Page 74 of Before We Say Goodbye
Aunt Morgan held court in the living room, making people laugh amid the sadness. “Did I ever tell you about the time my husband drank a case of Budweiser and decided he was a matador? I didn’t find Jim till I came out the next morning to feed the cows. He was laid flat in the bullpen with a welt the size of a cantaloupe on his head.” She’d lost Jim—Otis’s uncle—years earlier and had found her way through it with remarkable grace.
Cam and Mike played football with several other kids. Rebecca had gotten pulled into a conversation with Otis’s one and only girlfriend from all those years ago.Mortifyingwasn’t a strong enough word to capture Otis’s cringey feeling. He made chitchat with many of the people he’d come to know in his five or six years living here. WhenOtis told them of his wine adventures, most of them had looked at him like he spoke an alien language.
A few literary types showed up, fellow journalists who had worked with Addison. They shared their sweet stories of Addison, and the theme Otis picked up was that his father had always been the first in and the last out. Never had they seen a man with a stronger work ethic.
Otis wasn’t sure what to make of it, but his mouth was dry, and he was worn out on conversation when he saw his mother disappearing up the stairs. He followed and found her pushing open the door to her bedroom.
“Mom?”
“I need a break, that’s all.” Her voice was brittle.
“Yeah, you and me both.”
“Come in.”
Stepping inside, he breathed in the familiar scent of his parents. Eloise sat on the end of the unmade bed and kicked off her heels, digging her toes into the rug. She’d aged so much, and Otis wondered where the time had gone. It seemed only yesterday that she’d squeezed him goodbye as he departed for California years ago.
Addison’s bedside table hosted a stack of books, all nonfiction, including his own. His Rolex rested on a small porcelain plate along with his gold wedding band. On his mother’s side, a Bible rested under the soft glow of a petite lamp.
Eloise patted the bed. “Sit with me.”
Otis sank into the soft mattress only inches from his mother. She attempted to say something, then let out a long sigh. “I hope you know how much he loved you.”
Of all the things she could have said, that was what she chose. “I suppose so. He had to, really.”
“He wasn’t good at showing it, dear.”
Otis chuckled at that, feeling his belly kick with the absolute truth of the statement.
She shook her head for a while, her mind clearly ablaze with ... what was it? Grief? Regret? Or perhaps simply the bewilderment of what the hell we were doing on this planet for this finite amount of time. That would be more in line with how Otis felt. What was the purpose of it all? His father had lived such an extraordinary life, had done so much, and had died at his desk doing what he loved.
For what, though? All that was left of him was a long trail of words and a closet full of suits and a Rolex and ring that no longer had a home.
“He wasn’t happy, Otis. That’s the truth of it. He wasn’t able to express how he felt for you, because he didn’t love himself.”
“I think he gave himself a hard time. Held himself to a high standard.”
“More like an impossible standard,” she corrected.
A need to defend his father came over him. “Yeah, well, he gave up a lot moving here. He gave up so much of his career to help Aunt Morgan after Jim passed.” Otis recalled the day they’d closed the door to their London apartment and climbed into a taxi to the airport. “He was a good man for doing that.”
“I made him do it.”
Otis’s head jolted. “What?”
Eloise paused, clearly wondering whether she wanted to say more. “I was about to leave your father, honey. I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, but a lesson could be learned. There’s something in the Till blood. He had it; his father had it. His grandfather. And you have it. This desperate love of—or is it a need for?—work. He couldn’t shake it, and it was tearing us up. He was barely home, and even when he was, he wasn’t. You’d beg him to play, to take you out to Hyde Park to kick the football. I’d suggest that he take me on a date. Maybe do something special for an anniversary. Sometimes he’d find the time, but mostly he worked. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s. The news always came first. He was a good man, your father, but he wasn’t a good father or husband, and he’d stopped taking care of himself thatlast year in London. He was down to one hundred and thirty pounds when we left.”
Otis swallowed back an eruption of confusion, not recalling such frailty on the trip to Montana. “He was a pretty good dad.”
“No, honey, he wasn’t. Not then. He tried, but he wasn’t. I was leaving him. I drew a line in the sand. Your uncle was sick, and I wanted to go back home. To get you away from what your dad was doing to himself. He relented, because he did love us. He wanted to be a better man than he was, but he held the move over my head till his last breath.”
His mother had obviously gotten some of this wrong. “Oh, c’mon, he was ... he did it for the family.”
The pitch of her voice rose. “Because I forced him. Always in the back of his mind, he wondered what could have been, what he might have accomplished back in London. Always in his head, he was living that alternate reality.”
“Thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have gotten married or had me?”
She stretched her feet out. “Or wondering why I couldn’t have just let him do his thing.”
