Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Lucas
“ I ’m sorry,” I mutter into the phone. “I’m still under the weather. Can you have someone continue to cover my classes?”
“Of course, Dr. Goode,” the woman on the line replies. “We’ll go ahead and get you covered for the rest of the week. If you could please keep up correspondence with your students via the classroom portal, that would be great.”
I rub my forehead, stifling a groan. “Of course.”
“Feel better soon, Dr. Goode,” she says in a chipper tone.
I hit the end call button without a response. Setting my phone down on the coffee table, I recline on my couch with a glass of whiskey resting in my lap. Half-eaten cartons of Thai food are scattered across the coffee table, right next to a group of empty beer bottles, stationed like sentinels at my feet.
They keep me from feeling too much. Not everything, though. I wish they could protect me from feeling everything, but the regret and loneliness still seem to slip through from time to time.
Sadie left two weeks ago. For the first few days, I was able to pretend I was okay. I even managed to teach for a couple of days. But every chance I could, I reached for the bottle and by the weekend, I dove headfirst into the swamp.
Then, I started wallowing, and now I’m on day nine of this spell, and at this point, I wallow on a professional level. I’ve made a living in this swamp.
I’ve even taken to writing humiliating and depressing poetry. Burned that as soon as I woke up the next day. Turns out there was nothing romantic about the old drunk poets of the past—just pathetic misery.
I miss her so much it hurts. I miss the way she hummed songs, even in the silence. I miss the way she danced when she ate. I miss her fucking shoes kicked all over the house.
“Lucas.”
I must have fallen asleep because I peel my eyes open to find my shirt cold and wet from the whiskey I spilled and someone standing over me, silhouetted by the TV playing behind them.
He slaps his hand over his chest, gasping for air as if I’ve somehow scared him.
“Jesus, I thought you were dead. You scared the shit out of me.”
Wincing, I force myself to sit up and face my younger brother, who is somehow standing in my living room.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “You don’t live here anymore.”
“Maybe I should…” he mumbles as he scans the current state of my house. “Look at this place.”
“I’m not feeling well this week so housework has fallen a little behind.”
“A little?” he snaps. Then, he glances around the house. “Where’s Sadie?”
“She left,” I groan.
“Left…”
“She left me,” I say as I lean forward, squeezing my eyes shut and wishing my headache away. I’m still too drunk to be hungover, but lucky me, I seem to be caught between both states at the moment.
“Oh no,” Isaac murmurs. He sits on the couch next to me as he places a hand on my back. “Luke, I’m sorry.”
I swipe his hand away. “I’m fine. It was nothing. Just a fucking fling. I’m not really a relationship guy anyway.”
“So you’re not drunk and living in squalor because of a bad breakup?”
“What?” I grunt. “No. That’s ridiculous.”
“Sure, it is,” he replies like he doesn’t quite believe me. “I’m going to make coffee and open some fucking windows. It smells in here.”
I lie back down on the couch and cover my eyes as Isaac tears open the curtains and throws open the windows to let some light and fresh air in. Immediately, I hate it. I want to vomit or cry or yell or something.
It’s the middle of the fucking day and I’m drunk, trying to hide in the dark. How goddamn depressing.
But then I smell coffee and it gives me a small thread of hope. My stomach growls like it’s hungry and I welcome the warm mug my brother hands me.
“Tell me everything.”
So I do. I try to play it off as something casual that doesn’t matter, but quickly, it turns into something more serious. And by the end, when I’m telling him how she left, my voice is cracking from emotion.
“Damn, Luke.”
That’s all he says, and I don’t know if he means it as you really fucked up or a show of sympathy, but it hurts either way. Because damn .
“So, what’s your plan?” he asks.
“Wallow my way through the hard part, I guess,” I reply. “It’ll go away eventually, right?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. Do you want it to go away? ”
Fuck no.
“What choice do I have?” I ask as I take a sip of the coffee.
“I think that’s pretty obvious.”
Is it?
“Sadie left because I’ll never measure up to the man she deserves. She’s literally better off without me,” I say.
“No, she left because you care about your work more than her.”
“That’s not true,” I argue.
“Isn’t it? You’re still going to England. You denied a relationship with her to save your job. Luke, you’re a genius, but not when it comes to relationships. If you want Sadie back, then you need to show her that she means more than your job.”
Setting the cup down on the table, I bury my hands in my hair. “You don’t get it. My work is my whole life. My work is who I am.”
Isaac doesn’t speak for a moment and when I look up at him, I notice the tight-lipped way he’s holding back.
“What? Say it,” I mutter.
“Don’t get mad at me,” he replies.
My brows pinch inward as I glare at him. “No promises.”
