The Summer Son (2 page)

I
CALLED MY BOSS
, John Wallen, on Sunday night to tell him that I would be gone for a few days because…why? Because my father was a hardheaded, prickly, inscrutable bastard? Because my wife and I couldn’t last a day without some small spark of a fight threatening to burn down our house? Company policy on leave addressed neither baffling phone calls from manipulative fathers nor marital strife.

The fact was breathtakingly simple. I didn’t have a reason that would satisfy John. My sales had been crappy for as long as my marriage had been unraveling, and I lately was spinning through a vicious cycle of bad work, stress, and the subsequent strain with Cindy. All that manifested itself in my increasing slothfulness on the job and extended absences from home. I knew I didn’t have much margin of error left, with my boss or with my wife, but by nothing more than dumb luck, I was close on several major sales. If I reeled those in, it would make my year and, I hoped, buy me some grace at work and at home.

Now I was abandoning my post.

“Is he sick?” John asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Some sort of distress?”

“Maybe.”

“Huh.”

I had been with John for sixteen years. He’d built our South Bay medical-sales firm into a success story, and for a big chunk of that time, I had been his star salesman. I knew John well enough to know that “huh” meant that he was angry or confused. I hoped it wasn’t the former, but when it got right down to it, I really didn’t care. If I did, I supposed, I wouldn’t be leaving.

“Well, I hope everything’s all right,” he said.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can, John.”

He chuckled unhappily. “You’d better.”

I booked my ticket for the next day. I got the last seat on both flights, from San Jose to Denver and then from Denver to Billings. I booked the return for Thursday, not having any idea whether I’d be in Montana for days, weeks, or hours. The ticket, bought the day before travel and without a weekend stay, was staggering, nearly thirteen hundred dollars. The toll served only to darken my attitude.

Cindy tried to turn me around.

“Don’t fight him, and don’t take the bait if he offers it,” she said. “Just be.”

It was sensible advice that I found hard to imagine taking. I held tight to my biggest grievances with the man, but Cindy could do the math. Twenty-eight years divided by two face-to-face visits equals fucked up. She knew it, and she blamed Dad for it—if for no other reason than I did—and she blamed me for not rising above it. I often threw it back in her face and told her that it was my problem and not hers. I was wrong about that.

The cumulative effect of how far away Dad was from me in distance and degree had consequences in our home. Four years earlier, after years of trying, years of exploring the boundaries of the science of childbirth, we had been blessed with the arrival of Avery and Adia. It delighted me to learn that it really was true, that with children, every day is a discovery. Dad saw none of this. To Avery and Adia, Grandma and Grandpa were Cindy’s parents, who were right there in San Jose. My own mother didn’t live long enough to meet them. And Dad had seen them once, on a somber visit to Montana just a few months earlier for the funeral of his third wife, Helen. Cindy had insisted that we make that trip, difficult as it was to see him, much as she insisted that I go on this one now.

She thought some good might come from reaching out to him at a difficult time, and she wanted our children to know him.

But Dad was oblivious to the twins, and his grandchildren, in turn, were unimpressed by him. He didn’t smile or twinkle or make them laugh. He mostly grunted, if he made any noise at all. More than anything, he hid behind silence and welcomed no one to the other side.

As for Cindy and me, everything we did was for the kids, especially now, when we were coming apart. For all the fights, we never let Avery and Adia see the damage. We had gone so far as to agree that if we ever separated, Cindy, Avery, and Adia would stay in the house and I would go.

We desperately didn’t want that. We called in every bit of help we felt comfortable in seeking. Her parents stood ready to sweep in and take the children when the tension smothered us. We auditioned marriage counselors until we finally found the one we both could talk to. We confided in friends. We set aside date nights, and though several eroded into more fights, the point is, we were trying. Cindy was trying, anyway. I kept riding off into the same old ditch, and every bit of progress we made, I ruined by turning accusatory again.

Now I was going away, because I hadn’t tried enough or succeeded enough. Because my father had wrenched an opening in our lives big enough for my wife to push me through.

The kids wandered into our bedroom as I closed up my duffel bag.

“Where are you going, Daddy?” Avery asked.

“To see your grandpa.”

“You don’t need a suitcase for that!” Adia said.

“Not your Grandpa Bobby. Grandpa Jim.”

Adia curled up her nose. “I don’t like him.”

I looked at Cindy, helpless. She rolled her shoulders, as if to say, “Well, can you blame her?” And, of course, I couldn’t.

“You’ll just have to get to know him better,” I said. “Grandpa Jim is a good man.”

Look, kids, a fucking lie.

