The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [91]
Art was quietly astounded as the stories flew from his father’s lips. “My dad had gone completely Alaskan,” he says. “The dogs, the fishing boats, even the goddamn bud. It was like he’d been born there. And he was still excited by the place. He told me there were a lot of places he wanted to show me.”
And Art had missed all of it. Listening to the stories, he saw no reason why he and Wensdae and Jason couldn’t have been there, at least for some of it. Part of him wanted to feel rage and strangle his father, but he was too fascinated. “He’d talk and tell stories and I’d just be amazed at what an interesting person he was. I realized that my father was cool, he was fun to hang out with. What was weird was that, at the same time, he was a fucking asshole who left us to rot in the projects.”
Even when it was Art’s turn to catch his father up on his life, he did not show him an angry face. He made sure Senior knew that while he had been frolicking in the wilds of Alaska, he and his siblings had been living in one of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, going hungry, and struggling with a clinically insane mother, but he did not assign blame. He told him about Jason being more or less permanently incarcerated, about getting shot, and about how they’d all been wards of the state after Aunt Donna nearly killed their mother, but there was never a suggestion that Senior’s presence, or even financial help, might have mitigated some of it. He stopped short of telling his dad about his crimes, or of Wensdae’s accident. Art wasn’t yet sure how to break it to Wensdae that he had found their father, or how either of them would react.
Senior took it in silence. What could he say? He began to sob, and told Art that he had never meant for any of that to happen. Neglecting them had been the biggest mistake of his life. Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t thought of him and Wensdae and Jason. He still loved all of them. He knew that what he had done was wrong and he hoped that they’d forgive him; he wished he could change things. Since he couldn’t, all he could do was ask for Art’s forgiveness and start fresh from there.
“I’ll accept your apology if you tell me why you left us,” Art said.
In his fantasies, he had always hoped the explanation was something heroic or at least criminally understandable, “like maybe people were trying to kill him, or he would have ended up going back to prison if he came near us.” But flowers are few in the weed patch of deadbeat dads. Keeping it vague, Senior told Art that after he had fallen out of love with Malinda, she had “harassed” him, threatening him with lawsuits and arrest unless he came back to her. He knew that he would never be able to start a new life if she was around, and figured it would be better off for all of them if he stayed away. He added that he had looked for Art and his siblings “three or four times” but had never been able to find them.
“I knew it was all a complete lie,” says Art. “My mom couldn’t have harassed him much because she didn’t even know where the fuck he was. And if he had looked for us it wouldn’t have been that hard to find us. He could have phoned people. I didn’t call him out on his lies, but let him say what he wanted to say. More than anything, I was just happy to be there.”
ALASKA’S RESTIVE SUN had fallen and flown again during