Asshole.

“Jake, you remember the time your father took you hunting?”

Jake forks in more spaghetti, but his eyes look down. The memory, I realize, is not a happy one.

“Mm-hmm,” he hums, still chewing.

I wish Nick were here and hate myself for wishing it. He’s my son, after all. Even if I’m flawed, or uncertain at times, I love him more than anything. Love him more than I ever thought was possible.

What really stirs my guts, what makes me reach for another cigarette to drive away this feeling of worthlessness, is knowing Jake wishes the same thing I do.

That his father was here.

THE YEAR BEFORE HE DIED, when I was around eight years old, I guess, my dad and I went on a trip. Just the two of us.

We drove for what felt like days, but in hindsight I realize it was only about eight hours. Sundown to sunup. Across the state line. I slept some, but excitement kept me awake.

He told me we’d be hunting.

My father didn’t like sleeping away from home. He had the basement in our house, and a root cellar at the large cabin we owned deep in the woods. Both had coffins.

“But this is a special trip,” he said. “And the car will do just fine.”

We have a big truck. A Suburban. That night, we parked it in an underground parking lot. The back seats are always folded down, the windows tinted, so we slept in the rear. Me in a sleeping bag, my father on the thin carpet, on his back, hands folded neatly over his stomach.

I watched him for a while, his handsome face, his thick black hair. He turned and saw me, smiled. His eyes, ice-blue like mine, danced. “Go to sleep, Jake.”

I closed my eyes and slept the rest of the day.

When he woke me, I was hungry and had to pee, and told him as much. He laughed and said he knew a place where both problems could be solved.

We went up the stairs to the street. There were shops and restaurants, people walking, cars rolling past. It was dark, of course, but not late.

He pointed to a diner a block away. The windows were bright white, and people were seated in red booths. Waitstaff bustled. My stomach grumbled and he took my hand as we crossed the street.

I used the diner’s bathroom, washed my hands, and returned to see my father chatting up a waitress. I knew he was handsome, my dad, and women were always interested in him. My mother was always teasing him about how women “swooned as he passed them by.”

He ordered me a cheeseburger and fries and watched while I ate. He pretended to sip a cup of coffee, lifting the porcelain cup to his lips every few minutes and nodding at me over the rim as I talked about school, toys, and superheroes.

When I was finished and we waited on the bill, he leaned across the table and took my hands in his. “You ready?”

WE SAT ON A COLD bench and watched people go by.

“Someone alone, obviously.”

He had an arm around my shoulders, which felt nice because my teeth were chattering from the cold. It didn’t affect him, of course. Weather, I mean. One more neat trick that didn’t make its way down the genetic ladder.

Like I said, I’m not a vampire. Nor do I have vampire qualities. I love the sun. I eat normal food. And I don’t drink blood.

The only trait I did inherit from my father is the way I sleep.

I can’t sleep in a bed.

I mean, I can nap anywhere. Floor. Bed. Couch. Dining room chair.

But to sleep? Like, really recharge? I need to be in a coffin. Just like my old man.

My mother thinks it’s psychological, but Dad always disagreed.

“We are bonded to the earth,” he’d say, looking at me with pride. “It’s where we draw our strength, from what lies in the dark beneath our cities. We live in the place where flesh meets soil.”

When I was a baby, crying at night like babies do, he’d come get me from my crib (Father being awake, of course) and bring me down into the basement. Into his coffin.

The second the lid closed my crying would stop. I’d nestle into him, sleep until dawn as he lied awake, sacrificing his nights for me.

After I’d been around a few months, the crib was kept purely for show, in case we had company or if Mom’s family was visiting. Later, my nursery became a bedroom with a bed that was never slept in. The sheets never changed, as far as I know.

As I got older, and bigger, Father built me my own coffin. Laid the bottom with soil and silk, like his. There was talk of a full-size coffin down the road, but after Father died there was no need. His would do just fine.

It was around the time I turned twelve, a few years after his death, that we began to commune. His ashes, stored at my feet. His voice in my head. We’d talk in the dark. About my life, my challenges. About Mother. Those conversations are my best memories. An aching sorrow mixed with rushes of joy in each word that passed between us.

“That one,” he said, and I looked across the street. Between passing cars I saw a hunched man in a black raincoat hurrying down the sidewalk.

“Why him?” I asked as he stood, ready to trail the stranger. We followed from a distance at first, staying across the street, but when the guy turned at the next block, we crossed over.

“I can tell by looking at him,” Father said, leaping gracefully onto the opposite curb, me all but running to catch up. “I can tell how alone he is. How pathetic and sad. That man is wasted life. Wasted flesh.”

“Wasted flesh,” I repeated sagely, watching the back of that raincoat, now only a few yards ahead.

Later, in the man’s living room, we sat by his dying body.

We’d come in through the window after climbing four stories. Me clutching Father’s shoulders while he stuck to the wall like a spider, bared fingers and the toes of leather shoes pressed into the sheer brick wall.

“I don’t know how much of me is inside you,” he said as we sat around the body, as if the unconcscious man were a campfire. He began loosening the shirt collar around the man’s neck, removed the tie, the eyeglasses. “And we may not know for some time, until you’re fully a man.”

He quickly slid a pointed fingernail along the flesh on the bared neck. Blood spilled as if he’d turned on a faucet. “But I still think it’s correct to teach the basics. I want you to drink and tell me what you feel.”

Hesitant, because I’d never drank blood before, but also exhilarated, I lowered my face to the still-warm flesh and put my lips around the pumping artery. Salty blood filled my mouth and I reflexively swallowed, drinking it down like tepid milk.

After three swallows, I pushed back, gasping for breath, coughing out the last mouthful in a spray, soaking my chin. My father’s eyes were on me, studying my reaction closely.

I wiped my chin gracelessly with a coat sleeve, sat back on my elbows. “I don’t feel much,” I said, still panting. Which wasn’t exactly true.

What I really felt? Nausea. That man’s blood sat in my belly like a ball of lead, and my insides gurgled in a way that made me think I might puke it all back out again.