“Why do you say that?” I ask him, not breaking his gaze for a second.
He bristles, like he’s annoyed that I even have to ask. “He really kept all that from you?” he remarks, raising his eyebrows. “Made you think that we all deserved it, losing our jobs like that? God knows what kind of fancy school you went to off our backs?—”
“I didn’t go to any fancy school,” I reply, not missing a beat. “I enrolled in the military. Then started volunteer firefighting. That’s why I’m here, actually, because I was helping out with the blaze that happened a couple months ago.”
My mother straightens up a little beside me, clearly pleased to have something to show off about, if only for a moment.
The man’s face flickers, and he bristles on the spot. “Doesn’t mean that he didn’t screw over half the people in this town to make his money,” he snaps back. “And you have the nerve tocome walking through here, acting like you didn’t make it half-impossible for us to?—”
“You see that building site at the bottom of the road?” I cut him off, and he blinks, surprised.
Glancing behind him, he locks eyes on the school, which is slowly starting to take shape. Might be a few weeks late to start the summer term this year, but at least the kids will have somewhere to study soon enough. “Yeah…”
“I’m paying for that,” I reply evenly. “With the money my father left me. Same money I’ve been using to fund the firefighting crew I work with, actually, the ones who got the town evacuated when the fire started.”
He lifts his chin slightly, not able to come up with anything in return.
“And I know that what he did hurt this place,” I go on. “And I’m sorry for that, Jacob, I really am. I was ashamed about it for a long time, and I think I had good reason to be. The logging industry, that was the heart of this town, and he gutted it without any warning and left you all scrambling to get back on your feet. It can’t have been easy.”
He grunts—it’s close enough to an agreement to convince me to keep going. I can sense my mother staring at me out of the corner of her eye, no doubt irritated that I’m affirming even a few of the issues that he has with my father, but we’re not going to be able to move on from this until we get it all out in the open.
“But I’m going to use his money to make this town a better place,” I promise him. “That’s what I want to do, now I’m back. And I’m not saying that it’s going to fix what happened in the past or undo how much you all struggled when he sold thefactories, but at least we can make things a little easier for the next generations, right?”
His face softens. I can almost see the anger unwinding from him, as strange as it sounds. It’s like something has finally given way, something that he’s been carrying for a long time, maybe even longer than he knew.
“My granddaughter, she’s going to be starting school next fall,” he remarks, his voice slightly gruff. “And she was so sad when she heard the school was down. She thought she would have to go somewhere else to start classes, but…” He shakes his head, and he plants a hand on my shoulder, giving me a nod. “Good for you,” he finishes up.
And then, before I can say another word, he shoots off down the sidewalk, leaving my mother and I standing there trying to make sense of what just happened.
She’s the first to break the silence. “You’re really using your father’s money for that?”
“It’s my money now,” I remind her. “And yeah, that’s what I want to use it for. Make this place better. Fix up some of the shit that he?—”
“Language.”
“Stuffthat he left behind.”
For a moment, we just look at each other. And then, she lets out a slight laugh, shaking her head. “I can’t remember the last time I told you off for your language,” she remarks.
“Been a while, huh?”
Something of the tension between us finally seems to have broken, some of the weight of everything we’ve been carrying starting to unwind. I know it won’t be that easy, not by a long shot, but at least she feels like my mom again, even if it’s just to tell me to get my language in hand and not sound so uncouth.
“It has,” she agrees. And I know she’s not just talking about what she just said to me, but the feeling that passes between us right now, that sense of something falling back into place where it belongs after all this time.
“Come on, let’s find a table at the diner,” I tell her, leading her a little further down the street. I might just be imagining it, but she’s walking with a little more certainty now, carrying herself like she knows she belongs here.
As we wait for a table, she glances toward a family at the far side of the diner—a mom and a dad with three kids who they are trying their level best to get under control. She smiles slightly as she watches them and then turns to me. “You know,” she remarks. “I think you’d be a good father, one day.”
“You do?”
I don’t want to tell her that I might already be a father, even if I don’t know for sure. I’m still trying to figure out everything that’s going on with Angelie, and I don’t want to get my mom’s hopes up before anything is set in stone.
“And I would like a few grandchildren one of these days, you know,” she continues, raising her eyebrows at me. I can’t help but laugh. She speaks like I’m going to pull them out of my back pocket right here and now, as ridiculous as that sounds.
“And this is a good place to raise a family, right?” I remark.
A smile fills her face, so warm and so unconstrained it reminds me of that night I sat on the stairs and watched her with my father.
