He stands there for a second before he decides to go outside. Completely reasonable reaction. Like I said, he’s a real gentleman. He believes in an ordered universe. If he has a fault, that’s it, his belief in the system. He’s never in his life raised his voice to an elder. Even if my father was wailing away on Trace, Tad would stand aside and swallow it. That’s why Southerners are so goddamn passive-aggressive, you know. They have to stand there and swallow it because of the social order, the fucking system. It’s bigger than all of them put together. And the system says fathers over daughters and old over young and white over Black, and god almighty over everyone. So for Tad to walk across the room is a display of almost heroic proportions. He’s registered his disapproval of his own father-in-law. You see? And for him to actually leave the room, to walk out of the house entirely—you have no idea unless you’ve met this guy. He’s broken with the system. He’s taken the only yardstick he has for measuring his self-worth and he’s snapped it over his knee. Snapped it just like that, the sense of duty to his family and elders, generations of tradition.
And does my father even notice? Of course not. Doesn’t even notice because he’s very calmly and logically working on Bron, dissecting her, working his appeal to her as a mother. You know him. You know that when Counselor Caldwell shows up there’re going to be bloody chunks on the floor by the time he’s done. He’s going to get his way, hell or high water, he’s going to put the screws to you and by god you’ll submit or die. He’s appealing to her childhood, her idyllic childhood in Santa Rosa—well, he doesn’t know about how idyllic it wasn’t. It never is, is it? Not with that much good cheer slathered all over everything. Her parents—her entire family—smell like candy apples. Complete con job.
My father listened to John’s address thinking that it was a deflection, too polished, a speech worked over in the dark reflection of tragedy. Blame must lie somewhere. Perhaps the son has every right to indict the father. After all, that’s the covenant of parenthood, isn’t it?
So it was Tad who got to him first, John said. He walked out the sliding door, and like the gentleman he is, closes it behind him. Then he jumped in the pool. I saw him jump. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. He’d finally cracked up, you know? Captain America lost his marbles, and it was our family that did it.
I think Trace laughed. She was right to laugh. It was funny. She’s thinking he’d done it for comic relief. And she and I walked over to the glass to see what he was going to do next, but he didn’t come up. And when he did, he comes out of the water with my son in his arms.
He brings half the pool with him. Like someone dropped a car in. He lays him down on the concrete and he starts to work on him. That’s the other part—Tad drove an ambulance for a couple of summers, so he knows what he’s doing.
You know, funny thing about Tad, John said. The next morning we’re all sitting in the living room and Tad looks at Beatrice—this is my other sister’s daughter, Fil’s daughter, she’s all of eight at the time, she’s in complete shock, she’s just old enough to understand what’s happened—and Tad looks at her and reaches out and takes her hand, and he says, Bea, it’s not your fault.
Tad thought he’d done some emotional calculus there that would help Bea out. He was thinking, Bea was the last person who was out by the pool with the boy, and even though that was an hour before, since she’d been out there with him, somehow she would think it was her responsibility, that her child’s mind might believe it was her fault for not watching over him. No one had asked her to babysit him. No one would have given her that responsibility. And if you could have seen her face—it obviously had never crossed her mind. She’d never thought for a second it was her fault. No one had. And now, oh boy, that kid’s face. Now it was her fault. She knows. She’s sharp as a razor. So all of a sudden now she’s bawling her eyes out, she’s wailing and screaming, and Tad’s looking around like he doesn’t get it—and it’s genuine. He really doesn’t get it. It’s not in him, that sadistic streak. That’s my father’s stock-in-trade, but it’s inconceivable to Tad. He was only trying to help. He’s sitting there, he’d been scouring his memory, trying to put together a timeline to explain how it happened, and he keeps getting hung up on one thing, that John and Bea had been splashing around on the pool steps together. And he thinks, Dear Lord, what if this kid thinks it’s her fault? One of those things that hits you like a bolt from the blue and leaps out of your mouth, because what if
