Chapter 19 #2
A pause. A long one. I could hear him breathing on the other end, and the sound of my son’s breathing was the most important sound I’d ever heard. “Hey, Dad.”
Quiet. Careful. Testing the word the way you test ice before stepping onto it.
“Happy birthday.” My throat was so tight the words barely made it out. “Sixteen. That’s a big one.”
“Yeah.” Another pause. “You called.”
“I said I would.”
“Yeah. You did.”
The silence stretched, two people standing on opposite sides of a bridge that was still being built, neither sure how much weight it could hold.
“I don’t really know how to do this,” I said. Honesty was the only thing I had, the only currency I could offer that was real.
“Me neither.” A beat. Then, with a directness that hit me in the chest, “Your voice sounds different from what I remember.”
“Yours too. You sound older.”
“I am older.” A hint of something in his tone. Not humor exactly, but the dry, understated edge of a teenager who was smarter than the situation required. Like Fay. Like me, if I were honest.
“Tell me about the guitar,” I said. Because I needed to hear him talk, needed to fill the space with his voice, needed to learn the sound of who he’d become.
And Boden talked. Hesitantly at first, in short sentences that gave away as little as possible, the verbal equivalent of keeping one foot near the exit.
He’d started playing a year and a half ago.
A friend had a guitar and taught him some chords, and he’d picked it up fast. He liked it because it was something he could do alone in his room, which I understood so deeply it ached.
He was into rock—Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen.
He was learning “Wish You Were Here,” and the irony of that title landed between us without either of us acknowledging it.
“That’s a good song,” I said. “Tough fingerpicking pattern.”
“You know it?”
“I used to listen to Pink Floyd a lot. Back in the Army. It was good music for…” I almost said “for the bad nights,” but I caught myself. “For long stretches with not much to do.”
“You were in the 82nd Airborne.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s like paratroopers, right? The ones who jump out of planes?”
“That’s the ones.”
“That’s kind of badass.” He said it with reluctant admiration, clearly not wanting to be impressed by his absent father but unable to help it.
Something in my chest cracked. “It had its moments.”
We talked for twenty minutes. Not about the hard things, like why I left, the five years of silence, or the anger Boden had mentioned in his texts.
Those conversations would come, and they’d be brutal, and I’d have to sit through every one of them and take whatever my son needed to throw at me.
But today was his birthday, and today was about hearing each other’s voices and learning the new rhythms of how we spoke.
He told me about the debate team. About his best friend, Rainier, who played drums and wanted them to start a band.
About his mom’s fiancé Greg, who was “fine, I guess”—the teenage endorsement of a stepparent who hadn’t done anything wrong but was still a new presence in his life.
About Rainier again, whose birthday was tomorrow, so they were throwing a birthday party together.
I told him about Forestville, about the mountain, the campground, the cabins I was building. I kept it light. He didn’t need the weight of my story, not yet.
“That sounds cool,” he said. “Building stuff.”
“I like it. It keeps me busy.”
“Do you…?” He stopped. Started again. “Are you by yourself up there?”
The question landed carefully. I looked at Arek, who was sitting in his chair, eyes on the valley, coffee in his hands, his presence as steady and grounding as the mountain itself. Three feet away. In the chair I’d built for him. “No, I’m not by myself.”
“Good.” The relief in that single word was so plain it nearly undid me. “That’s good, Dad.”
“Yeah. It is.”
We said goodbye. It was awkward and stilted since neither of us knew how to end a call we’d spent five years not making. Boden said, “Thanks for calling,” with a formality that broke my heart, and I said, “Happy birthday, Boden,” with a steadiness I was faking.
Then he said, “Bye, Dad.”
The same two words from the text, but spoken aloud, in his new-old voice, and I held the phone against my ear for three seconds after the line went dead because I wasn’t ready to let go of the sound of him.
Beside me, Arek waited.
I opened my mouth to say something, give him a summary of our conversation, but what came out instead was a sound—the raw, cracked noise of a man whose chest had been locked for five years and had just been opened by a boy’s voice saying “Bye, Dad.”
Arek’s hand found mine on the arm of the chair.
His fingers laced through mine and held.
His hand in mine, warm and steady, was an anchor to the present while the past and the future crashed through me like water through a dam.
The tears came silently, the way they had when Fay sent the photo, running down my face, into my beard, and dripping off my jaw onto my shirt.
I held on. My grip was probably too tight, probably bruising, but Arek didn’t flinch. He sat in his chair, held my hand, and let me break apart without trying to put me back together. He understood—had always understood—that some things needed to break before they could be rebuilt.
I sat on my porch on my mountain, holding the hand of the man I was falling for, and cried.
I cried for my son, for the five years I’d lost, for the voice I’d almost forgotten.
I cried for “Bye, Dad,” and “That’s kind of badass,” and a sixteen-year-old boy in San Francisco who was learning “Wish You Were Here” on a guitar and who had, despite everything, left the door open.
After a while, the tears slowed, my breathing evened out, and the world reassembled itself. The porch. The chairs. The coffee, cold now. Arek’s hand in mine.
He was already looking at me, his green eyes bright with his own tears, unshed but present, held in check by the same discipline that governed everything he did.
He hadn’t cried because this wasn’t his moment to cry.
But he’d felt it. Every word, every silence, every sound I’d made. He’d felt all of it.
“He plays guitar,” I said. My voice was destroyed. “He’s learning ‘Wish You Were Here.’”
Arek’s mouth did something that was half smile and half the effort of not falling apart. “Apt choice.”
“He said I was kind of badass for being in the 82nd.”
“He’s not wrong.”
I looked at our hands, laced together on the arm of the chair. My scarred, callused hand and his steady, precise one. Two hands that had been doing everything alone for years and were now, on a Friday morning on a mountain in Washington, learning how to hold on. “Thank you. For being here.”
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
I lifted our joined hands and pressed my lips to his knuckles in a brief, rough gesture to express the gratitude that was so big I couldn’t fit it into words. His knuckles were warm under my mouth. I felt his breath catch, and then his fingers tightened around mine.
I lowered our hands back to the chair. We sat on the porch in the late-morning light with our fingers laced, and I understood what happiness felt like.