Chapter 15

Asher drove into Haddenfield just after three a.m. on Friday morning. As he remembered from when he was a kid, the tiny little town was sound asleep and looked the same. They rolled their sidewalks up at ten p.m. and unrolled them around seven the next morning. He drove down Main Street and saw that the General Store was still there. He had always liked the couple that owned it. Mr. and Mrs. Cooper had owned the store for close to forty years when Asher had been a teenager. They’d had two kids, but they had both been a lot older than Asher and had moved out of Haddenfield as soon as they had graduated high school.

He passed the Bar and Grill. He noticed that they had added on to it. From what he tell it looked like Mia’s family was doing well. The church he used to go to with his mother every Sunday was on the left and the park with the pond he and Travis and Dean learned to fish in was just behind that. He found himself feeling a lot more nostalgic than he had thought he would. As he drove by the high school he thought about Mia again. She had been such a huge part of his life then and now it had been an entire lifetime since he had seen her. He wondered again if she would be at the funeral. He knew he should stay away from her, but he would love to see her again, just one more time.

He finally came to the street his family lived on. He pulled up in front of the house and sat there for a long time with the car idling. He considered just driving on. He couldn’t make the time up to his father now. He looked across the manicured lawn. His father had always made sure it was mowed and edged to perfection. Asher wondered if he had did done his own lawn up until he died. He suspected he did. He couldn’t imagine his father letting anyone else touch it. His eyes moved up to the big colonial porch with the white pillars at the top of the stairs. The swing hanging between them was what caught his attention. He pictured his mother on that swing. She had loved it. When she got really sick Asher had hung one in back for her too, to make it easier for her to get to from her room. He sighed. He knew that he had to do this. He owed it to his father to be at his funeral and taking care of old family business had been too long in coming.

He backed up and pulled the car into the driveway in front of the garage. Grabbing his duffel bag out of the car, he walked over to the steps. He bent down and moved the rock at the edge of the lawn. His parents had kept a spare key there his entire life. His father was notorious for forgetting his keys. Asher bent down and picked it up. That memory of his father made him smile. Some things never changed. He turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The past assaulted him instantly. The first thing he saw as he stepped inside was the photos of him that his mother had lined the entryway with. It started with his birth photo. He had always thought he looked like an Ewok, but his mother disagreed. She used to say, “You were the most perfect baby ever born.” From there were his toddler photos and then one every year from Kindergarten through high school. He was always the star of Lily’s show. He was shaking before he even got through the hallway and into the living room. He flipped on the light and once again he was beat over the head with nostalgia. It made him sick to his stomach and he turned the light back off and headed up to his old room.

Asher’s blast from the past was completed here. His room hadn’t been touched except that it was a lot cleaner than he had ever left it when he lived here. He dropped his canvas bag down on the bed and started stripping. He was exhausted more mentally than physically. He sat on the edge of the bed and before he laid down his eyes landed on an envelope at the bedside. The front of it had the word ‘Asher,’ in his father’s handwriting. With trembling hands he reached for it, flipping on the lamp next to the bed. He slid his fingers under the flap and pulled it open. The yellow lined paper made him smile again. His father used a yellow legal pad for everything. When Asher was a kid he often wondered if it was the same pad and it had a thousand sheets of paper in it. He slid the paper out, folded it open and began to read:

‘To my son,

I’m writing this in hopes that someday you will come home. Maybe it will be after I am gone and that gives me one more regret. There is just so much that needs to be said. First of all, I love you. I have loved you since the day you were born. You were such a good kid and you made it so easy for us to love you. You brought your mother and I so much joy and someday I hope you will have the privilege of enjoying that feeling when you are raising children of your own. I don’t know where you went that day. I don’t know where you have been since but I want you to know that I never wanted you to leave. I looked up at the moon every night before I fell asleep and I wished that wherever you were, you were happy and safe. I hoped that the agony of our lives and the horrible way that I treated you didn’t get in the way of your happiness. I am pretty sure that it did and if I could build a time machine, I would absolutely do everything differently.

The day I met your mother was truly the beginning of my life. The day that I heard the doctor’s telling us she was dying felt like the end. I should have thought of someone besides myself. I had a son who needed me but I just couldn’t function, I wasn’t strong enough. You were the strong one, and I thank God that your mother had you. The alcohol started out as a crutch and it turned into my life source. I was so stupid. I was so blind. My life source was right in front of me and I just couldn’t see it.

Asher had to stop for a few seconds and wipe his eyes so he could keep reading. He hadn’t cried since his mother died. All of the death he had seen. All of the death he had caused. He hadn’t shed one tear. But tonight, his shoulders shook and tears rolled rapidly down his cheeks. He was consumed by emotion, the biggest one of all being regret. All of these years he had stayed away because he thought his father hated him. He had wasted all of this time. It was an incredibly devastating thought. If only he had come home sooner. Another round of sobs took hold and it took him another ten minutes to get himself under control enough to read on:

I am so sorry, son. God I wish I could change things. I wish we could go back. That’s not possible so all I have left is to tell you this: I’m so proud of you. You’re so strong and amazing. You are the best son that any father could have ever been blessed with. I failed you and I failed your mother miserably. When your mother asked me to let her go, instead of thinking about myself once again I should have considered the horrible suffering she had to endure. When you helped her instead of me I should have told you right then and there that you did the right thing. You did what she wanted and what she needed, because at seventeen-years-old, you were the man I couldn’t be. I am so sorry I put that on you. I am so sorry for it all.

My wish for you is that wherever you ended up was a happy place. I hope you have a good life and you remember the good times that we did have. I hope that you can use the money I leave you when I die to make an even better life. There is just one thing I ask of you, son. Please don’t ever sell the ranches no matter what the price, or the pressure. They were a part of your mother’s heart and I swore to her they would always be a part of this family. I know it takes some nerve for me to ask anything of you, and if it wasn’t about your mother, I never would.

Please know that no matter how much I screwed up, I love you, Asher. I am so incredibly proud to be your father whether I have a right to be or not. Please be happy and if there is ever a time you can see your way clear to forgiving me. My soul will rest easy for eternity.

Love, Dad’

Asher put the paper down with a trembling hand and his raw emotions sent another wave of tears rushing fom his eyes. This pain was worse than that of an open wound. He couldn’t stop shaking. He laid back on the bed and rolled himself into a protective ball. It was another thing he hadn’t done since he was a child. He laid like that for hours. Each time the tears would subside, his mind would draw on another memory or once again return to the regrets and he would break down again. Sometime just before the sun came up he fell asleep, waking again just after dawn with another nightmare. Once he had stopped screaming, he did what he always did. He got into the shower and then he made coffee. The only difference today was that he had to go watch them lower his father into the ground.