IAN
A silver compact turns into the drive, gravel popping like Bubble Wrap. Aimee’s arms slip from me and we turn to watch the driver approach and slow to a stop, facing us, in front of the house. He cuts the engine but doesn’t get out of the car. He stares at us from under the sun visor and behind his dark glasses.
“Your dad?” Aimee asks.
“My dad.” I haven’t seen him in sixteen years, but the box jaw, defined chin, and wide fingers curled around the steering wheel are unmistakable. So is the wave of hair lifting off his face, one uncooperative lock dividing his forehead. They’re the same as mine. What doesn’t sit well with me, though, is that I’m having a hard time digesting the sunken cheeks and the color of his hair. He’s gone completely gray.
Stu cuts the engine and opens the door.
I clasp the back of Aimee’s head and, tucking her under my chin, speak into her hair. “Will you give me a minute with him?”
“Take all the time you need.”
I kiss her head and go down the steps to meet with my dad, to get the truth from him about my mom. To find out what’s going on with him.
His movement from the car is slow and labored. When he finally stands, bracing a hand on the door while reaching the other into the backseat, my step falters. A clear tube wraps under his nose and winds over his ears and dips into the cab of the car like an umbilical cord. With some effort, Stu hauls out a portable oxygen tank. The wheel catches on the runner and drops to the ground.
I rush to his side. “Let me help.”
He stops me with a raised hand and a stern, and slightly uncomfortable, expression. I back up, realizing he’s embarrassed. And I’m ashamed. I should have been around earlier, years earlier, to help him. His frame is a wasted, wan version of himself, a dried corn husk of the robust man he’d once been. He cautiously bends over, never letting go of the door, and uprights the tank, balancing the cart on its wheels. He keeps a tight grip on the handle, shuts the door, and turns to me. We watch each other for several moments, each assessing the other. I’m taller and wider. He wheezes as he breathes. I can’t see his eyes behind his shades, but whatever sickness he has, it’s been dining on his body for some time.
“How long?”
He smiles, exposing a row of yellow-tinged teeth. “The prodigal son returns.”
“Surely you have a better line than that.”
He nods once. “Long enough. Who told you I was sick?”
“Lacy Saunders. You probably remember her as Laney. Or better yet, Charity Watson, or Charity Mullins? Any of those ring a bell?”
He nods ever so slightly.
“Did you know she was Mom’s stepsister? Back when she helped you find me?”
He shakes his head. “Not at first. Your mother told me later who she was. Charity’s a meddlesome woman.” His words come abbreviated and breathy, and I have to turn my ear toward him to hear over the sound of the tractor working the field next to ours.
“That story of her finding you in a diner with the police you told me as a kid?” The one I’d told Reese when we dated and Aimee while we were in Mexico. “Was any of it true?”
“Some of it. You were asking too many questions then.” He lifts his head. “That your wife?”
I look back at Aimee. She raises her hand in a short wave but her eyes hold mine. I feel her love and it gives me the strength I need to keep my anger at bay. Stu never shared anything with me about Lacy, about the source of my mom’s condition, so I’d have a better understanding. About his own disease.
“You should have told me.”
“Probably.” He drops the car keys in his pocket. “Let’s take a walk.”
I follow him around the house to the ash tree with the trunk that’s thickened, its web of branches filled out. A mixture of burgundy, yellow, and green leaves dance and shimmer like jewels. A blanket of them covers the ground.
The oxygen tank bobbles over dirt clods and stones. I consider offering to buy a cart with larger wheels. It would be easier to manage over the property’s uneven ground. But making the offer would force my dad to answer, and talking while walking is an effort for him. Just walking seems too much.
We stop at a new-to-me wood park bench under the tree. The painted wrought-iron scrollwork is peeling and the wood stain is worn away on one side of the seat as though someone sat there often, looking out over the property. One could see quite far, as we can today, when the cornstalks have been removed and the soil is tilled in preparation for the oncoming winter.
My dad eases onto the bench, using the oxygen-tank handle like a cane. He invites me to sit down.
“I’m dying,” he says without preamble when I take up the spot beside him. No warning. No I’ve been diagnosed with. Just I’m dying. Well done, Stu. Let the sharing begin. Thankfully, Lacy had warned me, else I don’t know how I would have handled that blow, no better than an uppercut from the right.
