WE SAT AT THE BAR in Storrs, Connecticut swilling middling whiskey and waiting for the women in our lives. It had been just over a year since I’d last seen my father. He’d sold our family home and taken up residence as a houseguest with a couple of his close friends in Stowe, Vermont. We talked bi-weekly, which either means twice a week or every two weeks. Both of which were appropriate for describing our communication patterns. The conversation was always sparse, never weighed down with anything more than sports scores and reports of my father’s acquaintances passing away. I had previously asked him to stop texting me. It felt like a distraction more than an interaction. I told him that he could call me if it was important. In fact, most of the information I had about my father’s movements came from friends still living in Vermont – or my mother. I also realized that neither of those sources was especially reliable.

However, sitting there next to each other at the bar of a high-end chain restaurant, we did what we did best – sat in silence staring at our phones as though the secret to everlasting life resided just behind our matching cracked screens. We waited for my mother and sister, a ritual that Roberts men were accustomed to. In my short 25 years on the planet, my mother had almost never been on time, a habit that my sister had unconsciously adopted.

In the past four years since he and my mother had gotten divorced, we’d simply never had much to talk about. It was clear that we both wanted to speak about things that came from below the surface. He desperately wanted to impart his wisdom on me and I wanted nothing more than to shake him out of his old dog ways. This weekend happened to be my sister’s graduation from the University of Connecticut’s nursing school, so it was the perfect storm for each of us to make our move. It also marked the first time that we would all be in the same area code since my parents’ divorce.

In other words, there was plenty of fodder on the table for some real conversations between us about morality and mortality, but as always, we politely chatted about the Boston Bruins or a game of rugby that my father was particularly excited about.

He sat there staring at his phone, texting with whatever woman he was interested in at the moment, for the moment. I sat there haphazardly watching a Little League game. I hated playing baseball as a child. And now I hate watching baseball as an adult. Why did America insist on broadcasting every single level of that damn sport? The only people watching were the parents of the players, who were already at the game!

Another thought struck me, how tragically ironic it was that I’d rather watch the sport I hated most than interact with the man who’d helped give me life. I smiled my most blatant smile, hoping that he’d ask me what was so funny. He didn’t. I pulled my phone out for the umpteenth time in the past half-hour. The clock read ten to four. They were twenty minutes late. I was guessing that we’d wait at least another twenty minutes.

A text message from my sister read, “looking for parking, graduation weekend is always crazy! LOL.” So, perhaps more like thirty minutes. That was a trick we’d both picked up from our father. “Parking”, meant that she was about twenty minutes away. I mumbled something unintelligible under my breath. My father looked up and beamed at me as if to say, “I understand you entirely”. He smiled and his mustache curled up slightly as he reassured me.

“They’ll be here soon, Tiger. Have another.”

The Roberts family motto: When in doubt, imbibe.

“I don’t understand how they can’t manage to be anywhere on time,” I grumbled, more upset with my father’s sunny disposition than about the absence of my mother and sister.

I gestured to the woman behind the bar, whose face had recently been lacquered with too much makeup; her tits were pushed up with a bra that was designed for the sole purpose of acquiring a 25 percent tip. I wish my father would have a little more tact about staring at her chest, but as she brought me my Bulleit rye on the rocks, I espied in both of them the weird flare of mutual human attraction. I became keenly aware of my jealousy. Why do I care? A question for Freud and another time. I was here to get to the bottom of my father’s feelings, not my own.

“Anything else for you dahlin?” she twittered.

Oh be still my heart! There’s nothing more enticing than a New England girl masquerading poorly as a southern belle.

“I’ll have una cerveza. Stella. Please and Thank You.”

Any charm that existed in me was handed down from the sultan of swag, my father. He had a way of instantly making people like him. His smile beamed bright and his laugh was just the right amount of a pat on the back, while his English wit and cheeky sense of humor made you feel like a member of some secret club.

I am a planner – a damage controller. Knowing that this would be the first time my parents had seen each other since they had lost their joint business and moved on into separate lives, I wanted to know what my father’s plan was. I was curious about what he intended to gain from this weekend…what his approach to my mother would be. I took aim.

“So how do you feel about seeing mom?”

“I can’t wait! I mean, sure, it will be a little different, but…”

I grimaced and looked at him in confusion, tilting my head like a dog that can’t quite understand where you threw the ball as you hold it behind your back.

“You’re not nervous? You don’t think this might be a disaster?”

“Why would it be a disaster?”

“Really?”

“Yes, we’re both adults.”

