Luke stepped out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching his father, waiting for him to say more, to ask for help. When he didn’t, Luke asked, “Do you want me to take him to Durango?”
His father paused, braced his hands against the edge of the sink and stared down a moment. “No, Luke,” he said calmly, and turned his head to look at his son. “I don’t want you to take him anywhere. What I want is for you to go back to Denver. I want you to go back to your life. You can’t fix things here. And I don’t want us to feel like a burden to you.”
A tiny but sharp twinge of guilt flashed hot through Luke. He looked at the back of Leo’s head, just visible over the back of his chair. “You’re not a burden.” He said it without thinking, just as he’d said it many times before. Families weren’t burdens. Families were the most important things in the world. They had each other’s back. Okay, usually Luke had theirs, but still.
“Yeah, we are,” his father said firmly. He turned fully around from the sink, folded his arms across his big chest and stared at Luke as if he was silently daring him to deny it. “You may not say it right to my face, but everything about you says that we are a burden.”
“What are you talking about?” Luke demanded. He’d been so careful not let anything like that show—
“You know what I’m talking about. All your life, you’ve had to come home and save the day. When you were in high school, you missed the state title because we had cows stuck up at eleven thousand feet dropping from altitude sickness. Ernest and Leo and I couldn’t get them all down by ourselves. We needed you. You had to drop out of college for a time when Leo got sick because God knows your mother and I couldn’t deal with it. And then there wasn’t any money to put you back in, so you had to get a job on top of your studies. Then your mother got sick, and here you came again, to clean up after me and make sure Leo was cared for. I was useless, I know it. Those are just the big moments that come to mind, but there have been so many other times in between that I can’t even count them anymore. I just know that you have always been the one who had to uproot your life, leave your dreams and ambitions behind to take care of us. And the toll that’s taken on you is beginning to show.”
“I haven’t complained,” Luke said defensively.
“Maybe you should have,” his dad said stubbornly. “Think about it, son. Because of us, it took you six years to finish your degree—a degree I couldn’t even help you with. And now, you’ve started a business, you’re working on your MBA, but here you had to come again, and it’s in the tone of your voice, the way you carry yourself. We’re a burden and it’s starting to show on you. So I want you to go on home. I can get Leo to Durango. Patti will come around and help when I need her.”
“Maybe you see yourself as a burden, but I never said that,” Luke snapped.
His father sighed wearily and stood a moment as if he wasn’t sure what to say. But then he walked to where Luke stood, put both hands on Luke’s shoulders and said softly, “Look here, Luke, I don’t need you here. Now don’t get me wrong, son—I love you and I want to see you. But I don’t want to see the resentment grow any more than it has. I don’t need you to come down here and save the day.”
Luke was stunned. His father squeezed his shoulders then moved back to the sink. As Luke watched, his dad found the bowl he was looking for in the sink and turned on the water, squirted dish soap into it, and began to scrub it down.
Luke was hardly aware that he had turned around and had walked into the living room. He found himself staring out the window, his mind whirling through all the times he’d dropped everything to come home to save the day as his father had said. Yes, Luke was angry. And he would have been a whole lot angrier had it not been for one thought: His father was right.
He did resent it.
It wasn’t that Luke didn’t love his family—God no, he loved them more than anything in this world. The resentment had more to do with what he’d missed because of them, with the fact that so much had befallen them and yet he remained unscathed. He resented that his aunt had called him while he was on a date, and he resented himself for having the balls to resent her for it. But mostly, mostly he resented the hell out of the fact that his family had been steadily disintegrating for the last ten years and the universe would not let up.