“From what?” I ask.
“Lung cancer. It’s a bitch.” He coughs.
My knees are spread and I clasp my hands between my legs, rest my forearms on my thighs. I inhale deeply and close my eyes, allowing his words to make their impact. His life is over, and no thanks to my stubbornness, I missed so much of it. Then I let him speak, and I listen, something I should have done a long time ago.
“I’m selling the farm. Never wanted it. Your grandfather insisted. I had to give the dying man his last wish. Looks like I’ve come full circle.” He chuckles. It turns into a coughing fit. I wait it out, looking at my hands, hands shaped like my father’s. Funny how I never realized that before, and today it’s the first thing I noticed.
My dad wipes his mouth with a soiled handkerchief he dug from his pocket and continues. “I didn’t lease the land until he passed. I didn’t want him to know I had no interest in it.”
Grandpa Collins passed before I’d been born. I’d never met him. “You never told me about this.”
“I didn’t tell you a lot of things. Seemed the right thing to do at the time.”
“And now?”
“‘To regret deeply is to live afresh.’”
I look at him. I never took my dad to quoting Thoreau, or reading poetry. But my mom had stacks of books, from Frost, to Wilde, and plenty of Thoreau. Why this quote? What is he trying to do right by this time? I don’t have to wait long. He finally catches his breath.
“I have a buyer. Half will go to you and the other half into a trust I’m going to ask you to manage.”
“For whom?”
He quickly glances at me, then looks at the ground. He pushes dead leaves with the toe of his shoe.
At first, I think he plans to give half the money from the property sale to his tenant, Josh Lansbury, but he turns his gaze to the horizon. His throat ripples. He wipes his nose. And he takes a deep, fluid-filled breath where the air moves through him like water thick with mud around boulders and it dawns on me who will get that other half. My own breath leaves in a whoosh and I look at him, shocked to my core.
“That night in West Wendover nearly destroyed your mother. She didn’t know your camera was stuck in the door. She didn’t know she was dragging you. She couldn’t hear your screams. She was on suicide watch the first couple of years until a psychiatrist took interest in her case. She helped your mother manage her condition. It was your mother’s decision not to come home. She’d almost killed you twice. She couldn’t risk a third time. She left you because she didn’t trust herself around you. She left you because she loves you. She gave up her right to be your mother to keep you safe. And I agreed with her decision. I couldn’t let something else happen to you. I couldn’t leave you alone with her again.”
It takes him a while to explain this, with plenty of starts and stops along the way. When he’s done, he sounds like he ran a 5K at race pace. His chest rises and falls deeply. He doesn’t look at me and that’s when I realize he has known. He has known all along what happened to Sarah.
“You saw Mom when she was released.”
“I set her up in her apartment. I found her a job as a seamstress.”
“And you’ve been supporting her ever since. That’s why you need me to manage the trust. After you’re gone.”
He nods. “Her term came up and she made me agree not to tell you. She didn’t want you to come looking for her. She thought it best for you to believe she didn’t care. That’s why I stayed away when I should have been your father. I thought you’d see right through me.”
“You knew what her leaving did to me. How could you agree to such a thing?”
“I swore that I’d keep her safe and you safe from her. I love her, Ian.” His eyes sheen and hands clench tighter on the cart handle. “I did it because I love her.”
I feel my face heat. I’m sure it’s as red as the leaves scattered around us. I want to punch him. How could he let her take herself away from me when I needed her most? My teen years were more confusing without her than my youth had been with her.
But as I stare at him, seething under my skin, something happens. An epiphany of sorts. That damn lightbulb goes off like a camera flash and frames the picture. I recognize something else of me in him. No matter what my wife does, or has done—yes, that includes kissing James and keeping his damn paintings on display at the café—I would always love her. Had Aimee been in my mom’s place, I would have done the same as my dad. I love her that much.
“I know you blame yourself. It’s not your fault, Ian,” he says. “Your mother’s leaving has never been your fault and I’m sorry I made it seem that way.”
Emotion wells and I can no longer contain it. I bend at the waist, a tree giving in to the wind, and I do something I haven’t done since I was fourteen. I weep.