With a sigh, he shrugs. “Fine. I was just going to say…this whole workaholic thing you have reminds me of someone.”
“Who—”
I don’t even get the question out before I realize, and it steals the air from my lungs. Not because he’s being cruel or mean but because he’s right.
Our father.
He always put his work before us. It was what defined him. His legacy was his everything. He was Icarus who flew too close to the sun, and while we all reveled in watching him burn, it was too late. The damage was done.
Our entire childhood was tainted by the way he treated us. All of us. And while I’ve hated him more than anyone on this earth, it didn’t stop me from following in his footsteps .
“I’m sorry. You okay?” my brother asks with a wince.
“No,” I groan as my head falls forward. “I just realized I’m no better than Truett Goode, and I need a minute.”
Isaac slaps a hand on my back. “Well, that’s not entirely true,” he says with a laugh. “You’re not a hypocritical, self-indulgent homophobe.”
“No, but I don’t want to end up like him.”
“What, in prison?”
“No,” I reply. “Alone.”
“Well then, I think you have some groveling to do.”
After Isaac leaves, I pick myself up off the couch. Still more than a little drunk, I stumble my way around the house, picking up garbage and dirty clothes as I go.
My life fell apart when I was sober, so it’s ironic that drunk me is able to start piecing it back together.
As I’m cleaning, I can’t stop thinking about what Isaac said. Am I really turning into my father? Deep down, did I always know how much like him I am? That’s why I tried to spare anyone else from spending their life with me. I refused to treat the people I love the way he did.
Dismissive. Abusive. Manipulative.
I didn’t run away the same way Isaac did, but I did run away. And I’ve been running ever since. Even when I returned to Austin, I was never fully present, at least not with my family.
Which means all the things I wanted to say to him have been left unsaid. Years and years of resentment and anger and hurt have just been lying dormant inside me since I was a kid. And rather than face it, find closure, and heal, I’ve been silent.
But I’m done being silent now.
I’ve never been to a prison in my life. Growing up in a quote-unquote good Christian family , there was never an opportunity.
So, as I sit at the round metal table in the visitors’ center of the Hill Country Penitentiary, I feel more out of place than I’ve ever felt in my life.
After Isaac’s visit yesterday, I took a day to sober up and get my shit together. Then I drove up here with a headful of rehearsed lines I wanted to say to him. Right now, those lines are getting jumbled in my head. They sounded so eloquent when I practiced them in the car.
When the door opens, and they usher my father through the opening, I feel my stomach turn. He’s not in cuffs or chains, but there is a guard at his side. I hardly recognize Truett as he walks toward me. He’s a shell of the man he once was.
I used to think of my father as a mountain, strong and immovable. But now, with the dark circles under his eyes and barely any meat left on his frame, he looks like a weak, dying tree that could break with the smallest gust of wind.
His expression is guarded, staring at me with his brow furrowed as he takes a seat across from me at the table.
“What happened?” he asks, his voice a raspy crackling sound. For a man who once delivered sermons and shook walls with his verses, it’s just another example of how far he’s fallen.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Is it your mother? Is she okay?” He leans forward, his arms on the table as his gaze bores into me.
“Mom’s fine. Why?” I’m genuinely perplexed, and I hate that he spoke first. I wanted the upper hand in this conversation.
He leans back and narrows his eyes. “Why are you here?”
“I want to talk to you,” I say.
My father and I are strangers. I never realized it until now, but he and I have probably never been in a room alone together since I was a small child, and even then, I’m not entirely sure. We’ve never had a private conversation, and I can’t remember the last time he looked me in the eye as long as he is now.
It’s unnerving.
“I’m the only son who will still talk to you,” I say as the realization dawns. That’s why he thought I was here to deliver bad news. Adam and Caleb would both wring his neck before saying a word to him, so when he heard it was me, he assumed I was here to say something neither of them could.
He doesn’t reply to that. Just sits back and crosses his arms.
“What do you want, Lucas?” he mutters indignantly.
What do I want ?
All the lines I rehearsed vanish as I stare at him across the table while two guards watch us in silence.
“Four sons and the only one who will talk to you is the one you hate the most,” I say with a hint of humor in my tone.
His brow furrows deeper. “I don’t hate you. How could you say that?”
This time, I laugh, and one of the guards tenses.
“You’ve hated me my whole life. That’s if you bothered to even consider me that much. Every time I opened my mouth around you, you looked ready to knock my lights out. Sometimes you almost did. Remember those times, Dad? When spankings turned into punches? All because I had the audacity to speak my mind around you.”
His expression doesn’t change, even as a fire begins to brew inside me.
“Is this why you’re here? To remind me of what a terrible father I am? Adam and Caleb have already delivered that message, Lucas. I don’t need to hear it again.”
