39.
Graham
“Did someone call an ambulance? My son has just collapsed!”
That was Craig Oliver shouting that, as he leaned over Parker.
“An ambulance is on its way!” someone shouted. Parker had already come to, and was trying to sit up, clearly disoriented.
“Stay down,” Craig said.
Craig. Of Ocean View Realty. My father, who was kneeling next to Parker, calling him his son.
Which would mean Parker was my brother.
Well, half-brother.
Either way, it meant Parker and I were related.
Everyone in the restaurant had stopped eating and were watching. I just stood there while the flurry of activity happened around me. The ambulance arrived less than five minutes after the call had been placed. Parker was able to get onto the stretcher himself, but he looked awful, and I thought it was probably a good idea they were taking him to the hospital. As the EMTs wheeled Parker out, everyone went back to their meals. Craig followed the stretcher, but as he walked by me, our eyes met. I wasn’t sure why he looked at me right then, but then he was walking past and he disappeared from sight.
“Are you all right?” Chloe asked.
I nodded because I didn’t trust myself to actually speak yet.
“Oh, dear,” her mother was saying. “Poor Parker! I hope he’s going to be all right.”
I swallowed several times, then coughed. I looked at Chloe. “I’m going to go over to the hospital,” I said. “I should make sure he’s all right.”
“Okay. I’ll come with you.”
“I think it might be
better if I just went by myself. I just ... I’ll talk to you about it when I
get back, okay?”
She gave me a worried look. “Sure, that’s fine, but are you sure everything is
okay?”
“It is,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure if it was. My brain still couldn’t
quite seem to process anything.
*****
When I got to the hospital, I wasn’t sure if I’d even be allowed past the front desk, but no one blinked an eye and I just sort of fell in step with the people in front of me. Nurses wheeled patients past in wheelchairs, a family carried a big bouquet of flowers and a bunch of brightly colored balloons emblazoned with CONGRATULATIONS. The place was huge, so I knew there was a good chance that I wouldn’t ever run into Craig, but I had to at least try.
I came to the end of the hallway that I was walking down and turned into another hallway. This one was wider, and there was a row of chairs lining one of the walls. Craig had just sat down in one of them. I walked over.
He turned and looked at me as I approached. If he was at all surprised to see me, he didn’t show it.
“Hi,” I said. “I was at the yacht club and—”
He patted the chair next to him. “Have a seat.”
I sat. “Is Parker okay?”
“The doctors are running some tests right now. I saw him for a little bit, and he’s awake. Confused about where he is and what’s going on, but I suppose that’s to be expected. His mother’s on her way back from Boston; with the traffic, though, I don’t expect her to get back here for at least two hours. I’m hoping I’ll have good news to tell her when she gets here.”
“I hope so too.” There was a pause that stretched from a few seconds to a few minutes. I kept waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t, so I started to talk again. “You might be wondering why I’m here. I’ve been thinking about talking to you for some time now, and I just never have. I thought it might be better if I didn’t ....” My voice trailed off because I wasn’t really making much sense. “You’re my father,” I finally said, expecting him to look shocked or to deny it. But to my surprise, he only nodded.
“I am.”
“You knew about me?”
“I did.”
“I mean, beyond just my
mother having a child? You knew it was me?”
He nodded again.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. The whole ride over I’d been thinking of what I’d say, how I’d say it when he tried to deny that he was my father. I had a lot of good lines at the ready. But it had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t try to deny it, that he would act like he had known all along.
“I don’t know how much your mother told you,” he said. “It was a long time ago. That’s no excuse, I realize, but I was a lot younger than and not as responsible as I am now. At least I’d like to think so.” He coughed, a pained expression on his face. “We all do things in life that we wished we had handled differently. Some more than others. But I kept up with you over the years. From a distance, of course. I wanted to make sure that you were all right. I wasn’t actually in the country when you were born; I was over in Europe for a few years. Things never would have worked out between your mother and me. It would’ve been a disaster. We hardly even knew each other.”
I seemed to be feeling too many things all at once to process any one emotion. I felt like a blank slate. It was like being caught in the middle of a hurricane; you’re in the eye where everything is eerily calm, yet all around you was tumult.
“I don’t think you guys should be together or anything,” I said. “I never thought that.”
“I met my wife over in Europe. She moved back here with me. Parker was born a year later. It’s funny; I figured the two of you would always travel in different social circles, but then one day he was showing me pictures from a race, and there you were. The Rogue, I think he called you. He said you pissed a lot of the other guys off because you weren’t affiliated with any clubs and didn’t have any sponsorships, but you still managed to beat a lot of them. But he’s not a bad guy. That’s how Parker finished it. He said you guys sometimes gave each other a hard time, but it was all in good fun.”
“Yeah,” I said. It seemed strange now, to think back on all those times with Parker, and the feeling that I sometimes got that I knew him, beyond just the interactions we had at races. I’d always dismissed the feeling, though, because it had never made sense. It did now.
“So, you really knew I
was your son? You knew it was me?”
“I did. And don’t think that it didn’t cross my mind to get in contact with
you. It did, probably more than you might realize. But I didn’t, and that’s
just something that I have to live with. I tried to help you out how I could,
though.”
“You did?”
“I’m good friends with Richard Hanson, the president at the bank you got your
loan at. You were, what—nineteen, twenty—when you applied for your business
loan to open your shop?”
I nodded slowly. It seemed like such a long time ago, and at the time, it had
seemed like such a long shot, that I would ever get a loan to open my own shop.
I had no credit, no real business experience, and no collateral. But I was
young and probably a little full of myself and knew that I just had to take the
chance because tattooing was what I was good at and I didn’t want to have to
work for someone else. When they told me I’d been approved for the loan, I
hadn’t questioned it at all; I’d just assumed that it had happened because it
was what I was supposed to be doing.
“That was you?” I asked.
“Yeah. I vouched for you.”
“But you didn’t even know me.”
Craig shrugged. “You’re
right, I didn’t, but I felt like it was the least I could do.”
I paused, thinking back to that most recent loan statement I’d received. “I’m
going to go out on a limb here and assume that you also paid off the remaining
balance of the loan? Because I recently got a statement informing me that it’s
at zero. I haven’t really been paying much attention to it, other than making
sure the payment is on time every month, which gets deducted automatically, so
I guess it’d be more accurate to say I haven’t given it much attention at all.”
“Yes, I paid it off. There wasn’t that much of a balance left on there.”
“There was enough.”
“You’re right, but again, it’s something I wanted to do. You’d never made a single late payment, and even without ever having stepped foot in your shop, I could tell that you were doing well. I was happy to be able to do it for you, Graham.”
“Well ... thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say. The past few hours had been almost a blur, yet also stunningly clear at the same time. I was sitting here next to my father. The father I had grown up my whole life not knowing, yet he’d been there anyway, watching out for me in his own way.