Page 66 of Take the Fall
That was the thing I hadn’t braced for. The want came up on his face and he couldn’t quite put it down. I’d handed him the one thing he’d chased for ten years. He was dying, or so David had told me, and I’d believed every word of it. He was running out of time, and he needed me in that chair while his heart held, and here I sat, in the good suit, asking only to be told the truth among family.
“All right,” he said.
And he told me.
He took his time, sure he’d already won, laying it out a piece at a time like a man who expected me to admire the work now that I stood on the right side of it.
I knew the shape of it already. Murphy and Luke had put it in front of me in a closed office, every piece they could reach, none of it provable. But knowing a thing and hearing your own father lay claim to it are not the same. The money ran back through a row of companies that were nothing but names on paper, into ours, his hands showing nowhere on any page. Whitfield, his friend of twenty years, was the one who shoved my transfer through in six days and set me down in the division the rot was already spreading into, so that when it went up there would be an obvious man to hang it on.
“A place like that needs a reason it failed,” he said. “You were a tidy one.”
He said it the way you’d mention having a hedge cut back. Mild. A little bored. A thing that had been handled. When he came to the detective who had been making a nuisance of himself in a laneway, he turned it over with two fingers. “He was spoken to. Once. Some men only need the once.”
And he had no idea what he was telling me.
He thought he was telling his son about a stranger, an annoying detective who was muddling with his plan. He didn’t know the cop in the laneway had a name. Luke. Luke down onthe pavement three blocks from our door. Luke coming up our stairs that night barely able to stand. Luke in our shower an hour later, letting me say I loved him for the first time...
Something tore. Low and quiet. I have never been more still in my life than in the second after it went.
I kept my face. And the one thing he taught me worth keeping was this: you don’t raise your voice when the room is already yours.
“David came to see me,” I said. “A few days ago. At the apartment.” I kept the voice flat, kept it cheap on the outside. “He told me your heart was going. Two surgeries this year, more on the way, that you didn’t have long.” I held his eyes. “That’s half of why I’m in this chair, if you want it straight. I didn’t want to be the son who stayed away until the funeral.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something worse. Satisfaction.
“And it reached you,” he said. Soft. Pleased with the work of it. “I’d started to think nothing could.”
The floor went out from under me. “Say that again.”
“I’m as well as a man my age has any right to be, Ryan. A stent, a couple of springs back. I jog four miles before breakfast.” No shame in it. There was none in him to find. “David told you what I asked him to tell you. I needed to know whether you could still be convinced. You’d made it very hard. A dying father is the one call a man like you picks up. So I had him make it.” He opened his hands. “And here you are, in the good suit. It worked. It told me you were ready to come home, whatever your mouth keeps saying.”
I have kept my face my whole life. I lost it then.
“You faked it.” The voice cracked straight down the middle and I let it. “You sent your own brother to tell me you were dying. As a test!” I was on my feet and didn’t remember standing. “You sick fuck. You actual sick fuck.”
“Sit down.”
“No!” The heat was in my eyes and I left it there. “You want to know what I did all my childhood and teenage years? I spent them on you. I built a son you might be proud of, and when that didn’t take I built the opposite, and it was you either way. Every choice I ever made ran through you whether I was standing in it or not. I wanted one ounce of your pride, of your love. One. A look. One good word with no hook in it.” The breath tore in my chest and I let it tear. “And there was never anything there to get. Was there? I could have spent my whole life on my knees on this carpet and come up empty, because there is nothing in you to give. I was a fool. For years. I made a fool of myself over a man who’d stage his own deathbed to watch me come running. And you wonder why I chose another path? One that is mine and not yours?”
He watched me come apart without moving an inch. Patient. Interested. Already deciding what to do with it.
“There,” he said. “There’s some fire in you after all. Some blood.” He nodded, like I’d finally tested inside a range he liked. “Bring that to the board. I can use a man who feels things, once he learns where to aim them.”
He didn’t hear or understand a single word I had said. That is the thing that put the cold back into me, all at once, scalp to heels. He had watched his son break open on his office carpet and logged it as a note on my potential. He did not understand me. He never had. Never will.
So I stopped performing.
“Okay,” I said.
I took the envelope out of my jacket and set it on the table between us. Thick. Cream paper. A lawyer’s hand on the front. Not his lawyer. Mine.
I sat back. I let the warmth drain off my face where he could watch every degree of it go.
His eyes went to the envelope, then to me. The first wrong note reached him. He’s too good to show much.
“What is this.”
“Open it, Father.”
