American Outlaw - Jesse James [21]
I didn’t know what my dad wanted me to think. Was it a white flag, his fucked-up way of saying sorry, since he sure wouldn’t say it out loud to me? It wasn’t really his style to be remorseful, though, not even in silence. After a while, I kind of figured he was sending a different kind of message: by sitting there, he was telling my coaches and my community that he had some part in my success. That I never could have gotten this way all by myself.
“What’s wrong, Jesse?” Linda asked me one night, when we were eating dinner together.
“Nothing,” I said. I never wanted to unload myself onto Linda. I felt guilty enough just sleeping under her roof and eating her food.
“Uh-huh,” she said slowly, looking at me unbelievingly. She was a smart lady, way too smart to fall for my act.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I nodded at her and Rhonda. “Promise.”
“You know,” said Linda, in the tone of someone who knows she’s got your number, but is too kind to put it in a mean way, “I happened to see your dad up in the stands the other night.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, after a while. “He comes to the games nowadays.”
“Does he ever try to talk to you? Talk about what happened?”
I shook my head. “No. We haven’t discussed it.”
Linda was silent. She looked across the table at her own daughter.
“Did your folks move to another house?” Linda asked.
“They didn’t have to,” I said. “The insurance paid for them to fix it up. There’s a new roof on the house. They still live there.”
Linda looked at me real straight for a second. “Jesse, I want you to listen to me.”
I looked at her.
“Your dad doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
I just looked at my plate and shrugged.
“You hear me, son?” Linda snapped. “Do you even get what I’m trying to say?”
I looked at her. I had never seen her worked up like that.
She shook her head, then closed her eyes, massaging her forehead. “You are always welcome in this house, Jesse. Please, please know that.”
Gradually my dad started driving by Rhonda’s house after work. It would always be in the early evenings—he’d cruise by real slow in his work truck loaded high with tons of junk. I figured he was showing me how much work he had to do without me.
When both of us had watched him come by for the third time in as many days, Rhonda asked me, “What are you going to do, Jesse?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”
Seeing him ate me up inside. Was he really in trouble? If I turned my back on my own dad, then I wasn’t much better than he was. But I just couldn’t tell him I was sorry. I needed to hear it from him first. He had started it. He chose to believe that I could have burned down his home on purpose.
So I didn’t contact him, and I didn’t show my face at the swap meets. My weekends were free to work a real job, the one that Linda had gotten me, delivering furniture from a store in town. I became a dedicated worker ant for them, happily getting lost in the physical labor of it—the driving, the lifting, the sweating. The money wasn’t too hot, but secretly it felt kind of gratifying to be earning some legit cash for once.
I was at the store one Saturday afternoon when my boss told me that Linda herself had bought something.
“It’s that big armoire in the back, kid. Can you get this one yourself, or you need some help on it?”
I eyed the armoire she had purchased. It didn’t appear to be too unmanageable. “No problem. I can take this one myself. Be back in an hour.”
“Don’t get lost over there, kid!” my boss called after me. “I know your girlfriend lives there!”
Happily, I drove the big furniture truck to Linda and Rhonda’s house. It was my house, too, now. It felt good to realize that.
I parked the truck in their driveway and unloaded the armoire from the back of the truck. Though it was big, it was a light piece, and I carried it easily to their front door, where I set it down. I had my own key, so I unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
“Jesse!” Rhonda yelped.
She was tangled up on the couch, her shirt halfway off, and there was another guy there with her.
“What . . . what are you doing here?” she asked.