“We were weak,” Doug said, sounding cold. “We were selfish and weak. I want you to know, we’ve discussed this ad nauseum. We’re not unaware that you were the innocent party.”
“Good to hear.”
Doug sipped his scotch. “I expected to be a better man. I thought, well, it isn’t his fault. And if, say, my brother left behind an orphaned child, I’d be more than happy to take it in.”
“But it’s a different scenario. Mom had betrayed you.”
“But you hadn’t,” Doug said. “But it felt like you had. I never knew what to do with you. I convinced myself that if you reminded me of him, I could be reasonable about it. And maybe I thought that in exchange for accepting that, I’d be rewarded with a blank slate. Then you started to remind me of him, and it almost felt like you’d gone back on a deal we made.”
“Seriously?”
Doug nodded, then let out another laugh. “It did. It really did. I remember when you came home from school and told us you’d been running races in gym class and you were the fastest at almost every distance. You were so thrilled, too. I felt like you’d slapped me, I had to leave the room.”
“But you knew you weren’t being fair.”
“Of course. I was ashamed of myself.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me when I was a teenager,” Carver pressed. “I remember asking you point blank if I was adopted or something.”
“It was never the right time.”
“Any time would have been!”
“You were so angry and distant.”
“I wasn’t angry. I was hurt.”
“No, you were very angry. You blamed us when you tore your rotator cuff.”
“Because youbeggedme to play football. Because, apparently, I was hurting you by running track instead.”
Doug closed his eyes. “I know. I know, Carver. But this is the kind of thing I — look, I encouraged you to play football, I didn’t make you get sacked.”
“I know, I got happy feet, I know.”
“I mean that more as in, you could have said no to me. I almost hoped youwould. It kind of makes me sick, the way you hate us yet still try to please us. Like you’re defying us by pleasing us.”
Carver could only laugh at the brazen unfairness of this. “So it’s on me for trying to please you. Okay. I wish you guys would stop saying I hate you, by the way, because I don’t. You’re my parents, I love you, and apparently you did something kind of monstrous to me.”
“Please don’t say monstrous,” Doug said, looking down at the green leather desk pad, which Carver had gotten his parents for Christmas a few years ago. He rolled a pen across it, then said, “Monstrously ill-advised.”
“I wasn’t so angry that you couldn’t talk to me.”
“Maybe so, but we were afraid to anyway,” Doug said. “And we were working, and raising three children, taking care of the house and having a social life, and our parents were getting old and having problems. The days just flew by, and it just keptgetting further and further away from us. Like a dinghy we couldn’t pull back in. Just watching you float out to sea.”
“Yeah. Well.”
Doug was quiet for a while.
“If it helps,” Carver said, “I forgive you a little more than I do Mom.”
“That doesn’t help,” his father said quietly.
“Really?”
“Yes. This isn’t about whose fault it is.”
“No?” Carver said, with raised eyebrows.