All the way up the 880 to the airport, I kept thinking that if I just said the word, the cab driver would veer off the freeway, turn around, and take me home. I could run up the sidewalk to our house, fling open the front door, and tell Cindy that it had all been a big mistake, that I would be husband of the year from now on. It could be just that easy.

At the exits for Stevens Creek, then the Alameda, and then Coleman, I felt the urge rise in my throat, the words sticking to my wet tongue. Each time, I swallowed hard and choked them back down. The driver pressed on, oblivious to the mental battle spilling into his back seat.

Cindy had left earlier that morning to take the kids in for a checkup—a coincidence that I half-bitterly accused her of having rigged so she wouldn’t have to deal with this. I knew, of course, that the kids’ appointment had been set weeks earlier, and my wife took my frustrated jibe gently and said, “You’ll do fine. You know I’d go if I could. You also know that it will be better if I don’t.”

I knew. The way I had it figured, disaster or disappointment loomed as the outcome of this trip, whatever the circumstance. But if I were to put Jim Quillen and the battle royale between his son and daughter-in-law in the same room, God save us all.

I stood in line at the ticket counter. I watched people peel off toward their gates, and I wondered what manner of regret they carried. I was being choked by mine, and I worried that my throat wouldn’t be wide enough to swallow it again.

As I stood in the terminal, my mind drifted again, inexorably, toward the sun-bleached images that returned to me with enough regularity that they had become part of my existence, an unpleasantness that I long ago assimilated. In the time that it took for my brain’s wiring to fire up the memory, I became not a thirty-nine-year-old husband, father of two, and businessman, but instead, an eleven-year-old boy in a strange, small town. As each exquisite detail filled my head, I was as ill equipped now as I was then to set it right. I knew every word I should have said, every action I should have taken, and yet, in the replay in my head, the same things happened, again and again and again, as if on a tape loop.

I shuffled through the security line toward the gate, picking through the words of my past few conversations with my wife and warily looking ahead to what waited at Dad’s, and I felt myself go. I knew that I would be exhausted by the time I had gnawed yet again on each bitter scrap, but I welcomed the thoughts, if only as a diversion from the mess I was leaving at home.

It’s not as if I should have been surprised. Dad had been on my mind for several days, and this journey through my memories meant going to the twenty-eight-years-earlier version of him, to swallow once more the way in which he broke me down—broke us all down—and left us to pick up the pieces, year after year. It’s only in retrospect that I see any of it coming, and by then, it’s too late to get out of the way.

As we waited on the tarmac, I pulled out one of the notebooks packed into my carry-on bag. A night earlier, when I had finally confessed to Cindy that I felt sick and scared about what awaited me, she gave me an assignment.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

“To what?”

“To you and your dad. Tell me what happened.”

“God, Cindy, it’s late.”

“Not now. While you’re gone. Write it down. Let it out.”

I equivocated, but she wouldn’t accept no. She stuffed my bag with notebooks and pens.

“Give it a shot,” she said.

I uncapped a pen and set the ballpoint onto the paper. I kept it there for a while, arguing with myself about whether to proceed.

“SEATAC, WASHINGTON,” I wrote.

I set the pen down and closed my eyes.

I felt the plane lurch backward from the Jetway, but I didn’t remember its wheels leaving the ground, nor did I recall the big loop over the South Bay before we turned east. My eyes had been wide open the first time I took this trip, when I lived it, and over the years I found that the endless journeys into my memories went better with them closed tight. I knew what was coming. I’d seen the story before. Parts of it comforted me, particularly the recollections of those moments before I left SeaTac all those years ago. I could see my mother’s sweet face, smiling at me as she said good-bye. She tried not to let me see her tears.

In my head, she always returned to me, the vibrant, beautiful mother who inhabits my dreams.

It’s my favorite part, but it never lasts.

Grace fades.

Losses linger in your gut, resistant against your best efforts to expel them.

Somewhere between consciousness and sleep, lulled by the jet’s engines and the torrent of memory, I returned to that place I’ve never been able to escape and made another fitful journey through what my eyes took in and my head wouldn’t let go.

“M
ITCH, HOLD STILL
.” My mother betrayed a hint of frustration with me. She had things to say before I barreled onto the plane for Salt Lake City.

“When you get off the plane, there’s supposed to be someone to take you to the next gate. If you don’t see someone, just stay there. OK?”

“Yeah.”

I knew the drill. Mom had been putting me on planes for six or seven years and putting her trust in the airline personnel to get me to where I was going. I hadn’t been lost yet, and I found it embarrassing to be treated like a little kid.

“OK, good,” she said. “How often are you going to call?”

“Once a week.”