“You really were a terrible father,” I say. “So, why did you have us? Why have four kids if you didn’t want us? You could have been a great man. Maybe nobody would have faulted you for your vices if you had an ounce of humility, but you hurt the five people who loved you most. The people you were supposed to protect. So I guess I’m just here to understand…why?”
For the first time since I sat down, he seems to let his guard down. It’s as if he realizes I’m not here to attack him but to just understand him. He lets out a deep breath I’m sure he’s been holding for a long time.
“I wanted to be a good father, Lucas. When Adam was born, I really did think I was going to be the best father. Then, you two were born, and then…” His voice trails as he thinks of Isaac, and something inside me stiffens. I breathe a sigh of relief when he doesn’t utter his name. I hate that my brother even exists in my father’s head, so I don’t know if I could bear to hear him speak about him.
Truett lets out another sigh as he leans forward and rubs a hand over his face. “I loved my boys.” When his voice cracks, I fight the urge to flee. The last thing I want to do is hear my father cry like a victim in any of this.
“But I wasn’t the father I wanted to be. And there were days I regretted having you. I considered leaving. But then I would show up at the church, and everyone loved me. Do you understand what that’s like, Luke? To find more joy in your work than your own family? It was more powerful than I could have imagined.”
“It’s all you cared about,” I mutter under my breath.
To my surprise, he nods. “It is all I cared about.”
The rage inside me boils hotter but as I glance up and look into his eyes, seeing him for what he really is—a man who never should have been a father, the fire starts to die off.
As a son, to hear this hurts. To know my own father didn’t want me. He loved something more.
The fact that he’s finally owning up to his own behavior shakes me to my core.
I bury my fingers in my hair and let my head hang forward. Right now, the world feels so heavy, it’s practically pulling me under. How could I have almost promised myself to Sadie with even a sliver of a chance that I could end up like this ?
“I don’t want to be like you,” I growl into my hands.
To my surprise, my father lets out a chuckle. Which turns into a laugh, and when I peek through my fingers with confusion, I find him smiling and it’s the most perplexed I’ve ever been in my life.
“You? Like me?” he says with a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I say with annoyance.
“Lucas, of all my kids, you were the least like me. Adam, sure. I could see Adam following in my footsteps, and even Caleb had a mean streak I recognized, but you? If your twin brother didn’t look so much like me, I’d have thought you were another man’s child.”
“Well, bad news. I’m a workaholic, and guess who I got that from,” I snap.
“I wasn’t a workaholic,” he says, which only grates on my nerves. Just as I’m about to argue with him for trying to escape the blame once again, he holds up his hands in surrender. “It wasn’t my work I loved. It was the fame. The attention. The power . I didn’t give a shit about the work.”
“Wow…” I say as I shake my head. “Prison has really beat the humility out of you, hasn’t it?”
He shrugs with defeat. “What the fuck do I have to lose now? You think I care anymore? I have nothing left, Lucas. So yeah…I can admit now what I’ve done wrong.”
Neither of us speak for a moment. All of this is so hard to take in. It’s so incredibly foreign to hear my father talk about himself in a way that isn’t dripping with self-righteousness.
“Why are you all of a sudden so worried about being like me?” he asks, but before he can answer, his mouth forms an O shape as if he suddenly realizes. “You’re about to be a father, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” I reply. “I want to be.”
It’s the first time I’ve really admitted that out loud, and it feels good. I want to be with Sadie, and I want to raise this child with her. He might not biologically belong to me, but it feels like we’ve made him together. So much so that there’s an ache in my chest for him. Something I’ve never felt before in my life.
“What the hell are you so worried about, then?” he asks with a shake of his head. “You’ve clearly expressed everything I did wrong. So, do the opposite.”
“It’s not that easy,” I argue.
“Sure it is,” he replies, and I immediately hold up my hand.
“I’m not taking parenting advice from you.”
He puts his hands up in surrender before continuing. “All I was going to say is…” But then he pauses, and a tense silence fills the space as we stare at each other. “Being a father is easy, if you try. Just look him in the eye. Don’t make him afraid of you. Listen to him when he talks. And tell him you love him. That’s it.”
I’m not taking parenting advice from my father. Ever.
But…him just advising me to do everything he didn’t do as a father does ring with truth.
Neither of us say anything for a while. We sit in tense silence.
“Time’s up,” the guard says as he steps behind me, putting a hand under my father’s arm.
We don’t bother with goodbyes or other sentiments. He puts the familiar scowl back on his face as he’s carted away from me.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I can finally put something behind me. Hearing Truett admit to what he did wrong as my father is just the first small step in healing, but it’s enough to take the step forward I need.