Chapter Thirty-Six
Bryan
Truittism No. 18: You can go home again. But you likely won’t be the same person you were when you left.
He looks so much older, and frailer, in the satin-draped coffin. I hardly recognize the man I last saw five years ago in court for his sentencing. The day that the judge shamed him for implicating his own son in a crime in order to deflect attention from himself and his own guilt.
I smell my mother’s jasmine perfume before I see her, then I feel her hand at my elbow.
“Hello, Mother,” I say quietly. Her brown eyes look huge in her face, also considerably aged over the last five years.
“Bryan, sweetheart, I’m so glad you came,” she says, her voice choked with emotion. “I–I didn’t think you would, honestly. I mean, I hoped…”
“You can thank Helen for that,” I tell her honestly, and she gives me a weak smile.
“Ah yes. We spoke on the telephone, and she offered me her condolences a few moments ago.”
I look around at the room full of empty seats and wonder just what she was thinking.
“Why did you have a wake? Did you really think people would come, Mother?”
“I hoped,” she says again, and I can see that she really did. She somehow imagined that there would be people saddened by the loss of such a greedy, unscrupulous man. “He wasn’t always like that,” she continues, as if reading my thoughts. “When we were first married, when you were a little boy, we had good times. We were a family. But then something changed.”
I’m relieved when she stops there, because what she doesn’t realize is that I remember those days. And that is what made this so much more painful. If my father had been a bastard all along, I never would have known he was capable of anything else. But to have him be a good father who somewhere along the way lost sight of his humanity was so much worse.
And what he did… He didn’t just obliterate my past, erasing all the good years, he also destroyed my future. By throwing me under the bus, Bryan Broadmore Sr. ensured I would never be able to use my name again without a cloud of suspicion hanging over me.
My mother takes my hand in hers and leads me to a sofa on the side of the room. From here, I can see Helen sitting out in the lobby by a koi pond, scanning her phone. Otherwise, we’re alone.
“I didn’t do this for him,” my mother explains. “I did it for me. You see, when I took my marriage vows, I was very serious, Bryan. I promised before God to stand by that man until the day one of us passed. I did. And now, that day has come. This is the last thing I can do for him.” She pauses and looks off in the distance for a long moment, then turns back to me. “I believe that we all have to face our maker someday. Your father will have to answer for the sins he’s committed, but I will be able to stand once again before God and say that I stayed true to my marriage, to my husband, and to my vows.”
I can see that this makes perfect sense to my mother. And she’s right. No wife could have been more devoted to her husband, right up till this very moment—right up till the end. But there’s still that part of me, that barely-mature twenty-four-year-old part of me, who is devastated at her refusal to disavow the man who so callously threw away their son’s life in a desperate attempt to save his own.
I reach over and take her hand in mine, giving it a squeeze. “What will you do now, Mother?”
She sighs, and I see the slightest hint of light creep into her haunted eyes. My God, could that possibly be hope that I’m looking at?
“I’ve met my obligations, son. Now it’s time to get on with my life. You know there wasn’t really anything left—not after restitutions were made, what little we could give back to those poor people who lost everything. But I’ve got a bit put by, and my pension from when I was teaching. Your aunt Barbara has asked me to come and live with her down in Tampa, and I’m going to do it. The house is already on the market. I’m going to start fresh somewhere else. New state, new name, new life.”
“New name?”
She smiles at me, and this time, there’s nothing weak about it. “Yes, love, I think it’s time my son and I had the same name again, so I’ll be going back to my maiden name. Clara Truitt.”
I don’t know why this makes me emotional, but before I can stop myself, I’m crying in my mother’s arms like a lost little boy who’s finally found his way home.
…
Our one-day detour turns into three when Helen convinces me we should stay for the funeral and burial. In sharp contrast to the wake, several people turn out for the church service and at the cemetery, not to honor my father’s life, but my mother’s. I’m surprised by how relieved I am to find that she didn’t lose everything with our family’s reversal of fortune. It is obvious that Clara Broadmore is a well-respected, much-loved part of her church and community.
Her friends tell me what she was too humble to disclose, that she wrote to each and every victim of my father’s schemes—more than one hundred letters in all—personally apologizing for their pain and suffering at the hands of her husband. She’s made a point of living her life well below the radar and giving back to her community in earnest.
By the time I board the plane home on Sunday, I’m amazed by how much lighter I feel. It’s as if I’m finally free of the anvil secured to my ankle for the last five years. Helen sees it as clearly as I feel it.
“Good Lord, you look better than I’ve ever seen you, Bryan,” she observes with a grin, somewhere over Tennessee.
“Yeah, I have to admit, I feel better than I have in a very long time. I needed to do this. Thank you,” I say sincerely.
“Just helping a friend,” she replies. “Now that we’ve got your past sorted out, can we talk about your future?”
“What, the Iowa project?” I reply, knowing very well Iowa is not what’s on her mind. She swats me with her copy of People. “All right! All right, already, I surrender!” I say with a laugh.
“Good. Now, about this Hennessy…”
She leaves the sentence hanging for me to fill in the blanks. With a sigh, I look straight ahead and consider my reply.
“This Hennessy is beautiful and sweet and brilliant and sexy. She thinks she has to live a bigger, shinier life than the one she grew-up with, and so she’s miserable. But when she’s at home, in Mayhem, with her crazy sisters and those nut-ball neighbors of hers, she just…” I pause, searching for the right words. “She just comes alive.”
Helen is staring at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head.
“What?” I ask, feeling myself growing defensive.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s just that I’ve never heard you talk about a woman that way. They’re usually just hot or, if you really like them, smokin’ hot. But she’s different, this Hennessy,” Helen deduces correctly.
“Yes, she is,” I agree. “If I’m honest, it’s why I made that ridiculous bet with her. It was just a stupid excuse to stay in town—to stay close to her. And then, once I was there and I got to know her and to feel like a part of the community, I didn’t want to leave. For just a little while I could pretend that I was a normal guy, falling for a normal girl.”
“Bryan…you don’t have to pretend. You can have a normal life. You deserve to be happy. Why don’t you just go and get her?”
“I can’t,” I say with a sad smile. “This time it can’t be about getting everything that I want. It’s about her getting everything she wants. And she doesn’t want me, Helen.”
And just like that, the weight of my own words falls upon me. The anvil is back, and it feels about a hundred pounds heavier.