“You could go back now,” I said, hesitant to interrupt his story, to challenge him or reveal that I was losing sympathy.
“No. It’s been too long. I can’t.”
“What was her name?” I asked.
But he was silent, and then he told me that it was late, and said good night.
✴
AS I DROVE through the mountains, the windshield wipers barely kept up with the rain. I pulled into the gas station and parked next to the phone booth. The forecaster was announcing an unusual storm: a cold, blustery precipitation that would turn into sleet and freezing rain after midnight. I’d be home soon. I had driven to the UMass library for research, and only the mountain road remained. Classes had let out for finals, and I hadn’t talked to my father in a few days, but the night before, he’d left a message with my landlords: your father called.
I ran through the rain to the phone booth and dialed collect. The connection was bad, the static punctuated by loud clicking. The line rang. I waited for his accent, his quiet h’s and heavy r’s. When he answered, he sounded far away.
“Just a minute,” he said, and his end of the line went silent. Then he was back, his breath rasping. “I’ve changed my mind,” he told me straightaway. “I’ve decided I’m going to keep the store going. There’s no point in giving up now.”
I took a deep breath, not sure that I believed him. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“This winter will be tough,” he said, “but I’ve gone through worse.”
“That’s great. I was really worried about you.”
“You know, when I was little—” His voice broke, whatever assurance he’d had instantly gone. “Things weren’t good. I just want you to understand that.”
“What? Yes. I understand that.”
“I know I’ve made some mistakes, but I just want you to understand I’ve been angry for a long time. I keep thinking I’m not angry anymore, but then, you know, it doesn’t take much. It doesn’t take much, and I’m angry again. I was thinking about my uncle the other day. If I’d gone to live with him, I could have played hockey. I could have finished school. But my father needed me to work. And that was that. I was so angry. I remember, I saved every penny I had to buy a rusty pair of ice skates. But then I didn’t have a hockey stick. It was stupid.”
He tried to laugh but broke into a dry cough.
“When I was a young man,” he said, “I thought if I’d been born English, everything would be all right. We had nothing but our family and the church. I didn’t believe in the church, but I thought a family was the most important thing in life. I don’t know why I hated one and not the other.”
As he spoke, he paused to take long ragged breaths. “I should’ve hated both. I just used to think I’d have kids someday and everything would be different. But … but you’re a lot like me. I think that’s true, don’t you?”
“In some ways, maybe.”
“I think in a lot of ways. You used to be pretty serious about crime.”
“I just liked the stories,” I told him, suddenly exhausted, unsure of what to say.
“I want you to do things better than I did. I don’t want you to ruin your life. If it weren’t for you, I never would have talked about that stuff again. You could have been like me, but it’s not worth it.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“You don’t remember how you were. You would have.”
“But I won’t,” I told him.
“Okay. Well, don’t worry about me. I’ll deal with the store. I’ll deal with all that.”
“You’re not going to let it go?” I asked, knowing he would. My throat was suddenly tight, and my body ached, the way even the premonition of grief bruised, so that the injury would seem to have always been there, just beneath the skin.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ll deal with it.”
The connection crackled as lightning jarred the sky.
“Is there a storm out there?” he asked.
“It’s the first lightning I’ve seen in months. I doubt we’ll get much more.”
“You shouldn’t be on the phone. You might get shocked.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The rain began to fall harder.
“Do you want to call me back in a couple of days?”
“These next two weeks are going to be crazy. I have finals. We can talk for a while now.”
Raindrops pattered over the booth’s windows as headlights passed on the road.
“We could get a cabin up in Squamish,” he told me. “I meant it, what I said before. We could do a little fishing, and I could tell stories.”
“You know I can’t. I don’t even like to fish anymore.”
He spoke softly. “It was never about the fishing. It was about being in the mountains. It’s just nice to be on the rivers. Sometimes you don’t catch anything.”
“I know.”
“But you can’t take a little time off?”
“Not right now.”
The rain had become loud, sleet and the occasional hail rattling the panels of the booth. The line hissed and cut out, and when his voice returned, it echoed.
“Is the storm bad?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
“You know, if you’re ever going to write this stuff, you’d have to write it the way it was. I’d like that. It’s not that I’m proud of having been a criminal. I’m not… Crime wasn’t something I even wanted to do at first. I knew that if I did it, I’d survive…”
Thunder banged through the earth, and the line crackled again. He spoke so softly that I had to focus to hear him.
“When I gave up crime, fish was the only other thing I knew. I wanted to have a family.”
The wind slammed down, hail rattling off the top of the booth and drowning his words. Cars pulled off the road, hazard lights flashing. The line was breaking up, and he repeated something. Water streamed
