Tre was twenty, about to go on his first tour, and starting to move like a man who’d mistaken success for a safety net. I could feel him slipping toward something I wouldn’t be able to pull him back from, if it wasn’t reined in now. Simone was sixteen and was becoming a young woman dealing with things I had no frame of reference for. I was managing all of it with no manual.
And then there was WadeHouse. We were in the middle of a quarter that needed me laser focused, moves on the table that could multiply the business ten times over in a matter of months, and I was sitting in his old office staring at reports, unable to make the numbers hold still.
I’d told myself he’d come back. I’d built the machine of myself on the quiet assumption that one day my father would return and take some of the load back. By that point, I understood plainly that he was never going to walk back on his own.
So I would go get him.
Uncle Reggie was the only line any of us had to him. Over four years ofhe’s all right, he’s just not ready, give him time,delivered in my uncle’s careful voice. He knew where my father was and had never once told us, because my father made him swear not to. So Reggie chose to keep abroken man’s confidence over our right to know where our father laid his head.
I found him at his shop and I didn’t ease into it. “Where is he, Unc?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “Julian, you know I can’t?—”
“I’ve asked you nicely for four years.” I was trying to stay composed. “I’m not asking nice today. He left me carrying everything and he gets to just begone,and you get to be the wall I run into every time. I’m done with it. Tell me where my father is!”
His face dropped. “It ain’t that simple, Julian.” He set down the rag in his hands. “You think I like this? I don’t tell y’all where he is ’cause the day I do, he’s gone. Right now I’m the one line he keeps open. He calls, asks about y’all, I know he’s breathing, I know he’s fed, I can tell y’all your daddy’s alive without lyin’ to your face. The second he thinks I’ve given you an address, he stops answering my calls, and then there’snobody.You understand? Not you knowing a little. All of us knowing nothing.” His voice cracked. “I’m not keeping him from you to be cruel, Jules. I’m keeping the one thread we got from being cut.”
I understood. It was true, and I’d have made the same call in his position. It didn’t change what I’d come for.
“Then don’t point me at the door,” I said. “Just don’t stand in front of it.”
He looked at me a long moment, and rubbed his chin, searching for the thing he could give me without breaking the thread himself.
“That house you grew up in isn’t the only property your folks ever put their name on.” He held my eyes. “You’ve got a head for paperwork. That’s as far as I go. I done already went further than I should’ve.”
I went to our family home and into my father’s study, and pulled every folder in the file cabinet until I found it. A deed. A piece of land four hours away, on a lake, in both their names, bought the year before Simone was born.
I stared at it a long time, because I knew this place. Not from ever being there. Fromnotbeing there.
The lake house was Mama’s. My father had bought it for her, and it was the one place that was only theirs. Where she went when she needed time for herself, when the four of us got to be too much, or when the two of them wanted to just be a couple in love, instead of somebody’s parents. None of us had ever set foot in it. It wasn’t for us. It was the only door in our whole childhood that stayed closed, the place with her name on it that we only ever heard about secondhand.
I copied the address and got in my car.
The road narrowedthe closer I got. The trees got taller, and the water came up between pines. A cabin sat smaller than I’d pictured, set back from the water by fifty feet. A porch with two chairs and a little table between them faced the water. A hammock swung slightly in the breeze at the bottom of the slope.
I got out of the car, and I heard a guitar before I made the first step. I stopped at the bottom of the three steps and put my hand on the porch rail to hold myself up against the sound of it. Four years since I’d heard my father play. I hadn’t prepared for what the sound of him playing inside that house would do to me.
Then I went up and knocked. The guitar stopped and the silence after it ran longer than the playing had.
I knocked again and called out. “Pops. It’s Julian.”
After another long moment, his weight crossed the floor, the latch turned, and the door opened.
I stared at him. He was tall the way he’d always been. Everything else had changed. His hair grown out in a gray, uncombed afro. His beard halfway down his chest, and the posture of a man who’d stopped lifting things. He had on the slippers I’d bought him the Christmas before Mama died.
He stared at me. I stared at him. Two of the exact same eyes looking back at each other.
His face did the work his voice couldn’t. Guilt arriving before any words. Sadness under it, and shame. He was looking at his oldest son for the first time in years, on a porch he’d never expected me to stand on.
“Pops.” I swallowed, holding back the tears fighting their way up.
His eyes filled with his own tears, but he didn’t answer.
“Can I come in?”
He glanced at the door, then back at me. He couldn’t say no out loud. To refuse me to my face was a thing he didn’t have the nerve for. So he pulled the door shut behind him with the care of a man closing off a room that held something precious to him and stepped past me, lowering himself into one of the two chairs. He lifted his hand toward the other.
That was his answer. So I sat.
