Luke
IT’S NOT LIKE I EXPECTED a homecoming parade when I rolled back into this dusty little town of Knot Valley in Eastern Washington. It would have been nice to have gotten a ride home from the fucking bus station though.
I don’t know why Pops wasn’t there at the station to pick me up as planned. He hasn’t sounded like himself on our weekly phone calls, and he stopped visiting me years ago when Mom took sick.
I hitched a ride as far as the mailbox on the main road, but it’s another mile up the driveway to the house. Which gives me time to think. Too much time. Thinking is all I’ve done for five years, and I’m tired of what might have been.
What if I’d never been falsely imprisoned? What if my mom had lived to see me vindicated—the real criminal finally arrested? Damn. The familiar anger churns through my gut knowing my mom died without me at her bedside. At least I know her faith in me never wavered. Not once. She always believed I was innocent and never stopped praying for justice to be served. I only wish it could have happened when she was alive to see it. What I wouldn’t give for one more day. One last chance to hold her hand. To tell her they found the real criminal and let me out.
The fields along the driveway are sick. I don’t need to use my bachelor’s degree in ag science to know that. Why hadn’t Pops gotten more help with them? As I round the last corner, my childhood home looms in the distance. It seems sad. Forgotten. Jesus. I’ve only been gone for five years—I didn’t think a house could change so much. Though five years on the inside seemed a lot longer to me, too.
There are no flowers anywhere the eye can see. Mom used to keep up the beds circling the house so there was always color no matter what the season. I wonder what happened to the furniture that used to be on the front porch. That was the place I was always guaranteed to find my folks in the evening after supper, at least until the weather got too cold for even cocoa and lap blankets to keep them warm on their porch swing. Now the screen door is propped up against the wall to the right of the door, and all the windows are closed despite the pleasant spring breeze. No curtains are open to let in the light, either.
I open the door and it creaks like a damned haunted house. I take a few steps in. It’s musty when it used to smell like lemon furniture wax with hints of cinnamon from the kitchen. There are newspapers and magazines stacked haphazardly down the sticky hallway floor that used to shine like a mirror.
“Pops?” I yell out. “You home?”
I stop at the wall of portraits. I hardly know the young kid smiling so big with his first fish, his first blue ribbon, his first prom date. There he is with his football championship trophy. Another with his high school diploma. Look at him standing between his parents in his university graduation gown. He’s got the whole world in front of him.
Six months later, all that promise would be gone. Taken from him. Wrenched out of his life.
The last time someone took my picture, it was when they were booking me on bogus charges. I haven’t been a free man since. I’m not sure I feel free now.
“Pops?” I find him in his recliner. Stacks of newspapers and empty beer cans circle the chair. He’s snoozing while the baseball game plays on the television with no sound. I gently shake his shoulder. “Pops?”
He snorts as he wakes up, trying to place where he is and who is talking to him. “Luke? Is that you?”
“Of course, it’s me.”
His eyes don’t seem to focus. “I thought I was picking you up tomorrow?”
He smells like he’s been bathing in old beer.
“That was today, Pops.”
His skin is too yellow and his eyes too red. He looks doughy and slow, so unlike the man I remember. Five years. How could everything change so much in five fucking years? He grunts. “Sorry, son. I guess I lost track of the days. I was going to clean up this mess today...before you got here...” He trails off as we both take in the mess and realize it would have taken him far more than one day to clean up.
My guess is he’s been living in this chair since he buried Mom three years ago.
“What do I care about a little mess? It’s good to see you,” I lie. I love him more than I can say, but it’s not good to see him. Not like this. This man is broken.
Just one more thing taken from me. My childhood hero.
“You look...”
I chuckle. “Big. Yeah, I had a lot of time to exercise.” I’d been in good shape for my entire life, part of it is my alpha genes, but I was always an athlete too. In prison, though, I had to get stronger. Bigger. Meaner. I’m one scary son of a bitch now. The golden boy this town remembers died the day he was arrested. This man I am now is the kind of guy you find in a roadhouse biker bar, not the quarterback on the field or the prom king on the dance floor.
“You hungry, Pops? I could sure use some grub.”
He shakes his head. “I’ll just have another beer.”
“Sure thing. I’ll bring it to you.”
My mom’s kitchen is destroyed. Garbage everywhere—mostly food wrappers and beer cans. A lot of flies are circling the sink full of dirty dishes. Rage fills my chest instead of air. Not at my dad—he’s obviously sick. I knew he was depressed when we spoke on the phone, but to be confronted with what it looks like in real life, to see how lost he’s been without his wife. Without his son.
No, the rage is at the unfairness. The life I was supposed to have compared to this one. This dirty, neglected place that used to shine. The house without its heart. I know my mom still might have gotten cancer and died if I’d been here—but Pops and I would have had each other to get us through it. Instead, he got sicker and I got meaner.
I bring him his beer and make a meal out of a couple cheap frozen dinners cooked in a microwave so heavy with grime I wonder why it hasn’t caught fire. Later, I get my dad in his own bed instead of the recliner I’m afraid he sleeps on every night. I don’t sleep in my old room. I can’t even go in there yet. I can’t face the old Luke right now. He’s a ghost. I sleep in one of the guest rooms instead. And I start making plans.
I have a lot of living to catch up on. A lot of work to go along with it. Work is good. It will keep me from thinking about what I used to have. What I should have now by all rights.
Thanks to the internet, I know my ex-boyfriend is married with one kid and one on the way. His husband is a high school friend. Or was. Neither he nor Aaron ever visited me in prison. They have a farm, and I have fallow fields. They have kids, and I have an aging hero in a recliner who looks ready to be put out to pasture. They look happy. In love.
I have my hand for companionship.
As I rub one out, for necessity not pleasure, it sure feels like I’ve traded one damn prison for another.
***