Page 27 of Bursting With Love
Jack laughed. “Not anymore.”
“Shit.” Pratt shook his head, and his mouth lifted to a crooked smile.
Jack felt a shift in Pratt’s attitude, and he was glad to see hints of a nicer guy beneath the sullen exterior. “It’s okay. I studied engineering, but I went into the military after college and ended up in the Special Forces.” That year, Jack had met the men who would become like brothers to him. And years later, after Linda’s death, he’d erased them from his life just as he’d abandoned his own family. He’d even removed their numbers from his cell phone. “You’re right about engineering school. It’s pretty serious stuff. So did you graduate?”
“Yeah,” Pratt said.
Jack could not reconcile the young man with the black tuque pulled down low over his forehead with the other eggheads he knew in college. Great men, but they were highly intelligent, and not one of them had a creative bone in their body. “So, why sculpting? Did you dislike the engineering field?”
Aiden pulled on Jack’s pants leg. “Excuse me, Jack, but what’s sculpting?”
“I’ll let Pratt answer that.”
“Well, it’s when you take something—like a hunk of metal or clay—and you reshape it until it looks like something else. Sometimes you have to use really hot fire, which is cool, and sometimes you can just use your hand or you use tools.” Pratt nodded. “Do you use Play-Doh?”
“Uh-huh,” Aiden said.
“That’s sculpting,” Pratt said.
“Cool. So I can be a survivor man and a sculptor.” Aiden beamed at his father.
Lou patted him on the head. “That’s right. You can do anything and everything you want, and if you need to learn how, we’ll find a teacher.”
Pratt sighed. “You probably shouldn’t tell him that, ’cause it’s not really true.”
“What’s not?” Lou asked.
“That he can do anything he wants to do.”
“I don’t understand. Of course he can. If you work hard enough, you can accomplish just about anything. Right, Jack?” Lou said.
Two days ago, Jack would have agreed with Pratt. His future looked like it was going to be one of a reclusive angry man with no hope for happiness. Now, as he looked back at Savannah and felt a fluttering in his chest, he felt a glimmer of hope that he might not be held hostage by that anger forever. It was the strangling guilt that he wasn’t as confident about.
“I think everyone should try as hard as they possibly can at anything they do in life. It doesn’t matter if you’re a garbage man or the president. Hard work pays off.” It had taken every ounce of Jack’s energy, his spirit, and his willpower to fall back from the public life he’d once lived and come to a place of solitude in order to suppress the guilt that surrounded Linda’s accident. He’d known the cost when he’d done it. As much as he wanted to disappear, it was difficult to turn his back on the people he loved. Now he wondered if he’d tried hard enough. When he told Savannah that before meeting her he’d finally been able to function like a normal human being, he was telling the truth. What he hadn’t realized then, and what was becoming clearer by the minute, was that he wasn’t functioning like a normal person at all. He’d been functioning as an angry, guilty man who was able to deal with only a modicum of civilian life—and functioning was stretching it. Maybe it’s time to deal with all this shit head-on.
“I’m not talking about the ability to do what you dream of. I’m talking about society’s perceived value of what you do and the expectations of others,” Pratt explained.
It sounded to Jack like he wasn’t the only one waxing introspective.
“I know all about societal norms.” Lou patted Aiden’s head. “Some people think we’re rebelling against the system by homeschooling, but we just want Aiden to have a chance to learn more than schools allow. We want him to find his own likes and dislikes, and we want to nurture them through schooling. But there are even some parents who think it’s weird, so they don’t offer play dates and such.”
Jack looked over at Lou, noticing the content look in his eyes and the way he carried himself without any false bravado—his shoulders a little hunched, his belly a little soft. Lou wore hemp shorts and a loose cotton T-shirt. He appeared very comfortable in his own skin. Something Jack envied. “So why do it?” Jack asked.
Lou put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Why live in the woods?”
Because I was too angry to live around people. “It makes me happy.”
