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By Root 729 0

in his sweater. Even sitting down, he looked a lot bigger than Pop, and now he stood and moved fast around his friends and grabbed Pop’s shirt and vest, and Pop grabbed his sweater and both seemed to pull at once so they pivoted and fell onto the table, flipping it, a woman screaming as she and the others scrambled away from their spilled drinks and broken glass and overturned chairs, the woman’s husband on top of my father now, throwing punches at his head. Then the man’s sweater collar was in my hands and I was yanking, a hand squeezing my shoulder and jerking me backwards, and I turned and shot a right into someone’s mouth, this bearded man in a flannel shirt who dropped to the floor, and now there were other men pulling the woman’s husband off my father, and in seconds he and I were out on Washington Street, laughing and breathing hard, though I wanted to get out of there before the woman’s husband and his many friends came out looking for us.

We drove slowly down Main Street in my father’s old Lancer. Pop kept laughing and shaking his head. He’d wanted to go to another bar somewhere, maybe Ronnie D’s where some of his students might be, but we ended up buying a six-pack of Molson’s at the package store next to the VFW where that kid had thrown a Molotov cocktail into my mother’s car. From behind the wheel, Pop sipped his beer.

“I wanted to punch him, but man, it happened so fast.”

“Yeah, it’s always fast. You just have to be faster.”

We were passing streetlight after streetlight, the sidewalk empty, the tin-sided houses just blocky shadows on the other side. I drank from my beer and saw again the face of the man I’d punched. He was twenty years older than I was, his beard trimmed like my father’s, and now I wasn’t so sure he’d been coming after me. In that flash of a second before I hit him in the mouth, there was the light of reason in his eyes, a reasonable man trying to break up a fight, that’s all, and I’d hit him so hard he went down.

Pop reached over and squeezed my shoulder. He laughed again and I laughed too, happy to be the object of his pride, but my knuckles stung and there was the dark, tilting feeling I had added something to myself that each time I used it subtracted more than it gave.

Pop took the slow right off Main up Columbia Park. I drained my beer and knew he’d tell this story about us for a long while. I knew too that I would not discourage him one bit from doing so.

DAYS LATER, a warm Saturday morning, I borrowed Jeff Chabot’s flatbed truck to move Pop’s things to his new apartment across the river in Bradford. He was forty-one and his new girlfriend, Peggy, was nineteen and now she stood in our front yard under the sun. She’d driven up from Boston and had thick blonde hair and blue eyes, a dusting of freckles across her upper cheeks. She wore shorts and sandals and looked smart and athletic, her arms crossed under her breasts as she watched Jeb and me tie down Pop’s boxes and bags and weight bench onto Jeff’s flatbed.

Pop was cheerful and laughed a lot, his eyes darting from his new girl to his sons to his ex-wife’s rented house and back again. My mother was home, and she’d come out and introduced herself to Peggy, who’d looked mildly surprised. Maybe because Mom was being so warm and friendly. Maybe because she was surprised to see such a lovely first ex-wife, my mother barefoot in shorts, her legs lean and smooth. Maybe because she wasn’t sure which ex-wife this was. The one he’d had four kids with? Or the one he’d just left for her?

Mom teased Pop about how little he owned, about how he didn’t need a truck really, just a decent fucking car. Then she went back inside, and now Pop’s new girlfriend looked a bit bewildered. She kept looking Jeb and me over. The fingernails of Jeb’s right hand were long and tapered for the guitar, his hair wilder than ever, his face shadowed with three or four days of whiskers, and she seemed to take in how Pop and I talked to each other. Not like a father and son, but like pals. Like drinking buddies.

Suzanne and Nicole had come out to meet her too,