24. Blake
CHAPTER 24
BLAKE
I ended up in the park, sitting on the slide, watching the birds in the cloudless blue sky. When Oli first met me, he’d called me the sad man. Was he right? Was that me? Was I the sad man? Would I bring sadness into his life?
Oli was a happy kid, but that was thanks to Claire. Claire and her parents. They’d raised him right. What could I give him that the three of them couldn’t, aside from my sadness and my isolation? He didn’t need those things. He didn’t need me.
He didn’t need me. Neither did Claire.
I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands. It had felt like fate when I ran into Claire, when Buster ran up to me, when I met Oli. But fate wasn’t always a positive thing. Some folks had dark fates, or sad ones, or strange ones. Maybe mine was a guest role in my son’s life. I’d show up now and then laden with presents, and then I’d fly out again before my sadness touched Oli.
A car pulled up nearby. I heard the door slam.
“Blake? Are you serious?”
I raised my head. “Sam?”
“Thought I might find you here when you weren’t at home.” He trudged over to meet me and sat next to me on the slide. “Joelle said you stuck your foot in it with Claire.”
I grimaced. “Sure did.”
“Want to tell me what happened?”
I didn’t, but at the same time, I did. Sam and Joelle had been together since high school. Maybe he could tell me the right thing to say.
“I was thinking of moving back here,” I said. “There’s this great fellowship… well, the details don’t matter. Point is, if I wanted, I could come back.”
“But you don’t want to?”
“No! No, I do.” The force of my denial surprised even me. “I want to be here, but what if, y’know…”
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “What if what?”
“What if I come back and I screw it all up? If I screw Oli up. If I’m not a good father.”
“What if you leaving screws Oli up?”
I hadn’t thought of that. My stomach clenched up. For a moment, I thought I might actually puke.
“Relax,” said Sam. “You will screw him up. That’s what parents do. They screw up their kids.”
“And that’s supposed to be comforting?” I punched his arm. Sam punched me back, in the meat of my thigh.
“Joelle didn’t say comfort you. She said kick your ass. But you look too pathetic for me to do that.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.”
He smirked. “You’re welcome.”
“So, do you have any advice for me, or was that it? Relax?”
Sam leaned back on the slide, and then he stood up. He frowned down at me, his deep-thought frown. “The problem with you,” he said, after a while, “your problem is, you suck at relationships. It’s easy to miss that because you’re easy to like, but the second you hit a snag, poof . You’re out.”
“What? No, I’m not.”
“Uh, yeah. You are. Remember that time, our first year in college, we had that huge fight when I blew off our study group? You didn’t talk to me for a whole month, and when I came crawling back to you, you remember what you said?”
I tried to remember, but I couldn’t at all. Our fight had been years ago, and it was over. We’d moved on, or I had. I’d put it behind me.
“You said you thought I was mad at you. I was like, duh. Of course I was mad at you, but that means we don’t talk? We’re still friends, aren’t we? We work it out.”
“We did, didn’t we?”
Sam did a facepalm. “Yeah, because I came and got you to talk. You’d have just gone on and written us off.”
“So you’re saying I should go back and talk more to Claire?”
“Maybe not now.” Sam sat down again. “You really are hopeless. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
We sat for a while, watching the road. A blue car whizzed by, then a couple of black ones. A wild turkey pecked its slow way down the shoulder.
“You’re going to screw up,” Sam said at last. “In any relationship, that’s just a given. You’ll do and say the wrong thing a million times over, but what you don’t seem to get is, that’s not the end.”
I scuffed at the dirt. “It has been for me.”
Sam looked so sad I wondered what I’d said this time. He started to say something, then shook his head.
“What?”
He sighed. “I forget sometimes how you grew up. All those damn foster homes. How many, again?”
“I lost count,” I said. “More than both hands. They used to get scared of me, the parents, y’know. Because I was big and all, and they had other kids. I’d get mad one time and I was too much. They said I was angry. Hard to control.”
“You’re allowed to get angry. You know that, right?”
I tried to picture myself getting angry at Claire. Yelling at her. Telling her no. I couldn’t see it, somehow. It felt wrong and mean.
“Me and Joelle fight. We have to sometimes. If we didn’t fight, we’d never get to what’s bugging us, and then we’d never figure it out. I mean, we have rules, no screaming, no name-calling. But we disagree. We do that a lot.”
This was news to me. I couldn’t picture them angry, not at each other. “And you two are happy? You’re doing okay?”
Sam smiled, wide and sunny. “We’re doing great. We’re talking about a baby, maybe next year.”
“And you don’t worry it’ll all fall apart?”
“Sometimes.” Sam shrugged. “Things fall apart. But you can’t make life choices based on that chance. You’ll never do anything if you think that way. Any relationship can fall apart. Any career can fail. Nothing’s for sure. But I wake up every day and I choose Joelle. She wakes up next to me, and she chooses me. We get through the bad times, and we fight for the good. That’s how it works.”
“Relationships?”
“Yeah.” Sam grabbed my shoulder and gave me a shake. “I can’t tell you, ‘do this, and it’ll all be okay.’ But my advice would be, work out your shit. Figure out what you want, then go back to Claire. Talk to her, and don’t run if she wants to fight. Let her get it all out, and make sure you listen. Then, once the dust clears, you can move on from there.”
A lump rose in my throat. I swallowed it down. What Sam was saying sounded too good to be true: Claire could get mad at me, and not mean goodbye? We could still be a family, at least in some form? I’d been so sure she’d never want to see me again, except for the time it took to hand off Oli.
“Think it over,” said Sam. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t. Thanks, man.”
“And if Joelle asks you, I kicked your ass.”
I kind of felt like he had. Like he’d shocked my whole system. “Kicked it good,” I said.
Sam stood up again. “Well, I’ve got to get back.”
I sat all choked up, watching him go. I’d asked myself sometimes, how did folks stay together? How did they go years, and not mess it up? Could it be they did , and then they just fixed it? I was good at fixing things, tables, chairs, bodies. Claire was, as well, so maybe together, maybe the two of us could fix what we had.