“Right. And tell Jerry it wouldn’t kill him to call once in a while, too. I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”

“OK, Mom.”

She knelt down to face me, though she needn’t have done so. I was nearly five and a half feet tall—just a wisp shorter than she was.

She smiled. At the corner of her eye, I saw the first tear coming, and I fidgeted. She pulled me into a hug.

“I love you, Mitch.”

“I know. Me too.”

She let me go, then grasped the bill of my ball cap and gave it a friendly tug. I loved that cap. If I held any regret about leaving for the summer, it would be that my baseball team, the Mariners of Capitol Little League, would finish their final two games without me.

“Tell your dad that I want a phone call tonight, so I know you made it safely.”

“OK.”

I turned away from her, and the gate attendant gave me a wave of his hand, as if to say, “Come on, let’s go.”

I skipped down the Jetway.

Eight years earlier, when I was three years old, Mom had split from Dad. She packed my brother Jerry and me into her car and drove us through the night from Billings to Olympia. She had chosen a time when Dad’s work took him out of town, but it was an unnecessary precaution. He never came for us, and he never seemed surprised that we had gone. We lived for a little while in my grandparents’ basement until Mom could no longer stomach that arrangement. Her parents detested Dad and had always contended that Mom’s union with him would end in pain. That their prediction was realized twelve years after it was first made seemed to satisfy them somehow, which never made much sense to me. Who would want to be right about something like that?

Jerry and I spent alternating summers with Dad, one of us always hanging back in Olympia. Mom said that sending one of us away for the summer was so difficult that she couldn’t bear to be without both of us at the same time. Separating us ensured that she didn’t have to.

After Jerry graduated from Olympia High School in ’78, he flat-out told Mom that he wasn’t going to college, that he planned to work on Dad’s rig. She pleaded with him to reconsider, but it was pointless. Jerry was our father’s son in physicality and stubbornness. He didn’t linger in Olympia longer than it took for him to turn the tassel on his mortarboard.

One year later, on the summer set aside for my every-other-year visit, I was on my way to join my brother and my father.

In Salt Lake, a gate attendant met my flight, just as Mom said he would, and he whisked me in a cart to a satellite terminal for my puddle-jumper ride to Cedar City. I had scammed a few extra bags of peanuts from the stewardess on the Seattle flight, and they were stuffed into my shirt and pants pockets. I had even accepted the plastic wings that had been offered, after first protesting that I wasn’t a little kid.

“Are you from Cedar City?” the shuttle driver asked.

“Nuh uh. That’s just where my stepmom is meeting me.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Milford.”

“You ever been there?”

“Nah.”

“Not much to it. How long you staying?”

“All summer.”

He whistled and said nothing else.

I rode alone on the flight to Cedar City. Once I was buckled in, the copilot came out. I stuffed peanuts in my mouth while he talked.

“This will be a short flight, Mitch. Since it’s just you and us, we’ll leave the cockpit door open so you can take a peek and see what we see. Just stay in your seat, OK?”

Up in the cockpit, the pilot turned around and gave me the thumbs-up, which I happily returned.

I waited impatiently, willing the propellers to start. I yearned to see my father and Jerry again, and I was close now. I could feel the coming freedom of hanging out in the field, guzzling soda pop to my heart’s content, playing video games in hotel lobbies. The rigid structure I chafed against at home would be thrown off in Milford, I was sure.

Dad was a doodlebugger—that’s what guys like him were called, guys who ran truck-mounted drilling rigs and dug exploratory holes for uranium and natural gas. During the energy booms of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, they roamed the rural West in packs, joined by surveyors and soil scientists. Itinerant workers all, they would blow into a town and take it over for a few weeks.

As a consequence of Dad’s work, Jerry and I always headed somewhere new on our separate visits. Jerry spent summers in places like Cuba, New Mexico; and Limon, Colorado; and Rock Springs, Wyoming. I saw Elko, Nevada; and Thermopolis, Wyoming; and Sidney, Montana. Both of us would see Milford. The idea of that thrilled me.

About forty-five minutes into our hour-long flight, I saw the copilot pull out a book that looked like a manual of some sort, and the black grip of fear slipped around me. When I saw the propellers, I tried not to worry, but deep down, I knew that these puddle-jumpers were not safe—or were less safe, anyway, than the jet I had flown from SeaTac. Visions of Jim Croce and those guys from Lynyrd Skynyrd played in my head. They had died in planes just like the one I was on.

My mind reeled.

Doesn’t he know how to fly this thing?

Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Why would he need a book?

Wouldn’t they tell me if something is wrong?

I’m just a kid. Maybe they’re afraid I’d freak out.

