Daniel felt a surge of anger at the mocking tone, dispelled at once by his father’s pronouncement: “She seems like a great girl.”
Daniel nodded and took another bite to keep his mouth busy with other things. He didn’t feel like his dad had earned the right to know about his personal life.
“How in the world are we gonna get rid of that thing.” He jabbed his Pop-Tart at the green plume of leaves sticking up over the roof. The tree seemed bigger than the house.
“A piece at a time,” his father said. “That’s how most things get done, good or bad. A piece at a time.”
He took a long pull from his cup of water.
“I wish I could take some things back,” his father said quietly. He looked off into the woods, and Daniel could feel his own eyes coat with tears. He lost himself in his second pastry.
“When I built this house, a part of me knew I could do it. I’d done just about every piece of building a house at some point or another, even though I never stayed on a job long enough to see it from beginning to end. I didn’t really have that—what would you call it? Like an unbroken chain of events—”
“A continuum,” Daniel said.
“Yeah. I just had all these jobs I drank myself on and off of, going where the money was then splitting once I had a fistful.”
Daniel’s father turned to him, his eyes under a blanket of water. “I had a problem before I met your mother,” he admitted. “I kept it from her. Kept it from my parents when I was at school. Kept it from my teachers. Hell, I didn’t even know it was a problem for the longest time. I knew other kids along the same lines, drinking all the time. The people I worked with on job sites seemed to be no different. You never know, when you’re so used to hiding things, just how much everyone else is hiding as well. Your demons become their demons.”
He stopped to take a bite. Daniel listened to the birds sing.
“When I met your mom, I wanted to build her the world. You should’ve seen how pretty she was.” He shook his head and smiled. “So I talked myself and my future up, and I even believed some of it. That’s what you do when you fall in love, or what most people do. They put this impossibly perfect thing up there for the other person to destroy, or figure out for a lie—”
“That’s not how it has to be,” Daniel said, even though he knew he had no idea about such things.
“I wish it wasn’t,” his father said. “With your kids, it’s even harder. You guys looked up to me so much, right from the start. It was confusing. I already knew what a shit I was then, but you guys thought I knew everything—”
Daniel felt his body stiffen as his father lost it. His dad sobbed, his Pop-Tart in the dirt, his hands over his face. “And the bad gets built one piece at a time, too,” he sputtered. “You don’t know how it gets there, this thing you become, but looking back, it’s like you drew it out with a pencil—”
“Dad—” Daniel whispered.
His father wiped his hands on his thighs and stared down at the dirt between his feet. Daniel saw tears plummet into the leaves and disappear in the dew.
“I never meant to be a bad father—”
“But you were,” Daniel said.
“I know.” His head bobbed. “I wish I could tell you what it’s like to be old and full of regret. How you want to turn back the clock, how you pray for it every night, for one more giant chance to redo everything in your life. But even then, even knowing how those mistakes feel, you keep right on making them. You build and build on this awful foundation, you know? It’s like you know there’s a better way, but you can’t start over. You want to do things different, but you keep right on like before. That’s the curse of it all, Son. You learn what you’re doing is wrong and bad, and you watch yourself spin in circles. You feel lost in the woods, but your footsteps are right there in front of you.”
He sniffed and wiped his nose.
“I can’t apologize for what I’ve put you kids through. There’s no way I can make it up to your mom, and I’m not trying. When I leave the next time, as soon as I can, it’ll be some short and foreign life I go off to try and live.” His father looked at him, and Daniel realized he was crying as well. “I want you to know that you never have to forgive me, ’cause I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Dad—”
Daniel didn’t know what to say.
“I just hope you’ll do everything different than I did. You’ve got this chance ahead of you that I’d kill for. I’m so jealous and proud of you for that.”
“Dad. I’m sorry for some of the things I said to you back then.”
“I deserved worse.”
“I’m still sorry. I wish I hadn’t. I used to blame myself—”
“Oh God, Son.” His father shook his head; his shoulders shook with sobs. “Son, please don’t ever—”
“I don’t anymore—”
“God, Son, don’t ever blame yourself. I was a mess before I made you.” He swiped the tears from his cheeks and wiped his nose. Daniel stood. He reached over and put his hand on his dad’s shoulder, the most and least he could think to do, and his father’s weathered hand came up to rest on it, holding it there. And his father cried even harder. His bent body was wracked by sobs, tears falling through the fingers of his other hand, which he kept over his face as if to hide from his son, or from the world. He cried and squeezed Daniel’s fingers, pinning them to himself, and Daniel could tell what the simple gesture meant.
It made him wish he could offer or mean even more.
27
“Step through this loop first.”
An hour later, faces dry, Daniel’s father held a curl of webbing open at his feet. Daniel stepped through, shifted his weight to that foot, then did the same with the other.
“Now pull it up, just like a pair of shorts.”
“This’ll hold us if we fall?” Daniel shrugged the webbing up over his shorts, tugging down at the hem of them to keep them from getting bunched up.
“You could swing from this all day.”
Zola watched them from the front steps, sucking on a straw punched through a warm juice box. Every now and then, she tried making a call or sending a text. Now, when she put her phone aside with each network error, it was with a practiced calm, none of the frustrated desperation from last night. Her straw slurped at the bottom of the box.
“You’d better be real careful with my boys up there,” their mother said. She stood near one of the log piles, her arms crossed, a doubting look on her face. Daniel smiled at her to try and calm her nerves—and his. Carlton topped up the oil and gas on the chainsaw, then walked over and peered up the ladder leaning against the gutter. Hunter worked his homemade harness of knotted webbing on without their father’s help.
“Knot your line on the other line like this when we get up there.” He refreshed them on how to tie a bowline; the lessons taught on the houseboat years ago came flooding back, and the loss of the boat gnawed at Daniel. He untied and retied the knot several times while their father bent to secure a short piece of rope to the chainsaw. He stood, slung it over his shoulder, and went to the ladder first. The long, extended aluminum sides bent with his weight. He took the rungs slowly, getting both feet in place before reaching up with one hand to steady himself on a higher rung.
Once at the gutter, he lifted the chainsaw to a two-by-four he’d nailed in place across the shingles. He hoisted himself up and tied his webbing off to a loop of rope strung across the breadth of the house, from one side to the other. The loose bowline let him slide left and right and crawl higher up the roof, but should catch him if he slipped. Daniel watched, nerves tickling his stomach, as he waited for his dad to move out of the way. Then he went up the ladder after him.