than at his own reflection in the mirror. Pa had wanted a better life too, but as soon as second Ma walked out, bound for Detroit with some man Pete had only seen once, and that by accident, the old man had given up hoping for a future. He had given up, period. The woman he’d loved had left him here with a son that wasn’t of his own blood, a dying farm, and plenty of time to sit and drink and wonder why she’d given up on them.
“I reckon I am,” his father said, in such a low voice that Pete had to strain to hear it, and even then he had to struggle to remember the question his father was answering. His thoughts had set him adrift from their conversation and now he had to search quickly for the thread. He found it as he watched the old man raise the bottle of whiskey and study the remaining dregs.
Pa was afraid, and as it was a state Pete seldom, if ever, saw in him, it had the effect of galvanizing his own discomfort. He stood, shoving the chair back with his knees, and came around the table to stand beside his father. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
The old man lowered the bottle, but kept his eyes on it as he spoke. “I don’t reckon I did much of a job by you,” he said. “Don’t reckon I could even if I tried. My own Pa wasn’t much of a man neither, and never treated me right, though I don’t expect that’s much of an excuse.”
Hearing his father talk of such things disturbed Pete more than the odd silence and the sudden sense that their house had shrunk around them, but he shrugged and forced a smile.
“S’okay, Pa. Don’t nobody know the right way to do everythin’.”
His father considered this. “Maybe that’s true, but there ain’t no excuse for not tryin’.”
“You did try,” Pete told him. “You looked after me pretty good. I ain’t wantin’ for nothin’.”
A small bitter smile twisted his father’s lips. “You wantin’ for plenty, boy. Some of that I can’t do nothin’ about. Some, I reckon I could’ve fixed.”
Pete frowned. “Well…it ain’t too late, Pa. We got time.”
At that, the weak smile vanished from his father’s face. His eyes widened as he glanced from the bottle back to the door. “That’s the trouble, son. I got a feelin’ we don’t.”
He had promised himself he wouldn’t scare the boy, but after a good deal of thought and a great deal of whiskey, Jack had realized there was no way around it. If the Merrill clan were coming, better Pete know, so he would at least have the chance to run. He set the now empty bottle down between his chair and the fire, and let his hands rest on the polished walnut stock of the rifle. He’d kept the weapon in pretty good shape all these years, better shape than anything else, his son included. Jack was truly sorry for that and he’d meant what he’d told the boy. There was so much else he wanted to say too before time ran out, but no matter what way he came at it, the words wouldn’t come. Even now, with the hounds of hell thundering a path to their door, he couldn’t tell his boy he loved him. And maybe that was because he didn’t. There was no doubt that he cared for Pete, and worried after him constantly, but years of disappointment, self-loathing, and resentment for the child he secretly held accountable for the only two women he’d ever loved abandoning him, didn’t allow those seeds to blossom into a full flower of adoration. In truth, he’d never wanted a kid, and had been doing just fine avoiding the whole problem until he’d met Annabelle, who been nurturing one in her womb. Even so, he’d figured he’d adapt just fine to the role of parent, even if she ended up doing most of the raising. But then she went and died on him soon as that child drew its first breath. For almost fifteen years he wallowed in self-pity and thoughts of up-and-leaving, reasoning that someone would find the kid and take him in, and to hell with whatever they thought of him for deserting it. He was no monster, and it would have been a bald-faced lie if he’d ever claimed he hadn’t taken a shine to the kid. But though on paper it would always say Jack Lowell was a father, he knew in his heart he wasn’t equipped to be one. Someday, he’d known, that kid would wake up and be alone. It would kill him to do it, but staying would be worse for them both.
Then he spotted Louise Daltry in town, being guided around Jo’s Diner in preparation for her first day’s work. Aside from waylaid vacationers, or guys from the forestry department, strangers were rare in Elkwood, so the arrival of Ms. Daltry, come all the way from Mobile and an abusive husband, was the talk of the place that whole summer. But from the moment Jack set eyes on her caramel-colored skin, high cheekbones, swept-back hair and soft lips, all of which were presided over by a pair of golden-brown eyes that paralyzed him whenever they strayed to his booth, he knew he’d never be concerned with her past. Only her future interested him, and in particular, whether or not she’d ever in a million years consider sharing it with him.
He smiled, just a little, and rubbed a calloused thumb over the rifle’s trigger guard.
“Who’s comin’, Pa?”
The best day he could remember in his sixty-odd unremarkable years started as the worst. He’d been hungover, his head stuffed with cotton. The sour taste in his mouth had resisted his attempts to wash it away with toothpaste, then coffee, and finally a breakfast of toast, egg, bacon and grits down at Jo’s. Even the presence of Louise, dressed as she was in an immaculate white blouse and blue jeans, looking as beautiful as he’d ever seen her, her skin radiant in the same morning light that skewered his eyes through the slats in the blinds of the diner’s plate glass window, couldn’t raise his spirits. He’d argued with the boy the night before, over what he couldn’t remember, but he remembered striking him, and more than once, so on that day, while the smells of fat and bacon on the griddle turned his stomach and the whiskey hammered his brain, guilt gnawed at his guts.
“Someone went a few rounds with a bottle and lost,” Louise had said, surprising him out of his self-pity and he’d looked up to see her sitting across from him, arms crossed on the table, head cocked slightly, a small smile on her lips.
He’d nodded and given her the usual perfunctory responses, and when he’d forced himself to look at her, he was struck, not only by her beauty, but by the sense that she was peering past his facade, into the dark turbulent sea of his guilt, as if she recognized it because she’d swam in those waters more than once herself.
“Wanna talk about it?” she asked, and though he’d thanked her and shaken his head—
“The boy ain’t yours?” she asked when he was done.
“He were already in the oven when I met my wife,” he told her. “She never told me who the daddy was, and I guess it didn’t matter. He was long gone when I showed up.”
“Where’s she at now?”
“Dead. She died givin’ birth to ’im.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
That day had broken down some barrier between Jack and Louise he hadn’t realized existed. It had been more than just the protective bubble that surrounds each and every man and woman when in the company of people they have no reason to trust. He got the feeling Louise had seen something in him he hadn’t known was there, something that appealed to her. Though in hindsight, he thought maybe
“Pa, say somethin’…”
She’d loved him for a time, and they’d been happy, but if he was honest with himself now, he could admit that he knew from the moment she stepped foot into this house, and their lives, that she wasn’t going to stay. It wasn’t because she didn’t love them. She just wasn’t a homebody. After eleven years of living with a man who’d beaten her senseless with whatever object was close at hand whenever she dared sass him, she wasn’t willing to be owned again, or tied down to relationships that were just waiting to go sour. In walking out on that sonofabitch, she’d found her freedom, and though he’d sensed her restlessness right from the start, had known she would never stay, Jack had allowed himself to ignore the reality of it until it smacked him right in the face two years after the day she’d moved in.