“Fine. Okay. “

The bartender returned with my father’s Stella. He smiled and watched her as she entertained another customer who had clearly established a greater rapport than our party of two. I watched my father’s expression as he sipped his beer with a wistful grin. Studied him. Looked for a crack to see through this imposter. A crack in the exterior of this show he put on for everyone. Could this really be my father? Was I insane to feel as torn up as I was about my parents’ divorce? Was all of it exacerbated by the weekly sessions with my therapist? I felt as though his leaving my mother was partly a reflection on me. Narcissistic, I know, but that didn’t make it any less human. Shouldn’t he feel comfortable enough with me to share his fears? His misgivings? Is the distance of a generation so great? He was a man who used to be so driven to be successful in business, to provide a legacy for his family; now, he was only interested in receiving tit pics from some Jamaican woman he’d met on his last mid-life foray to the tropics. Shouldn’t that be my part to play in this relationship? Didn’t he know that he had stripped away part of my youth? I was meant to be the child – the silly, irreverent male of the family. This was the man I had once wanted so badly to emulate, but now that I saw real signs of my infantile inconsequential self within him, it scared me. Would he die like this? Would I die like that?

Without really thinking about it, I blurted out, “You know you can tell me things, right?” This was not calculated, but it was real. Honest. It wasn’t what I had planned, but it carried the correct weight. It accomplished my goal. “I wish that you’d talk to me about things that matter. Not just the weather.”

My father started to laugh, but then saw that I wasn’t smiling and stared at me, perplexed.

“Oh come on…we talk about things!” I was silent. “I just assume that you don’t want to hear about my problems.”

“Why? It’s better than talking about nothing and just filling time.”

My father looked at me and a generous sadness seeped from his light blue eyes. I was suddenly aware that it must be just as jarring for him to stare back into mine. He’d taught me how to walk, how to curse and how to drink, but he’d never taught me this. Vulnerability that I hadn’t noted in him before welled up on his tongue, tempted. He bent towards me and lowered his voice.

“I bought a gun.”

My heart sank, passing my stomach on its way up as I became very aware of my breathing. In – Out – In –

“What?” I croaked, and although I knew I asked. “Why?” – Out.

“I had a really dark time a couple months ago. It felt like it was going to last forever.” He smiled that sad smile…my sad smile. ”The business wasn’t doing well. Kit wasn’t talking to me. I figured I had nothing left for you kids.” He sat up in his chair and leaned back, stretching his lower back. He seemed to wrestle a deep breath from his chest and leaned back in to me. “I thought I’d kill myself. I even had a place picked out. Where no one would find me. You guys would all get the insurance money.”

He laughed, but his eyes sold him down the river.

“Jesus…Dad.” I struggled to find something from my short life to help him. “I don’t…”

Like any adult, I had daydreams of suicide, but had never considered it a REAL option. I thought more about the exterior queries – the fallout. What would my ex-girlfriend’s reaction be? How would I do it? Would I leave a note? Would my hometown run an obituary? Not knowing what to say, I fell back on my stock response for whenever a conversation stumbled dangerously into suicide. “I hope you know that wouldn’t solve anyone’s problems but yours.”

And with that infantile shove, I watched my father close off, sealed back in his old self. His blue eyes shifted from crystal to steel, betraying his ire in that moment. I knew that for a second, he saw me not as his son, but as another man.

Floating in this world where meaning is akin to gravity, hoping to hold onto anything, he had trusted me with something and my instinct had been to shame him. I had played my mother’s role so well – the devil’s advocate.

He smiled his prosthetic smile.

“Yes. I know. That’s why I didn’t.”

And with that, my sister all bags and mother all expectant bustled through the door.

“Hiiii,” Kit whined. “I’m sorry. The store said they had my size, but when we got there they didn’t…so I had to drive to another one like, 30 minutes away – it was literally a nightmare.”

Before she had even finished, having popped off his barstool, my father held her in his arms.

“You’re right on time!” he crooned.

My mother walked over to me, eager to match my father’s affection towards Kit.

“Hi, sweet pea! Sorry we’re late.” Then, whispering, “You know how Kit is.” She made a frenetic gesture with her hands.

“I do,” I shot back, full of whiskey and understanding.

“I heard that!” Kit narrowed her eyes at me.

My father sidled up next to me and slapped me on the back. These pats were surely meant to steal me, but they were always off-putting, too hard – actual heavy-handed interaction. I wanted to scream in his face, but instead I stared blankly into a spot of nothingness on the far wall.

He poked me in the chest, saying, “You got a little…”

So caught up in musings of my father’s masterful charade, I bent my head to see –

“Meep!” he scooped my nose and laughed. They all joined him.

I turned to look at him. He really looked happy. Maybe he really was. As long as there was an audience to entertain, he could drown those dark thoughts.

“Come on! It’s a joke!”

I smiled his prosthetic smile. Any hope I had of coaxing out my father’s more intimate self had disappeared. Women were here. My plan to expose my father’s fears and dreams in order to better understand mine had to be abandoned for the moment.

Eventually, the hostess brought us to our table and I sipped my third and eventually my fourth; my father asked meaningless questions and received meaningless answers in reply. Deftly, he pretended to be “jolly good” and “right as rain”. Sitting there, I began to realize that I would never escape the similarities between my father and I, not because he was my father, but because he was human, only he was better at hiding it.

***

Read more powerful tales in SN2: Equal Night, available on Amazon!

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