with anger, to let it go through me without controlling me.
“Did you know?”
I ask her.
“I dragged the truth out of him just before we signed the papers to sell the farm, or I swore to him I wasn’t going to sign. He wanted to spare me the burden of taking care of him.”
Her words border on bitter, but mostly I hear the sad pain, the raw grief of loss.
Papers to sell the farm?
A strangled chortle escapes from me.
“He sold the farm?”
The words scrape from my throat.
“We had to. We… needed the money. It’s all we had left and… the farm is useless with no one to work it.”
I’m trying to wrangle a confusing mix of unsettled emotions, to keep them in check as they chase each other around in my head. But my gut knows where I am as nausea threatens to erupt, and my chest tightens so hard around my ravaged heart that I think it cracks.
I take some deep breaths to regain some semblance of control.
I need to talk to Susie.
Hope bursts with her name into my thoughts, allowing me to breathe easier. The new urgency to talk to her, to see her, to touch her, and hold her in my arms has me about to hang up on my mother.
Except Mom has no one to console her but me now. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll get a ride home tomorrow?—”
“Don’t. Stay where you are. Be with that pretty girl of yours. Let her console you. Let her make you happy. I need to think of you that way.”
“What about you?”
“I have Wally and my sister and her family. I have my memories. And I have you in my heart.”
She pauses, sniffles with agony. “To tell you the truth, Bryan, seeing you, the spitting image of him when he was a young buck, would just about kill me right now.”
Her words shake me to the core.
“Good-bye, Bryan. I’ll call you when I get settled at Aunt Sophie’s.”
She hangs up before I finish saying good-bye, as if she couldn’t stand to hear my voice anymore. Telling me about my dad had to be the hardest conversation she’s had since my brother died, one more hard thing in a hard life.
I’m thinking this while I hold off the tidal wave of devastation coming from a distance, gathering force, and I dial the number Susie gave me, hoping she answers before I get hit.
It’s a California number, and my hand still shakes. I randomly wonder what the long-distance charge will be, distracting my pain as I struggle to hold myself in one piece long enough to hear her voice. I need to re-dial twice before I get the call through, and Susie’s parents’ phone rings on the other end.