My expression must make my confusion clear.
“Have you ever actually hurt anyone by getting angry?” James prompts.
I mull it over. I can’t think of many times when I’ve actually let myself get what I would considerangry. Annoyed, sure, but I always get myself under control before things go any farther.
“No,” I answer, “but Icould, and that’s why I have to—”
James doesn’t let me finish. “Whether or not you actually could, youchoosenot to, and while I’ve never met him himself, I take it that’s not something your father would have done. You’re not like him, Cole. The fact that you don’twantto be like him already proves that.”
The truth of his words hits me like a smack from his cane over the back of the head. Even though my first instinct is to protest and tell him he’s wrong, I can’t bring myself to do it. There’s something to what he’s saying, something I can’t deny.
He’s watching me with an unsettling kind of understanding, like he can see more than I want him to.
“How...?” I start to ask, but I’m not sure what my question should be.
He gives me an answer anyway.
“I took me a long time to figure that out about my own father. Too long. If I’d realized the same thing sooner...Well, maybe I wouldn’t be living in a house with no one but Camilla to look after me in my old age. Life is a cycle, you know? If you let it, it just goes around and around and around. Fathers hurt their sons, and then those sons turn into fathers who hurttheir sons. You get hurt by one lover, and then you turn around and hurt the next person who loves you. It’s a circle. It’s a chain. You’ve got to be brave enough to break it.”
I let that wash over me. For a few minutes, we’re just two people sitting there staring at the walls, both remembering a past and imagining a future, but I know I’m the luckier one. I still have a shot at that future.
“Yeah,” I find myself repeating, “you’ve got to be brave.”
James reaches for his cane where I tossed it on the floor and uses it to poke me in the leg.
“Not bad for a bass lesson, huh?”
I don’t whether to groan or smile.
“No,” I tell him, “not bad at all.”
