Patrick swirled the coffee cans of solvent to get the carburetor parts clean and ate another piece of pizza. He heard a truck park outside and thought, Where’s my weapon? A moment later Archie was standing in the doorway with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two glasses in the other. The dogs barged past him, all tongues and tails. “Mind if the asshole comes in?”
“Not one bit.”
Archie nodded and walked in. He was a purposeful man, always on task, but tonight he seemed uncertain. “Ted gone to bed?”
“Think so. We tired him out the last couple of days.”
“Just as well. I wanted to talk to you first. Splash?” At the workbench he poured two bourbons neat. Patrick came over and took a glass and they leaned against the bench facing the Mako. The dogs patrolled the barn, sniffing things. “That’s a nice craft, Pat. Eleven grand. Well done. How’s the engine?”
“Low hours and clean.”
“Don’t overload the oil mix on those two-strokes.”
“Never. I learned that from my old man. What’s up?”
“I feel rather shitty about what happened out in the grove yesterday. I’m going to try to apologize. I think you understand my anger, but how could Ted? Sometimes I’m not even sure I do. When I saw those big chunks of tree bark all over the ground...”
“He’s always had a blind spot in his common sense.”
His father nodded and sipped the bourbon. “That’s a good way to put it. You know, right from the get-go Ted wasn’t fortunate.”
“The seizures and fever.”
“Your mother and I thought we might lose him.” Archie looked at Patrick then back at the boat. “I had very high hopes for him. I wanted him to not just survive, but to flourish and fly someday. I wanted to make it happen. I saw in Ted a chance to be a hero.”
“A hero to your own son?”
Archie was staring at the boat but Patrick could tell he wasn’t seeing it. Over the years Patrick had noticed the thousand-yard stare in his father and but only since the war did he recognize it for what it was. He’d seen it on Bostik and Salimony and Messina, on every man he’d known in the Three-Five. It was a strange thing: distant and focused, aware and oblivious, outer and inner, present and absent.
“Did I ever tell you about meeting your mother?”
“Sure, Dad. It was in a restaurant and love at first sight.”
Archie gathered his attention on Patrick and smiled. “Well, that was the party line. There was a bit more going on. Some of which may be pertinent. May I speak frankly?”
“You should.”
“It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a biker bar in Oceanside. Kind of a dump. I’d gone there with a buddy. I was forty years old, ten years widowed. The farm was making me some good money. I had plenty of energy and girlfriends. I was steering solo and happy with that. I’d loved my first wife perfectly, I thought. Or as close to perfect as I could manage. She died young. Cancer, as you know. And because our love was young, she was ideal. Even in death and after, she remained ideal. So who could compete with that memory? Well, when Caroline walked into the biker bar she was beautiful, troubled, drunk, and about half my age. But she had an indefinable thing that was absolutely unmistakable in spite of the ideal love I’d once had. My heart registered it immediately. My first wife welcomed her. I felt things I hadn’t felt in years. Helpless, for one. I berated myself for foolishness, but it did no good. Does it ever? Caroline’s boyfriend was with her, a biker, a big guy who seemed to think he was in charge. When she took off her sunglasses I saw the smudges of bruises near her eyes. I’ll confess to being unimpressed by the boyfriend and saying so. The short version is we took it outside and I gave him a terrible whipping. Caroline called two days later with a story to tell. We made a date for the telling. Among others things it involved mental and physical cruelty, and pronounced recreational drug abuse.” Archie drank and looked at his son. “But she was something, Patrick. Sobered up, she had the looks and brains and appetites I’d intuited. Her heart was good and hungry. What a match for mine. And she was about to have something I had resigned myself to not having. She delivered him into the world approximately seven months later.”
“Ted.”
“None other.”
“I suspected.”
“As did many others. We were married before she showed. We delighted in our wicked little mystery. No confessions but nothing hidden, either. No explanations, nothing revealed, then the arrival of our little Ted. I pledged to save him from his own... unfortunate nativity. Ted’s father was a charming, brutal pig. Like Caroline’s father, he humiliated and hurt her. Her father was from money and of money. Layers of privilege and recklessness. Staggering unaccountability. The biker was intended as an antidote. Imagine. But you can’t satisfy swine of either type because they only want more. It takes a lot to fill a tiny heart. So she broke, Pat — right here in the house, right in front of my eyes. She broke, utterly and completely. And then she started over. Began to make herself again. To make herself herself for the first time. The baby was my project, my contribution to turning Caroline’s life around. It was my job to make that baby right. She chose me to accompany her on that journey. I have been honored. She’s become the strongest person I’ve ever known. She still frightens me in every good way and I would still lay down my life for hers in an instant.”
Patrick felt history falling into place behind him, followed by a strange liberating pleasure, like looking down from a cliff but feeling fully capable of flight. “Not sure what to say, Dad.”
“The upshot is I couldn’t do anything for Ted. His seizures or fevers, or his feet, or his odd inabilities. And over the years I went from hope to forbearance to disappointment to annoyance to resentment to hostility. The headshrinkers assigned him different mental maladies, some of which seemed accurate. Others not. No consensus. Your mother has always worried that he’d do something bad to himself or someone else. There’s an anger in him he rarely lets show. I don’t think he’s a bad person. I don’t think he’s severely retarded. I did love him and I will learn to love him again. And I’ve punished him enough for disappointing me. I know that, and I intend to stop.”