As he crossed the hallway, dad grabbed his shoulder.
Patrick winced and tried to pull away. What had he done now?
But dad didn’t box his ears or anything. He pulled him in against his oil and beer smelling shirt and mumbled something in his hair.
“What?” Patrick said.
“Nothing, buddy. Don’t look so worried. You’re my little guy, you know that, right?”
The only possible answer was yes.
Dad let him go. “Go read. It’s fine.”
Too surprised at this change of heart to answer, Patrick ran up the stairs to get to his book. He didn’t want to waste any more good reading time.
*
Still reverberating from an unexpected divorce, Patrick returned to the lake house after his parents died. He just wanted to clear out some personal items and sell up the rest. Uncle Roddy and his family had dropped out of sight, and Patrick hadn’t been able to locate his one cousin, Bee, Uncle Joe’s daughter. The others had died before his dad.
He roamed through the emptying rooms as he triaged pieces for the bonfire or the yard sale, missing, strangely enough, the rowdy brothers and their fights. Six of them, full of vim and vigor, and now he was the only one of the next generation. And his own kids hadn’t been allowed to come. His ex stuck to a rigid schedule of once a month, which the overly righteous judge had agreed to. He’d begged Allyson to lighten up just this once; they could see the old lake house, it had been in the family for generations…but no. No kids. Just him. Thirty-seven and counting.
He ran his hand over the old-fashioned wainscoting in the hallway. With his mother’s rugs and knickknacks gone, it had regained some of its former grandeur. Those black and white tiles sure had been nice to glide on.
The Shaker sidetable was missing, like many of the old-looking pieces of furniture he remembered. His mother had never liked them – had she been selling them off over the years? Maybe it was in the shed.
The shed yielded up more burnable junk, but no sidetable. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, he’d never thought about the thing in all those years.
He worked until late in the afternoon. The burnable pile was getting too high to toss more stuff on, but it seemed a waste of a good fire to light it by day. He loaded the sellable pieces into the truck. Driving through miles of bare trees, he rolled into the sleepy town, emptier than before, with more closed-up stores than he remembered. The antique cum junk cum loved-clothing store was still open.
Craig, the owner, still shock-haired although it had gone white, plucked his lower lip. “Some nice things in there, Paddy, but business isn’t doing so great. Can’t offer you much for it. How about a trade?”
Patrick laughed. “For what? I can’t take stuff with me, I’m flying home after I sell this truck.”
“I’ll take the truck,” Craig said. “Have a browse in my store. I’ll give you more money’s worth in trade than I can offer in cash.”
God, that was sad. When he was a kid, it had felt like a happy, prosperous town, full of smiling people, so different from the grey frowns of Chicago townhouses.
“Okay,” he said and followed Craig into the store.
And there it was. Amidst a jumble of incomplete china sets, stacked plastic chairs, football trophies, black and white TVs, art deco radio sets, mysterious chrome rods and other dusty, unappealing objects, stood the Shaker sidetable. Shinier, the wonky forepaw fixed with a pale synthetic, like a pony with a white fetlock. But it had somehow become prettier now, since Allyson had taught him about Shaker furniture in the intervening years.
“Where did you get that?”
“That’s my white elephant. I keep having to buy it back because people complain about things disappearing and appearing in it.” Craig looked as if he wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Huh. My parents used to own it, I think. Did my mom sell you this? “
“Before my time, I guess. You want it back? I’d be willing to include it in the trade,” Craig said, a shade too eager.
Patrick scratched his head. Did he want the damn thing back? He didn’t have any particularly important memories of it. He’d lost some kind of toy to it, which had sucked. Still.
He opened the left drawer.
And closed his hand possessively around Leatherhead. It couldn’t be. But his hand knew it was the one he lost and didn’t intend to let go. There was more in the drawer besides the figurine: a bunch of keys, a lighter, some change.
Patrick lifted the key label with his other hand. 3789 Wichita Rd., it said in his grandfather’s shaky writing. It couldn’t be. But here they were, all the objects that his dad and his uncles had tossed into the left drawer. He even smelled pine needles and rum. Christmas smells.
He put Leatherhead in his pocket, encountering something else in there. He fished it out. A broken cell phone from his daughter Hollis, forgotten in this ancient waxed coat, which he hardly ever used in the city.
He tossed it in the right drawer.
Right drawer goes back thirty years, left drawer goes forward thirty years, he mumbled to himself.
“You want it?” Craig asked.
Patrick startled. He’d forgotten all about the man and the stuff in his truck, the trade. But first he had to do something. Alone.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. You get started getting my stuff in here, I just need to do something.”
Craig went.
He and his father had never seen eye to eye; he hadn’t gone home more than once a year, if that, since college, and avoided talking to the old man as much as he could.
But the pain of separation from his own kids had made him wise to distant dads. They had feelings. Fathers did love, even if they sometimes couldn’t show it much.
Patrick found a business card in his wallet, the one screaming in shonky purple characters: Associate Professor, Dept. Of English Literature, Northwestern.
“Dad, I love you,” he wrote on the front. “From your son Patrick, December 2016.”