Maybe it’s not that bad. They don’t look worried.

Of course, I can only see the backs of their heads.

Maybe it’s really, really bad. What point would there be in telling me if that were the case?

Aren’t they obligated to say something?

Maybe I should ask.

I opened my mouth, but no words came. Instead, I hocked a frothy stew of vomit against the cabin wall and onto the floor. My eyes watering, I looked down and saw peanut chunks sitting atop the carpet.

The sound of my sickness drew the copilot out.

“Mitch, there’s a bag there in that front pocket, if you feel sick again. Don’t worry about it. We’re nearly there.”

I slumped in my seat, embarrassed that I had barfed but relieved that we apparently were not going to crash. I rubbed at my eyes, teary from the sheer physical exertion of regurgitation. The acid that didn’t make the trip out of my mouth lingered in my throat, burning. The smell of my sick wafted up toward me.

A few minutes later, a stretch that seemed to take forever, we touched down and rolled to the gate. The copilot came back and lifted me over my pool of congealing throw-up.

“You OK, Mitch?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t sweat it, man. If I had a dollar for every time somebody yakked on this plane, I wouldn’t have to work anymore.”

Marie waited just inside the door. She didn’t disappoint. Dad had an eye for beauties. It was certainly true with Mom, and what he had found in Marie, his second wife, was glamorous in a way that Mom had never been. Marie’s jet-black hair, parted in the middle, had been styled into locks that draped her shoulders and framed her porcelain face. Her nails were painted red. She wore big sunglasses, like Elton John’s. And she smelled great.

Though Dad had married Marie in ’76, because of my every-other-year visiting schedule, this was only the second time I had seen her. Her smile crumbled when she saw the copilot’s hand on my shoulder as we entered the terminal.

“Hi, Marie,” I said.

“He had a little accident, ma’am,” the copilot told her. “He threw up. No big deal, but I wanted to make sure he got to where he was going.”

“Are you OK?” she asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Looks like you got a little on you,” she said, lines creasing her nose as she pointed at my pants. “Let’s get that cleaned up.”

The copilot pointed me to the men’s room, and as I walked away, Marie reached out and touched his arm, thanking him. Jealousy poured over me.

I sat in the passenger seat and nursed a Coca-Cola that Marie bought for me. She said it would calm my stomach. I didn’t feel as though I was going to barf again, but that was immaterial. I liked Coke. I also liked riding in Marie’s car. It smelled of jasmine, like her.

“How far is it?” I asked.

“About sixty miles. We’ll be there in an hour or so.”

“Neat.”

“How did school go, Mitch?”

“Straight As.”

“No kidding?”

“Yep.”

“So what happened with that F last year?”

“I hated Mrs. Spinks.”

“Why?”

“She played favorites. So I didn’t do the work.”

“We were worried about you.”

“I had Mrs. Allen this year. She’s my favorite teacher ever. I won the spelling bee, too.”

“Really? That’s great, Mitch.”

“I lost in the next round, though. I misspelled
duodenum
.”

“What is that?”

“It’s something in the body, I think.”

“How’d you spell it?”

“D-u-o-d-e-n-i-m.”

“That’s an easy mistake to make.”

“I was also elected student council president.”

“Student council president, that’s great,” she said. “Your dad is going to be really proud.”

I preened under her praise, and under the anticipation of his. Maybe he would even tell me so.

“I guess this means you’ll want to stay there and not go to that private school.”

Mom wanted to get me enrolled at St. Michael’s. She said my “brilliance” would be better cultivated there. We weren’t devout Catholics, but Mom saw that as a small hurdle. If it improved my chances, we could become devout, she said.

The bigger barrier was money. Mom didn’t have much. Her job with the state was sufficient for our needs, but she relied on Dad’s child support to make the bigger leaps of putting braces on our teeth (I hadn’t needed them, but Jerry had racked up an impressive array of orthodontia), buying school clothes and supplies every year, paying doctors’ bills, and the myriad other budget-busting expenses that kids incur. Jerry had left the house a year earlier, and that’s where his support payments ended. Mine continued, and Mom had been lobbying Dad to help send me to private school.

“Here’s the thing about that, Mitch,” Marie said. “We’ve been talking, and we think you’re doing fine in public school. It’s a lot of money, more than we have to give. If you’re happy, that’s great.”

Private school was Mom’s idea. I liked how Marie talked to me as if I were an adult.

“Yeah, I like it at Garfield.”

“Good.”

At a highway junction, Marie turned her Buick Skylark left. Milford—and Dad and Jerry, who would be back from the fields soon—waited for us just thirteen miles down the road.