“You need to get out more,” she said. “You know I worry about you. You need to reconnect with your friends or make new ones or something. Do something you love again. You always just work. It’s not a way to live your life.”
When they were first together, every weekend, every day, seemed a celebration. Jonathan did things he loved with the people he loved – hunting, fishing, camping with thirty packs and fires and the sweet smell of marijuana lifting into the darkness. They began their relationship under those circumstances – laughter and joy and good times with good friends. But that dissolved away. Friends fall away, children and responsibilities take up time and drive wedges into relationships. The good times give way to those long, gray days of blandness. He supposed it was just life, the way things were meant to be, and accepted it as best he could. Mary felt differently. She tried to jog him out of his despair and laziness. She was probably the only wife in the world who was actively trying to push her husband out of the house to go mingle with his old buddies and hopefully rejuvenate that old spark of life in him. She had married a young, dynamic man who dreamed of being a writer someday, a Hemingway-like creature, who took the world as his hallowed hunting ground. What she had now was a thirty-eight-year-old man who seemed broken, and, unlike her patients at the hospital, there was no way to tell what was wrong or how to fix him. Instead, she could only watch as he descended further into whatever dark depression grew from within.
Jonathan knew all this. He knew what he had been and he knew what he’d become. None of this was what he’d intended when they first wed, but he was so far down this hole he didn’t know where to start, how to get back on track. He couldn’t give up on this life, this family – it was all he had. He knew it had all started that one night ten years ago, but the past remains unchangeable and so too, it seemed, did his future.
Something had to break eventually. Something would have to give.
Jonathan heard a pair of feet hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and Jacob appeared around the corner. The boy smiled, happily yelled, “Daddy!”, then ran and jumped into Jonathan’s arms. He caught the boy with a whoompf of exhalation and twisted his body in such a way to keep the boy’s knees from landing squarely in his crotch. Jonathan held his son for a moment, then patted him on the bottom and asked him how his day had been. Jacob was the spitting image of Jonathan as a seven-year-old boy – light brown hair, blue eyes, baby fat melting away, his face radiating innocence that tragically would be lost in time. Jacob was a quiet boy. An only child at this point, and, as far as Jonathan could tell, he would remain an only child for the foreseeable future.
When Mary first announced she was pregnant, he had feigned excitement as much as possible, but inside, he was afraid. Afraid that somehow the sins of his past would be transferred to his unborn son.
Jonathan ran his fingers through Jacob’s thick hair, feeling the contours of his scalp, thinking of how easily everything can be broken and praying to whatever god he could find that his one and only son be spared. There was still love inside him; his love raged at times, made him feel strong and even insane with it. But those surges of emotion did not last for long – they couldn’t. He looked in Jacob’s eyes for a moment before he placed the boy back on his feet and made for the television room.
“Try not to drink too much while you’re out,” Mary said.
He looked at her. She was still sitting at the table, her face resting in her hand as if she were bored, but looking up at him. “I still love you, you know,” she said. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Jacob and I need you here.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking back down at her. “I know.”
Chapter Two
Jonathan hadn’t been to the East Side Tavern in years. It was their old hangout, but he, Conner and Michael had put it behind them. Gene never had. He remained their regular, their best customer, even when he became increasingly pathetic. Jonathan stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes at a gas station. He didn’t normally smoke but wanted an excuse to step outside the bar, take in the night air and escape the Braddick brothers, if necessary. He wasn’t sure what they wanted or what they had in store for him, but he remained concerned. The more history people share, the more likely they are to do horrible things to each other.
The East Side Tavern was a single, stand-alone brick building beside a busy road that served draught beer to lonely men and women working through multiple divorces, and underage kids who could fake a decent enough ID to get a shrug from the bartender. Most people drove by and didn’t realize it was there. There were a couple of cars out front and more in the back when Jonathan arrived. He recognized Conner’s and Michael’s cars in the rear parking lot. It was dark now, and the only neon in the bar windows was the open sign, which occasionally shut off early on dull weekday nights like tonight. Inside was a dark hovel with old wooden tables and shadowy booths. The walls sparkled with liquor bottles. The televisions played endless loops of ESPN – old Red Sox games that seemed broadcast from the other side of time. Jonathan saw the bartender – a middle-aged woman with large, dyed blonde hair and a shirt revealing her flabby midriff – serving pitchers of cheap beer with red
