“I can’t shake him, which is stupid because . . . I don’t know.” I sigh heavily. “It was probably Nick anyway. He made a comment at the bar the other day about it.”
“But?”
“But it wasn’t Nick. This man sounded older and he mentioned his son. Said he wasn’t the father his kid needed. Told himself he was doing his best, and the truth was he didn’t try very hard, and by the time he figured that out the boy was grown and gone, and he didn’t know if he had any right to come knocking.
“I told him it’s never too late to try. Told him reaching out isn’t about easing his own guilt, it’s about handing his son the choice he never got. Show up. Tell the truth. Don’t reach for a single excuse. Then be man enough to take a no, if no is what comes back.” I shake my head. “Good advice. I’d stand behind every word of it. It’s just been stuck in me ever since and I couldn’t tell you why. Something about the voice. I knew it and I didn’t. Couldn’t put a face on it.”
When I finally look at my mom, her hands flat on the island countertop. Her expression is blank and her eyes are distant.
“Mom.”
“Say the rest of it?”
“How he talked?”
She nods.
I think of how to describe what I remember. “Slow. Careful. Like he had to think about each word before he said it or like the words were being dragged from him.”
“That’s your father.” Her words punch me in the gut. There’s no way he would call. The last time we spoke, I found him in the grocery store, cowering over Peyton. I wanted to strangle him.
“Nah.”
“Answer me this. Did he stop before he got to the wordson?”
“…Yeah.” I go cold. “No,” I say.
“Liam.”
“No. There’s a thousand sorry old men in this state who?—”
“You already know this in your heart. The voice was familiar because you know it you just don’t want to believe he’d have the gall to call you and say something like this for the world to hear.”
She stands, comes to me and puts her hand over mine. Hers is shaking, a little. That’s how I know she’s already sure. “That was your father. That was Sterling, on your show, asking a room full of strangers how to get back to you. And you’re the one who told him how.”
I don’t say anything. There’s a sound in my ears that isn’t coming from the room.
I’ve pictured a lot of ways my father might turn back up after all this time. A letter from a lawyer. An obituary. I never once pictured this one. Yet, I put myself out there, opened myself up for him to do this.
“He doesn’t get to do that,” I say, and it comes out lower than I mean it to. “He doesn’t get to be the sad old man on the radio. He doesn’t get to be a thing people feel sorry for. He had a wife and a kid and a whole life and he ground every one of us down because we weren’t the sheep he expected us to be, and now what. He’s tired? He’s scared?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I’ve got. I haven’t spoken to him since I signed the divorce papers. I left. Him. Beaumont. If the triplets didn’t live here, neither would I. My Paige loves Los Angeles. She loves my childhood home.”
My mom’s right. Paige, even Josie, loved the house in Los Angeles.
I can still feel the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. Funny what sticks. Not the yelling—there was never much yelling—he didn’t need it. The hand. Steering me into a room and out of one, away from Josie and onto a field, always where he wanted me to be.
My mother spent the best part of her life as a piece of furniture in that man’s house. He told her where to stand and what she was feeling. He told her, once, that her own mother was dead before it was true, and let her grieve a living woman across the country, because a wife who’s mourning is easier to keep than a wife who might pack a bag. I’ve known all of it for years. It’s why there isn’t a soft feeling left in me for him, and why I never expect there to be.
“I’m not going to tell you to call him,” she says. “I’d be the last mother on earth that should. He took my mother from me with one sentence and I never got those years back and I never will. You want to let him talk to your voicemail till the day he dies, you’ve got my blessing.”
“But.” Because there’s a but. There’s always a but with her now. Getting sober made her honest, and honest is a pain in my ass.
“But the Sterling I lived with never once asked for a thing he could take instead.” She holds my eyes. “Not from me, not from you, not from God. And the man you just described got down on his knees in front of strangers because he couldn’t find the nerve to do it in front of you. I don’t know what that is. I know it isn’t nothing. A man like your father doesn’t crawl unless something’s run out on him.”
