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By Root 802 0

of the semi-abandoned. I don’t know what was said about him or by whom, just that that surprising anger was rising up in me again, that same anger that fired up whenever I’d read whatever I’d just written in this novel I was slowly filling notebooks with in that trailer on the beach only miles from Lime Street where I’d been beaten up daily as a boy. And the anger felt old, as if it had been coiled in some Mason jar on a basement shelf and each scene I wrote turned the jar’s lid another revolution and now the lid was off and it was the boy in me who was screaming, not the twenty-seven-year-old man who loved and admired his father and treasured being one of the ones to help bring him back, but the boy who wanted to know one thing: Where were you when I needed you?

This was not a conscious question. I’d be too ashamed to know it was there, for I wasn’t the one who’d been run over and crippled trying to help someone. And I knew where he’d been. He’d been living on the other side of that river doing the best he knew how to do. I knew that his monthly child support payments often left him with ten dollars to get him through the last two weeks of the month. I knew he’d lived in small rented apartments and drove that used Lancer he’d bought for a hundred dollars. I knew he sometimes went months between girlfriends and got lonesome. I knew he strove every morning to create art.

I knew all these things, but I also knew he knew little about us. We children were in our twenties now: Suzanne had left her husband and was thinking about going back to school. Jeb no longer craved death and had weekend custody of his son. He was living in a mill downtown, working as a self-employed carpenter, practicing guitar at night, painting, trying to pay all his bills and go back to school and be the artist he’d always been. Nicole had moved to Santa Cruz for college. She owned a mobile home and was living with a woman and would soon have an advanced degree she’d earned with help from no one. And I was writing and living in the very town I thought I’d never return to; on the skin of things, it looked like we were all doing all right and would continue to do all right.

There was an afternoon cookout, maybe a birthday celebration for one of us. It was at Pop and Peggy’s before the accident. Mom was there, Bruce too, and most of us grown kids with our girlfriends or boyfriends, our baby half-sister Cadence being passed from one of us to the next. There was a lot of tickling and laughing and cuddling.

Mom was scanning the room, taking us all in. Brubeck was playing. Behind her was the wall of windows looking out over that rise of field and ridge of trees, and the sun was sinking low beneath their trunks, the sky a low-burning fire. She said: “Oh, I just wish we could have done more for them.”

Pop smiled over at her. “They had all they needed. What’re you talking about?”

“Oh, you know, I just—” Somebody jumped in and changed the subject. It may have been me, it may have been Suzanne or Jeb, but what lingered for me was Pop’s surprise at what she’d said. It was the same surprise in his face when he’d thrown a baseball to me for the first time when I was fourteen, when he saw that playing ball, playing at anything, was not part of my boyhood the divorce had taken him from.

Now I was a grown man, and I wanted to tell him about that boyhood. He and I were close, not like a father and son really, but more like two buddies who work out together, then drink together. That’s how it had been between us. Surely I could sit down with him sometime and tell him how it was. Surely he’d want to know.

But over the years, one of us would mention not having had something—a belt, a second pair of shoes, a good winter coat—and his cheeks would redden and his voice would become Marine-deep, and he would get loud about having done the best he possibly could. And how could he be anything but right about this? How could this frustration and rage be anything but a signal to us all that he had, in fact, nothing left to give?

But still, that boy in me needed to tell him