“Find people to talk to. Someone will know what happened to the kids who used to live there. I figure a few of them must still be alive, on the mainland if not around here. In a nursing home or something.”
“Sure. That’s an idea.” He didn’t sound convinced, though. There was an odd pause, and then he said, “So do you feel like you’re starting to get a better handle on who your grandpa was, being here?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess so. It’s just an island, you know?”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“What about you?”
“Me?” He shrugged. “I gave up trying to understand my father a long time ago.”
“That’s sad. Weren’t you interested?”
“Sure I was. Then, after a while, I wasn’t anymore.”
I could feel the conversation going in a direction I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, but I persisted anyway. “Why not?”
“When someone won’t let you in, eventually you stop knocking. Know what I mean?”
He hardly ever talked like this. Maybe it was the beer, or that we were so far from home, or maybe he’d decided I was finally old enough to hear this stuff. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want him to stop.
“But he was your dad. How could you just give up?”
“It wasn’t me who gave up!” he said a little too loudly, then looked down, embarrassed and swirled the beer in his glass. “It’s just that—the truth is, I think your grandpa didn’t know how to be a dad, but he felt like he had to be one anyway, because none of his brothers or sisters survived the war. So he dealt with it by being gone all the time—on hunting trips, business trips, you name it. And even when he was around, it was like he wasn’t.”
“Is this about that one Halloween?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know—from the picture.”
It was an old story, and it went like this: It was Halloween. My dad was four or five years old and had never been trick-or-treating, and Grandpa Portman had promised to take him when he got off work. My grandmother had bought my dad this ridiculous pink bunny costume, and he put it on and sat by the driveway waiting for Grandpa Portman to come home from five o’clock until nightfall, but he never did. Grandma was so mad that she took a picture of my dad crying in the street just so she could show my grandfather what a huge asshole he was. Needless to say, that picture has long been an object of legend among members of my family, and a great embarrassment to my father.
“It was a lot more than just one Halloween,” he grumbled. “Really, Jake, you were closer to him than I ever was. I don’t know—there was just something unspoken between the two of you.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Was he jealous of me?
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re my son, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hurt how?”
He paused. Outside the clouds shifted, the last rays of daylight throwing our shadows against the wall. I got a sick feeling in my stomach, like when your parents are about to tell you they’re splitting up, but you know it before they even open their mouths.
“I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find,” he said finally.
“You mean about the war?”
“No. Your grandpa kept those secrets because they were painful. I understood that. I mean about the traveling, him being gone all the time. What he was really doing. I think—your aunt and I both thought—that there was another woman. Maybe more than one.”
I let it hang between us for a moment. My face tingled strangely. “That’s crazy, Dad.”
“We found a letter once. It was from a woman whose name we didn’t know, addressed to your grandfather. I love you, I miss you, when are you coming back, that kind of thing. Seedy, lipstick-on-the-collar type stuff. I’ll never forget it.”
I felt a hot stab of shame, like somehow it was my own crime he was describing. And yet I couldn’t quite believe it.
“We tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Never found another one, either. Guess he was more careful after that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t look at my father.
“I’m sorry, Jake. This must be hard to hear. I know how much you worshipped him.” He reached out to squeeze my shoulder but I shrugged him off, then scraped back my chair and stood up.
“I don’t worship anyone.”
“Okay. I just ... I didn’t want you to be surprised, that’s all.”
I grabbed my jacket and slung it over my shoulder.
“What are you doing? Dinner’s on the way.”
“You’re wrong about him,” I said. “And I’m going to prove it.”
He sighed. It was a letting-go kind of sigh. “Okay. I hope you do.”