Chapter 37 #2
My father didn’t have anything to say about that. He stared at me, but pain showed on his face like a dark sky before a storm.
“You knew? You knew what kind of monster that man could be?”
He cleared his throat. “I did.”
“You knew you were my dad, and you knew he abused the woman you loved, but you… what? You just turned around and walked away?”
“I s’pose it seems that way to you. I tried not to.
Sat out in my truck for hours, tryin’ to figure what to do.
You and your brother left, and I followed you to the edge of town.
Y’all turned left, and I turned right. At that moment in time, I was sober, but it never lasted.
And seein’ you, hearin’ you speak and knowin’ in my gut you were mine…
Well, it ended that particular bout of sobriety.
“I went home and drank until I forgot again. Forgot how much I loved your mama. Forgot how pure our love had been. And I forgot that you might need me. All I remembered was the pain.”
He really was my father. We’d been built the same inside and out.
“Okay, so then when you got sober ten years ago?”
“Then you weren’t in the best place, and then you disappeared. I tried keepin’ tabs on you, but you didn’t keep steady work or friends. You flitted in and out of your own life, and I lost track of you for a while.”
“And you didn’t think learnin’ that my dad wasn’t Noah Lee, that I didn’t share DNA with that asshole, that it couldn’t help me?”
William stayed quiet a moment, rubbing the palms of his hands over his thighs, the jeans below them stained dirty and worn soft.
“I came to tell you once. Caught up with you and followed you into the bar in town, the kind of place I’d vowed never to see the inside of again.
I approached you at the bar, started to try to talk to you but you were so drunk, maybe high, too, and you turned, faced me, and said, ‘Fuck off, old man. G’on back to the rodeo. ’”
“I’m sorry for that,” I said. “And you’re right. If you found me at Manny’s Bar, I’m sure I was wasted, but you couldn’t stand up to some young punk? You couldn’t tell me to shut up and sit down?”
“Would you have listened?”
That shut me up. No, I would not have listened. I would’ve hit him. Shit, if I’d been high enough, I might’ve killed him for talking to me like that.
He nodded. He knew just as well as I did that his words back then wouldn’t have done any good.
“It wasn’t long after,” he said, “that I lost track of you. You never went back to that little apartment you used to rent over on High Street; I checked once or twice a month, if I could get a break at my job, but I never saw you again. And then the last time I was there, I saw the landlord haulin’ out some old furniture and a bunch of trash, and when I asked, he said the old renter had skipped out so he was puttin’ the place back on the market.
“I tried a thousand times to call your mama. It just… Well, just ’cause a man is sober, it don’t mean that all the things that made him a drunk go away.
I expect you already know that. So, the shame of leavin’ your mama and all my misguided pride, it wouldn’t let me call her.
I never did. And until you showed up here today, I never saw you again. ”
Goddamn. Everything he said made so much fucking sense that I was struggling to stay pissed off. He was describing me. Misguided pride had helped me make a lot of bad decisions too.
Jabbing my thumb over my shoulder at the painting of Merv, I said, “But you loved her. There’s no other art on these walls. It’s painfully plain that she’s the love of your life. So, if you were keepin’ tabs on me, you would’ve heard that Noah died. Why couldn’t you call her then?”
Raising his arm quickly, he swung it around his living room. “What did I have to offer her?”
But Avery Jane and Stu had taught me that all a man needs is love.
“There’s a simple answer,” I said, and when the words left my mouth, their weight lifted off my shoulders. “When you figure it out, maybe we’ll see you. You know where we are. Oh, and by the way, you have a grandson now, if you care.”
I stood. I wasn’t disappointed. Maybe a little, but I’d learned a long time ago not to expect too much from fathers.
Besides, there was a beautiful woman outside, waiting in an air-conditioned flower van for me, and making her wait wasn’t a habit I wanted to get into. And the little boy waiting for me two hundred miles away could ease my sorry heart with one smile. I wanted—needed—to get back to him.
No man would ever make me miss another moment of Stu’s life for as long as I lived. I’d vowed it to myself and to Stu, and I wasn’t planning to go back on my word.
William Messer, Jr. didn’t say anything more as I walked out of his trailer, and the hot sun touched my skin again, but this time it kissed me and wrapped me up like a soft blanket on a long winter’s night.
When I got back to AJ’s van and hopped in, I took hold of her hand and squeezed.
“One father down, one to go?” she asked uneasily, worried about the outcome of my conversation with William.
“Let’s go home.”
“You don’t want to tell me what happened?”
“I do and I will, but it doesn’t matter.”
Smiling at the woman I loved, I knew it was finally true.
Who my father was or wasn’t didn’t make a bit of difference in my life.
The only things that mattered to me were the people who loved me, who I loved right back, more than I ever thought I could.
If I had AJ and Stu in my life, I was luckier than any prince or king.
And there was nothing, not one damn thing, in this world that could ever make me say different.