SETH WAS PASSING Cops and Coffee, wondering what Brianna was making for breakfast, hoping it would hold because just the thought of her bustling around in the kitchen had him fantasizing about taking her on that matte quartz kitchen counter with her wearing nothing but one of those cute retro ’50s aprons she’d begun buying—and maybe a pair of high-heeled pumps like all those TV housewives used to wear—when his dad came out and waved him down.
He pulled over to the curb and got out of the truck.
“We need to talk,” his dad, never much for talking, said without so much as a “good morning.”
“Is it about you and mom?” He’d been in Cops and Coffee the other morning just in time to see his dad getting onto the ferry. It hadn’t made sense because Pete had returned home from the VA hospital last week. Unless something else was going on. A possibility he’d been trying not to think about. “Because I don’t want—”
“It is. And it isn’t. It’s mostly about you and that Mannion girl.”
“What?” As far as he knew, except for his poker games, his dad never went anywhere, hardly talked to a soul. How the hell did he know? And what had Seth done to be forced to have this conversation twice on a morning when he could be tasting not just breakfast, but every inch of Brianna’s tall, lean body, which he’d come to know as well as his own? “I don’t want to be disrespectful here, Dad. But whatever our relationship happens to be, it’s our business.” And no one else’s, he left out, but the message was clear.
“It is and it isn’t,” Ben Harper repeated. “I’ve got some stuff to say and you need to listen to it. Before you fuck up the best thing in your life.”
Only because his father hadn’t offered him a word of advice since he’d shown up at his bedroom door with a box of condoms and given him “the talk,” Seth decided he must think whatever he had to say was damn important. Which meant the least he could do was hear his old man out.
“Let me get some coffee and something to eat.”
“I got a bag of bacon maple doughnuts. There’s enough for two.”
“Because everything goes better with bacon,” Seth said, thinking about Brianna’s hash brown/cheddar cheese/bacon casserole.
“You got that right,” Ben said. “I’ll meet you at the pier.”
* * *
SURPRISINGLY, THE PIER wasn’t as crowded as Seth would have expected on a sunny Sunday morning. He figured all the serious fishermen were out on the water, other folks might have been in church and there was a good possibility Wheel and Barrow was doing a dynamite business with everyone getting excited about a new season of planting their flowers and veggies.
His dad was sitting on a green bench toward the end of the pier, not far from a father and kid who looked about six or seven with their lines dangling into the water. Walking down the wooden pier, listening to the waves lap against the pilings, reminded Seth of those days when they’d get up early in the morning to go crabbing off the pier.
Although his dad seemed to take his crabbing super seriously, like he did most everything, Seth hadn’t cared whether or not they came home with a catch. It was having rare time together that didn’t have anything to do with work that was special. Although he wasn’t expecting an easy talk, thinking back on those rare times caused a bit of the peace he’d felt up on the ridge to settle back over him.
Seth sat on the far end of the bench, folded the plastic top back on his coffee and dug into the bag between them. Even as he felt his arteries clogging from the sugar, maple and bacon at the first bite, he decided a heart attack just might be worth it.
“So,” he said, breaking the silence that lasted through his dad’s entire eating of the Long John. “What’s up?”
His dad adjusted his Harper Construction hat, brushed some crumbs off his Tom Selleck mustache and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, and then we’re not going to talk about it again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It’s about my trips to Seattle. I’m guessing you didn’t think I was visiting Pete.”
“That became clear after Pete came home and you were still taking those days off.” Seth hadn’t wanted to know about that because it brought up too many possibilities. Like was his dad seeing someone because he thought his wife was sleeping with Mike Mannion? Or had his mother left because he’d had a woman on the side all the time?
“I’ve been seeing this therapist.”
“A therapist?” Having just taken a drink, Seth spit out his Portside dark roast. “Like one who works on your bum knee?” Which had come from too many years of going up and down ladders. “Or like a shrink?” Unlikely. It’d be easier to believe his father had been beamed up by a spaceship.
“She’s a licensed therapist with a bunch of psychology degrees from fancy universities hanging on her wall.”
Seth took another long drink of coffee, willing the triple shot to pump caffeine into his brain. “You’ve been taking the ferry to the mainland, then driving to Seattle, to see a shrink—” he raised his hand to take that word back when his father speared him with a look sharper than the fillet knife he’d used to clean steelhead “—licensed therapist.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“No. It’s just not what I was expecting.”
“You thought I was seeing another gal.”
“No. Yes. Well, okay, since you brought it up, it did cross my mind.” Returning to his spaceship analogy, Seth wished that he could just call on Scotty to beam him up to anywhere and any other time but here. “Maybe.”
“I’d never cheat on your mother. Ever.”
