Page 60 of Drilled (Dad Bod Contracting 2)
I wince. “Yikes. That sounds awful.”
He nods. “It was shitty. They loved me, though, and I never doubted that. Dad took me to ball games and taught me to ride bikes and all that shit, and Mom fixed my scraped knees and walked me to school and packed my lunches. But once they started drinking and fighting with each other, I couldn’t deal, so I’d ride my bike to Grandma and Grandpa’s.” He taps the workbench. “I bought their house from them when they moved into the nursing home.”
I blink. “Wait…so this is your grandparents’ house? This is the same garage where your grandpa taught you carpentry?”
He nods. “Yep. I haven’t changed this garage at all, except to replace the siding, roof, and garage door. Inside is the same as when I was a kid. Different tools, maybe a bit cleaner and neater, but mostly the same.”
“Wow. That’s…that’s really cool, Franco. No wonder it feels so…” I shrug. “I don’t know. Homey. Nostalgic. I don’t know.”
He smiles. “Yeah, exactly. I’ve never had words for it either…at least not hokey ones.”
I can’t help the soft, tender expression I feel on my face. “So, what are the hokey ones?”
He hesitates. “I just…I feel Grandpa out here. He’s here. I feel his spirit, his presence, whatever you want to say. When I’m out here, it’s almost like I’m with him again.”
“You must have really loved him.”
He laughs. “Oh yeah. He was a real hard-ass, though. Don’t get me wrong. Expected perfection. Probably where I get it. He’d make me redo a piece if I got one small thing wrong. An entire week’s worth of work, he’d just trash it if I got it wrong. But it was out of love, wanting me to do my best and expect the best from myself.”
“So, your parents.”
He nods. “My parents…like I said, it was chaotic at best.” Another long pause. “On top of the fighting, they were unfaithful to each other pretty consistently all my life. I remember cutting class and taking the bus downtown with my buddies as a kid, and seeing Dad on the street with another woman. He saw me, I saw him, and he just shooed me away. I asked him later, and he said I’d forget it if I knew what was good for me. A few weeks later I got sick at school so I came home early…and Mom was in bed with one of the neighbors. She told me to just keep my mouth shut. Same thing would happen regularly on both sides, and I realized eventually that they both knew the other was cheating, and they just…went along with it.”
He goes back to carving. “And it’s not like they didn’t sleep with each other—the house I grew up in had real thin walls, you know? So I heard them going at it a lot, drunk and sober. So, between the drinking and the verbal and physical abuse and the infidelity, I just grew up with this distorted view of marriage. I knew other families weren’t like that, but all my buddies growing up went through divorces with very few exceptions, and it just messed them up. So I was like, is it better or worse for them to get divorced? I wasn’t sure, you know? Like, having two parents was cool, but they were fuckin’ nuts. Mom fucked half the neighborhood, and most likely the mailman and a few contractors, and Dad had a little black book full of names with little marks next to each one, four lines in a row and then a fifth line across them, you know? Numbering how many times he’d slept with each. My dad was a busy man, lemme tell you. I happened to see that little black book once. I couldn’t get over it.”
“That’s sad,” I say. “And gross.”
He nods. “I know.” He sighs. “I guess I come by it honestly. Although I’ve never kept track, and I don’t cheat.”
“That doesn’t seem like you, Franco,” I said hazarding a guess. “So your parents’ example soured you on monogamy and marriage to begin with, and then…”
He stops carving, holds the piece up; it’s a little rabbit, about three inches tall, sitting on its hind legs, head twisted as it looks to one side. It looks so lifelike I almost expect it to dart away off his hand and hop across the workbench, but he’s not quite finished yet.
He glances at me. “Then everything with James and Renée happened. You heard it from Jesse, or at least part of it, and some from Nina, it sounds like. The little scamp can’t keep her mouth shut to save her life, God love her.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Since you know the shape of it, I can tell you how it affected me. If you want more than that, you’ll have to ask James.”
