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Setting my bag inside, Brantley and I follow him out the door when he hands the both of us a rifle. I’ll never pull the trigger, but I won’t tell him that. “How’re the boys and Madison?”
“They’re good.” I get inside his truck and close the door while Brantley gets in the back. “Callan’s playing soccer and doing great in school. Noah runs around the house with a cape screaming he’s Wolverine. Typical shit.”
Did you notice I didn’t say anything about Madison?
My dad does too and quirks an eyebrow at me but lets it go.
“So what about you and what’s her name?” I say what’s her name because I honestly don’t know who his ex-wife was or is or if he has a new one or not. Hell, knowing him he might marry Leather Lady next week and I wouldn’t know about it until he tells me they’re getting a divorce.
“Laura?”
I stare out the window. “Sure.”
“Well let’s see, she took about twenty-five thousand in the divorce and got my house in Palm Springs.”
“You have a house in Palm Springs?”
“Had. Past tense.” He pulls down a gravel road I’m sure we shouldn’t be on. Mostly because it said no trespassing, but my dad thinks those kind of rules don’t apply to him. I'm serious. Speed limits, traffic laws, property boundaries, he pays no mind to any of them ever. I doubt he even has a valid driver’s license anymore.
You’re surprised he owns a hotel and lives in a mansion, aren’t you?
Well when I say he doesn’t abide by certain rules, he’s incredibly business savvy, and I’m thankful I inherited that from him.
“Dad, it says no trespassing back there.”
He looks over his shoulder. “I didn’t see it.” And then he punches my shoulder. “I noticed you avoided my question about Madison. What’s going on?”
Brantley goes to say something in the backseat but I take the butt end of the rifle and smack him lightly in the head, hoping he shuts the fuck up.
Sighing, I stare out ahead of me at the barren desert “no trespassing” land. “She filed for divorce. For two months I tried to get her to fall back in love with me and get her to see it was a mistake, but she didn’t see it that way. I really thought I’d be able to fix it. I never wanted the boys to go through what I did… the weekend dad.” I laugh sarcastically. “Though you weren’t around much.”
Dad shrugs. “I know I wasn’t. I did a pretty shitty job as a father.”
We agree on that much. “You did.” It may sound like I’m being a total shit to my dad, but things were pretty bad between us for a number of years, but since then we’ve gotten closer.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this. It’s tough. I should know since I’ve been through it four times.”
I know he’s trying to make me feel better about it, but the comment only pisses me off. “Why did you get married that many times? I don’t get it. Why’d you always have to be in a relationship?” I ask this, but what I really mean is why wasn’t I good enough.
I’m my dad’s only child. That he knows about. I’m sure there are others, but he’s not aware of any that I know of. But here’s the thing. In all those marriages, he went from one to the next and I was never part of their lives together until I was fifteen and I had to be when my mother died and I had nowhere else to go. I lived with him in Boulder City from fifteen to eighteen and moved out the day I graduated. In all that time, four years, he had two different wives and six different girlfriends. It’s amazing I turned out so damn good because the example set by him was horrible.
“I know you think it was something you did, but it wasn’t,” he finally says. “It was never about you, or your mom. I’ll never love another woman the way I loved Evelyn.” By the way, Evelyn is my mother. “I fucked up. Plain and simple, and I never planned on being married that many times. Truth is, I don’t like being alone.”
“You weren’t alone. You had me.”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” he admits. “Don’t be like me. Be there for your boys. Put them before everything else because you never know when you’re going to need them. I was a horrible father. Don’t be like me.”
I’m not a hugger. I’ve never been one. My father? He likes to hug, and I’m not sure why that is. So he pulls me into a one-armed hug and jerks the steering wheel in the process. “Let’s go hunt some pigs.”
That’s if we make it there alive because when he jerks the steering wheel we end up in a ditch and then catapult over it into the desert where he announces, “Perfect spot.”
Crazy bastard.
I said I’d explain my distaste for cats later, right?
It’s later.
Here’s a story for you. I’ve never been into hunting. I once shot my neighbor’s cat with a BB gun in the back. Not my best decision but I was six, and it seemed like a good idea because the fucking cat was an asshole. And I was six, who gives a six-year-old a BB gun? Mike Cooper does.