“I believe you.” Ben Harper was not without his faults, but Seth had never known him to lie. Which was why his lack of openness about his reasons for suddenly disappearing every few days had been troublesome. There had been one more possibility that Seth hadn’t wanted to consider. That he was getting some sort of medical care he was keeping to himself. Like he had with his damn appendix. “I’m also glad that you have neither another woman on the side or cancer.”
“Why the hell would you think I had cancer?” Ben dug into the bag again and pulled out a second Long John.
“No reason.” There was no point in bringing up him almost dying once for having been a damn fool when his appendix had burst. “Why didn’t you tell me? Does Mom know?”
“Not yet. And before you play Dear Abby and say I ought to tell her, I’m planning to. I just wanted to make sure I could also tell her that I’d gotten my head straight and would spend the rest of my life making up for past problems I’d caused her.”
“Well.” What did a guy say to that? Especially when it came from your own father, after you’d already told him that you didn’t want to get mixed up in his marital drama? “That’s good.” He nodded and took a bite himself. “Real good,” he said around a mouthful of doughnut.
“You know I was in the military before I met your mother.”
“Sure.” Though his dad had never talked about his military days, Seth had seen a photo of him on his boot camp graduation day looking ready to take on all the world’s bad guys single-handed. “You were in the Navy.”
“Though it pissed off my dad, I didn’t want to stick around this town. So I bought into the message on those posters in the recruiting office window telling me that if I joined the Navy, I could see the world.”
“Did you? See the world?” Another thing his dad had never mentioned.
“Some of it. But only after having a long talk with the recruiter my junior year of high school. I’ve heard a lot of them lie, but he was up front and told me that I wouldn’t get to see much of the world from the deck of a ship or in a sub. Also, because I was captain of both the football and baseball teams, and had good grades in math and science, which probably came from years of working on houses with my dad growing up, he figured I might have a chance of making the SEALs. But having at least an associate’s degree would give me a boost up. So I went to community college nights and Saturdays while working all day for my dad on houses. Then I joined up.”
“You were a SEAL?”
“Yeah. Not right away—there’s a helluva lot of hoops and training to get through, and they make it as hard as they can so they can be sure you can handle the job—but I made the grade. And I got to see some of the world, though not places most people ever want to go.” He took a long gulp of coffee and looked out over the water, but Seth got the feeling his dad wasn’t looking at snow-clad Mount Baker towering in the distance, but something else. Something else in his past he’d never mentioned. “I was in Lebanon.”
Seth skimmed through a mental history book and did the math. “In Beirut?”
“Yeah.”
“For the barracks bombing?” That had taken the lives of how many Marines?
“Yeah. It was the deadliest attack on Marines since Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the US military since the Tet Offensive and the deadliest terrorist attack before 9/11.” Seth didn’t remember reading all that, but he figured if he’d been there for the bombing, he’d never have forgotten it.
“Were you in the barracks?” How the hell could he have not at least heard that story?
“No. We were five hundred yards away, up in the hills above the city on a reconnaissance mission. We came under artillery fire on the way back and by the time we got to our bunker, it was nearly five in the morning. We could have taken our mess kits and gone down and had ourselves a hot breakfast. But we were pretty wiped by then, so the effort didn’t seem worth it.
“Some of the other guys were going to wind down from the adrenaline rush and read—Robert B. Parker had a new book out—and others got out some Playboy and Penthouse magazines. But I hit the rack...
“I don’t know how long I slept, but suddenly the entire place shook like it had been hit with one of those bunker buster bombs. There was a lot of confusion while we were all trying to figure out what the hell had happened, but then Benson, one of my teammates who’d been out taking a piss, came running in shouting that they’d hit the barracks.
“It was hard to believe what we were seeing. Some days it still seems more like one of those end-of-the-world movies. While we’d been safe, sleeping or looking at porn, what turned out to be a truck bomb had damn near vaporized a four-story building.
“We went racing down the hill into this enormous cloud of ash and debris falling everywhere, and everyone who was mobile began digging out our dead and wounded from the rubble while snipers kept shooting at us. For days. A lot of guys got hit by bullets, others by cracking and spattering concrete.
“Meanwhile, down the road, another truck took out the French barracks. Many of those killed were paratroopers standing out on balconies, trying to figure out what had happened where we were.”
“Jesus.” Seth had seen old news videos during his American history class. But never in a million years had he imagined his dad in those scenes.
“It was the closest thing to hell I ever hope to get,” Ben said. “It took days, and eventually the voices of guys still trapped quit calling out for help. That was the worst. But at the same time, it was so fucking overwhelming that we became frozen to it. We just kept working. All night and day.”
“I don’t think I could’ve done that,” Seth admitted.
“Yeah, you could’ve, but I wouldn’t have wanted you to,” his dad said. “And I’m not telling you this to make you feel worse about your own grief over losing your wife in the same damn way. I wasn’t happy about her going off to war, but hell, it wasn’t any of my business. That gal was always going to do exactly what she wanted to.”
