That no-good foreign devil had tired of America and was yearning for her motherland. Turns out Femke was also fucking another European on the side, a visiting professor from Amsterdam who specializes in bullshit global warming theories and breaking up marriages.
“You let her take your daughter out of the country?” I asked my son, because that was not good. Things got complicated once you were out of the United States, and I imagined fighting an international custody battle would be much easier if you actually had possession of the child here in the USA.
“She just took Ella,” my son said, his eyes welling up. “I woke up last week, and they were both gone. Just like that.”
Kidnapping.
Hank went on to say that he had never done anything wrong; he had never been mean to his wife, had done everything she had asked, had bought the house she wanted in her preferred neighborhood, the car she wanted, a wardrobe they couldn’t afford—gave her everything she asked for, allowed her to send Ella to the private Friends school Femke had picked out, which was when I interrupted.
I told him his defense, outlined his entire problem. Women tire of men who give them anything and everything they want. They may think they like their men castrated, but every woman has needs, and it takes a wild stallion to satisfy. A tamed, broken, ball-less stud is no stud at all.
This man-to-man got Hank to cease crying for a second, long enough to call me crude and sexist. He couldn’t resist bringing up his mother too.
I pitied my son, and I blamed myself for his troubles. Maybe I should have been harder on him. Maybe I should have made him play football when he was in high school instead of allowing him to spend so much time painting, like his mother used to do.
Jessica taught Hank how to sketch and paint just as soon as he could walk. They spent years together at the easel she set up in his bedroom. Hand over hand, Jessica tried to pass on her gifts to our son. And he was a good pupil. You have to give him that. He would do anything and everything my wife told him to do. And they painted brilliant pictures together, hand over hand—but the genius vanished from the canvas and paper whenever Jessica took her hand off Hank’s. He knew he was talentless even when he was in elementary school, but he faked it for fifteen more years, even after his mother was gone. You have to admire his determination, if nothing else. Finally he admitted he didn’t have his mother’s gift, became an art dealer, and married a foreigner.
“It’s funny,” he said, as we sat in my hospital room. “I tried to do the opposite of everything you did, Dad, and yet here we are, both alone.”
So I said, “We need to go to Amsterdam and get Ella back. I have some contacts who can get us guns once we’re in country, and—”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Don’t you want Ella back?”
“Of course I do,” he said, “but this isn’t the sixties, and we’re not in the Vietnam jungle. I don’t solve my problems with violence! Most people don’t.”
My son makes asinine statements like this every single day, while men all over the globe kill and kill without mercy. Does Hank not even watch the fucking news? Does he not realize he’s free to spout all of the stupid, misinformed, unchallenged civilian rhetoric he constantly promotes because we have the biggest and best military in the world, and we have always killed our enemies? Every day. Funded by our tax dollars, by the way, which my son pays just like everyone else. Could he really be so fucking naive? Without the military we’d be speaking German or Russian or maybe even Japanese right now. Does my son have any idea what a Nazi or Communist regime would have done to Flower Power hand-holders like him?
Hank went over to the window and continued his sniffling. It was strange how much I pitied him. If he weren’t mine, I probably would have despised Hank Granger, but he was the closest I’d ever get to producing an heir, and so my emotions continued to betray me.
“She’s gone on hunger strike,” he said, and I could tell he was happy about this fact by the way his voice lifted.
“Ella?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Ella was seven years old at the time. The body needs vitamins and fuel at that age so it can grow properly, and so I expressed concern, which prompted my son to raise his voice again, saying he knew that and so did Femke, and that’s why she was putting Ella on a plane back to Philadelphia immediately. So all of the boohooing was for nothing.
And that’s just the sort of mother my daughter-in-law is. Her global-warming-professor sex romp through Europe trumped her maternal duties. Her husband’s father was fighting for his life after brain surgery, and she’s off fucking some overeducated Dutch weatherman. Part of me was happy, I admit, just to be rid of her, because there was no way she’d be coming back. Even Hank knew it. Or so we thought.
“I’d ask where I went wrong if I didn’t already know your answer would be horribly offensive,” Hank said.
I just nodded. There was nothing that needed saying anyway at that point. The facts spoke loudly enough. I was sorry for my son’s pain, but I couldn’t help thinking he had brought it on himself by picking a woman who was bound to betray him at the first sign of trouble or even boredom. I sniffed her out more than a decade ago. I didn’t need to tell Hank I was right—he now knew. The kicker was, he hated me for being right all along because it made him doubt himself, mistrust his instincts and his rosy dumb-civilian worldview.
The next time Hank visited my hospital room, Ella joined him. She gave me a big hug and a kiss right away, which was good medicine, let me tell you—it’d been so many months since I last saw her. I told her I missed her like crazy, and she said she missed me “crazier,” which produced a big-time fucking smile on my face.
Ella had lost a little weight. Her arms were a tiny bit thinner and her cheekbones were a little more prominent, and that made me want to put a bullet between her selfish mother’s eyes, but I managed to keep those feelings to myself as Ella told me all about her solo trip across the Atlantic Ocean. She had sat next to a nice older lady—no doubt American—who shared her mints and even let Ella have the window when she had been assigned the aisle.
What type of mother puts her seven-year-old daughter on an international flight without adult supervision?
Ella was sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, holding my hand, telling me about the canals in Amsterdam, when she reached out and touched the bandage on my head. I asked if she wanted to see my scar, telling her the doctors had stapled it shut and you could still see the staples.
My pussy son protested, but I peeled the bandage off anyway.
“Whoa,” she said, lifting her little eyebrows. And then she asked if I knew about her mother’s new boyfriend.