I don’t want him to see me like this. And I shouldn’t even be here — drinking to deal with anger is exactly what got my dad to where he was.
For a beat, I hover in the doorway, the singing of cicadas behind me, the crooning of old country on old speakers in front of me.
“Jake,” Lawrence says again, gesturing with one hand, the kind of circular beckoning motion that’s universal forcome in. “Please, come take a seat, son. I’ve been wanting to have a word with you.”
Sighing, I take a few steps, the old wood floorboards creaking under my feet as I go. The rest of the bar is empty, aside from one old guy in the back corner booth, who looks like he might be asleep.
“He’s not dead,” Lawrence says, chuckling when my gaze lingers on that area for a second. “He always looks like that.”
“I don’t want your condolences,” I say, knowing the moment the words come out that they’re too harsh, but I’m unable to take them back. They’re true, though. I don’t want Lawrence to say he’s sorry for my loss.
Especially not when he knows exactly how I feel about my father. How I felt about him. That I hadn’t seen him in the five years before his death.
“Great, because I’m all out of them.”
When he says it, I realize he might be more in need of condolences than me. I hated my father, but somehow, against all odds, Lawrence was friends with the guy. He must have actually been hurt the day that he died.
“Can I get you a beer?”
My eyes drift past him and to the shelf of liquor on the back wall. I’m two years legal on alcohol and have been drinking it since my freshman year of college, but something about ordering one from Lawrence feels like a sin. It feels like going to a strip club with your grandma.
And beyond that, turning to alcohol to drown my anger feels like I’m falling right into the rut my father carved out for me.
“Actually,” I sigh, running my hand down my face. “I’ll take a cola, please.”
Lawrence chuckles but grabs a tumbler and fills it for me from the gun, gamely sliding it over like I’m a kid just playing an adult at the bar. I take it, take a sip, remember I don’t really like the taste of soda that much, and set it back down on the counter.
“You’ve been wanting to have a word with me?” I ask, watching as Lawrence goes back to polishing glasses. I imagine he does a lot of that around here on weeknights. If anything, this bar is more of a food place, especially in the summer when people would rather drink out at the lake.
“Yeah,” he says, eyeing me like one good look can tell him exactly what’s going on in my head. “I have.”
Lawrence has never been a very big guy, but there’s something about him that screams authority. He’s the kind of guy whowould make a good coach, a man that you can’t help but listen to when he speaks. I sit quietly until he clears his throat.
“You know that your father and I were friends in high school, right?”
I open my mouth to reject this, to tell him that I’m not interested in cute little stories about my dad. That I don’t want to hear him humanized. He had his chance with me, and he threw it away.
But Lawrence holds up his hand, stopping me before I can say any of that. “But I was also friends with your mother.”
I blink. For some reason, the thought of my mother as a teenager had never crossed my mind. Logically, I knew that my parents had met in high school, but I never thought back that far. “You were?”
“That’s right. Oh man, your dad was pissed. Hated that she and I got along so well, until he realized she wasn’t interested in me. She was only ever interested in him but loved to see him get jealous. See him get riled up over things.”
Hearing about my mother always feels like hearing about a unicorn. Growing up, information about her was like contraband, something that Shelby and I could only whisper about. My dad didn’t like hearing about her, didn’t like talking about her.
I’d always assumed that he hated her for strapping him with two kids and dying.
“Your dad was always that kind of guy. Really intense, and could channel that into really great stuff. Back in Industrial Tech, he could make the coolest stuff. He’d talked about moving somewhere like Los Angeles and becoming a furniture designer -living somewhere that people might pay a lot of money for fancy furniture. But Wildfern Ridge wasn’t that place.”
“Duh,” I say, more into my cola than to Lawrence. He laughs, and I see his hands land on the edge of the bar.
“Your mom found out she was pregnant over winter break of our senior year. She wanted… well, she wanted to get an abortion. It was your dad who convinced her they could be a real family. That he was willing to stay in Wildfern Ridge with her. She wanted to be a teacher, and they made a plan - he would work on starting up his construction business, then when you were old enough to go to school, your mom would go back for her education.”
I take a drink, get an ice cube in my mouth, push it back and forth. In some way, I knew a cobbled version of this story. Enough of it had seeped out over the years. I knew that I was from a teen pregnancy. I knew that it was a tough decision to keep me.
“Miles’ mom died just a month after your mother,” Lawrence says, clearing his throat. “It doesn’t excuse a damn thing he ever did, but he lost both of them, just like that. Instant.”
I stare at the counter. Lawrence is giving me the sad-guy speech about my dad, and instead of shutting it out, I’m letting it in. The anger sits, still sticky, still inside me.