“You’re not going to get any argument from me about that.” As Seth said the words he realized that along with the peace that had come over him, he was no longer as angry as he had been even a few weeks ago. Not at Zoe, and not at himself. Which didn’t mean he didn’t still wish he’d been able to stop her, but like his dad said, she was a woman who knew her own mind.
Just like Brianna. But in a different way.
“But you got over it?”
“You never get over a thing like that,” Ben said. “You put it away, in a box, where you don’t ever have to think about it.” He looked at Seth. Long and hard. “I imagine you know a lot about that.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“The thing is that it doesn’t work forever. The Trade Center bombings brought it all back to me. That was the first time I had to tell your mother about it. Not the entire story. Just that I’d been there.”
“Mom hadn’t known before then?”
“Like I said, it was in a box. We didn’t meet until I got out, so there was no point in mentioning it... I don’t know what I would’ve done without her... Yeah, I do,” he said. “I just would’ve ended it after the PTSD came back.”
And didn’t Seth know the siren’s call of doing exactly that? Maybe that was another thing he and his dad shared in their DNA. The inability to take the easy way out.
Ben blew out a long breath. “So I built myself another box, even stronger than the first, and made sure I stayed away from the TV during September every year. That was working. Kind of, anyway, although your mother might claim differently, because things were more strained from time to time, though we got through it. Until all this damn terrorist stuff started up again all over the news and it’s like I’m right back there in Beirut... She wants me to quit my job.”
Seth decided against saying he knew that.
“I promised her, when we got married, that someday we’d travel. So she’s got this idea about buying a motor home and driving across America, seeing all the national parks and stuff.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“Yeah. But it also means that we’d be stuck together in a damn metal box for twenty-four hours a day. And because I love her more than life itself, I just couldn’t dump all these ugly dark memories and feelings I’ve locked up inside me on her.”
“Has the therapist helped with that?” Seth asked hopefully. Now that he’d heard the story, he had a lot more invested in his parents’ marriage succeeding. But not if it was going to cause them both pain.
“Yeah. She has, which is surprising, because she’s, well, a woman. And young. Just a few years older than you.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. PTSD has been around forever, but it hasn’t been studied that much. She’d probably be more up on treatment,” Seth suggested.
“I’m comfortable talking to her,” Ben agreed. “I didn’t think I would be.”
Probably because he didn’t experience any male competitive feelings, Seth suspected. And there was also the fact that being a man of a certain age, he’d be more likely to accept a woman as someone who could understand emotional problems he couldn’t talk about with the guys.
“I’m glad for you.”
“Yeah. She’s helped a lot with what she calls coping techniques. I’ve been doing some deep breathing and visualization. But I drew the line at taking up yoga.”
“Can’t say I blame you there.” Just the idea of his father doing a downward dog made Seth grin.
“So.” Ben brushed his hands together to shake off the sugar. “The thing is, you’ve probably got a lot of stuff in your box, too.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve also got yourself a good woman who’s had a thing for you all her life.”
“Geez. Does everyone know that?”
“Everyone but you, it seems. You were too young to be looking in that direction early on. Then once you met Zoe Robinson, you were blind to seeing any other girls. The past few weeks I’ve realized that a lot of guys are probably okay with living alone. But you and me, we’re not them. I’m going to do my damnedest to get my wife back from Mike Mannion.”
“She’s not with Mike.”
“Not yet, maybe. But if I lose her, he’d be the obvious choice to be her rebound guy. I’ll take care of my relationship. I’ve been working on it bit by bit and it’s getting easier. We’re going out on a date tomorrow. To this wine bar bistro place in Port Townsend so she can eat her veggies, but it also serves steak, so I figured that’d be a good compromise.”
“It is. And a good start.”
“That’s what my therapist says. She also taught me some conversational tricks that don’t risk us getting into any argument over me quitting work or any future plans. We’re supposed to just experience living in the moment together, she says.” Deep color flushed up his neck. “She got me to do this conversational dinner-talking role-playing thing.”
Despite the seriousness of the discussion, Seth struggled not to laugh at this news flash. “And how did that turn out?”
“Pretty damn well. She had your mother down pat. Meaning I guess she listened to everything I’d said about Caroline.”
“I think that’s what they’re supposed to do. Listen.”
“Yeah. It was a lot like when Tony’d talk with Dr. Melfi on The Sopranos. So, hopefully we’ll make it through dinner okay.”
“My money’s on you.”
“Yeah. Like we used to say in the SEALs, the only easy day was yesterday and failure’s not an option. Which you need to keep in mind and not let that Mannion girl get away,” Ben warned. “She’s a keeper, and if you lose her, you’ll end up spending the rest of your life regretting screwing up a relationship you both deserve.”
As weird as it was getting romantic advice from a man who’d probably, even a month ago, choked over the word relationship, Seth only wished things between him and Brianna were that simple.