Page 62 of I Am Salvation

Dad looks out onto the bar. “You may not believe this, Diana, but this little dive was my second home for a time after I turned twenty-one.”

“Really?” I wrinkle my forehead. “Why?”

His gaze darkens slightly. “Let’s just say I needed an escape. Somewhere where no one knew my name.”

“But Dad…”

I think of the old Cheers reruns Mom and Dad like to watch, where the characters hang out at a local bar where “everybody knows your name.” Seems weird that my dad was going for the opposite.

“What?”

“I don’t get it. Why?”

He frowns. “Sometimes it helps to get a different perspective, honey. Back then, this was a haven for the melancholy. For the outcasts.”

“But that wasn’t you, Dad.”

He exhales sharply through his nose. “Wasn’t it? Maybe it was at the time. Anyway, I later joined the military, as you know, and not too long after I came home, I met your mother.”

“Okay,” I say as Lonnie pushes a glass of red wine in front of me. It’s in a lowball glass, not a wine glass. Strange. “Thanks.” I take a sip. It’s…not good. But then Dad warned me.

Why is he paying good money for this? Especially when we have Uncle Ryan’s wines at home for free?

Dad takes a sip of his bourbon and winces as he swallows. Then he lets out a breath. “Whew!”

“Good?” I say with sarcasm.

“Yeah, in its own way. Sometimes it’s what I need.”

I pretend to take another sip of the shitty Merlot. “Help me understand why I’m here, Dad.”

He sets his glass down. “When I was thirty-five years old, I found myself back here.”

“You met Mom when you were thirty-five.”

“Right. It was just after I met her. I needed something. I wasn’t sure what, but I found myself here, hoping I could figure it out. I was walking around this area, and I got mugged.”

I gasp.

He holds up a hand. “Obviously I lived. It wasn’t the first time I had been mugged. I often walked through the seedy area on the outskirts of the city at night, just waiting for some dumbass to try to jump me. Two times before that night I had been jumped, and two times before I had disarmed the mugger and beat the shit out of him. No one had ever called the cops on me.” He shrugs. “I didn’t care if they did. I was careful never to do any lasting damage. Plus, self-defense and all. The guy who mugged me here, though, I wanted to go back and finish the job with that one. I had to force myself not to go running back and pummel him to death.”

I swallow. “Dad…”

“I won’t lie to you, Dee. That night, I wanted to see that mugger dead. I could still feel the heat of his shitty breath on my neck. But I wasn’t crazy. I knew killing was wrong. I wasn’t a sociopath.”

I gulp down another sip of the wine, my nerves jumping. “Of course you weren’t.”

“I didn’t say that to convince you, honey,” Dad says. “I said it to myself at the time. To convince myself.”

I look away from my father. He had just returned from his military service at that time. He was bound to be a little screwed up. Still, I don’t like what I’m hearing.

“Anyway,” he continues, “it turns out I met a friendly old guy. His name was Mike, and he was sitting next to me at the bar. He asked if I had troubles. I told him he didn’t know the half of it.”

“But you’d just met Mom…”

“Right, I had. But I was dealing with some stuff. The military, seeing what I saw, can fuck a person up. This Mike was recently widowed, had worked hard in construction all his life. We were different as night and day. Anyway, I was pissed.”

“Well, sure. You got mugged.” I scan the musty bar. “What were you doing around here anyway?”

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