Page 87 of Plum

“So you just never got clean?”

My father’s eyes dim, like he’s taken back, and his gap-toothed smile is sad as hell. “Nah. I sobered up. I’d have done anything for your ma. She was—It don’t matter.” The smile’s gone. “When I came back, she was already with that guy. The one before Thomas Wade.”

I don’t remember another man. My father must see my confusion. “Bill? Or Brian? He owned a few gas stations. Your ma said he was gonna move you guys in with him. A safe neighborhood with a gate. She said he didn’t want no baby daddy drama. She asked could I provide what he could? Back then, I didn’t need an excuse to fall off the wagon, but I took that as one.”

The weight of all this adds to what just happened with Jo-Beth, bears down, an oppressive mix of regret and rage.

“I don’t remember this.”

My father grinds his cigarette out in a hubcap ashtray. “I guess it didn’t pan out.”

“You don’t seem angry.”

“At myself. Plenty. I couldn’t give you or your ma what you needed. That eats at me. Always has. I guess seein’ you in the papers, winnin’ the science fair and buyin’ this company or that. I tell myself it ended up for the best. I know it’s a cop out, but still.”

“What do you mean the science fair?” I was in the paper when I was in the eighth grade. I’d been on a robotics team that went to finals in China.

“You made a robot or something. It sorted shit.”

“You saw that in the paper?”

“I think Grinder came across it. Or his old lady Ernestine.”

“They knew about me?”

“Shit. Everyone knows about you. They’ll be talkin’ even more now they know you can throw down like your old man.” He coughs and clams up as he realizes what he called himself.

I don’t have the bandwidth to think about what this man is to me. I’m trying to wrap my brain around this alternate history I never suspected was happening, a timeline when my father wasn’t shooting up in a heroin den, lost to the world, but bragging about me to his friends and following me in the papers.

The loss rolls over me in a wave, and blame follows in its wake.

“You don’t blame my mother?”

My father shakes his head. “She needed me to be a man, and I failed. I kept tryin’ to explain to her, but words ain’t shit. I didn’t get that back then. I needed to do somethin’, but I kept tryin’ to talk, and for your ma, that was all hot air.”

That brings my mind back to Jo-Beth, the woman I’ve let down. Maybe that’s why I’m not raging at this man. My own failure’s too fresh.

“There’s nothing I can say to Jo-Beth.”

“Maybe not.”

It’s so strange, talking about women in a garage with a virtual stranger who has my face and voice, the smell of oil and smoke in the cold air, the silence punctuated by clanging from the mechanic bay.

“What can I do?” I don’t know why I’m asking him. Maybe because he’s got the tragic, worn air of a wise man. Or because he seems to have made peace with his own mistakes. “I’m not walking away. What do I do?”

“What does she need?”

Care. Gentleness. Patience. She needs me to be a better man than I am.

“Shit. I don’t know. She needs her living room floor fixed.”

“Floor boards coming up?”

“No. It’s sagging.”

“Someone fuck with the joist?”

“Not that I can tell. I think at some point, there was insect damage.”

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