Page 22 of Secret Triplets, Second Chances

JAKE

I don’t even realize I’m walking into the pub until I’m already there.

After cleaning up the smashed glass from the floor, I decided to go for a walk to try and cool off.

I shake out my hands, as if I can flick the anger from my body like water droplets after washing my hands.

Like if I just keep moving, eventually it will stop sticking to me and move on to someone else.

But it’s pervasive, sticky, unending. An emotion so persistent that it fuses with my personality, makes it hard for me to see where it starts and I stop. Like a piece of double-sided-tape you keep passing from one hand to the other, not sure how to get it off.

Wandering around town with the cool summer night air on my cheeks doesn’t help. Seeing the familiar storefronts — the hardware store, the insurance agency, Lara’s father’s clinic — just makes me angry. Makes me feel like boiling over.

No matter how hard I try, I’m like a stupid fish, always ending up right back in the same tank.

“Jake.”

Lawrence is standing behind the bar, holding a glass in his hand just like last time, staring at me like he’s probably said my name a couple of times at this point. The man was like an uncle to me for years, and for a second, I think about turning and walking right out of the bar again.

I don’t want him to see me like this. And I shouldn’t even be here — drinking to deal with anger is exactly what got my dad to where he was.

For a beat, I hover in the doorway, the singing of cicadas behind me, the crooning of old country on old speakers in front of me.

“Jake,” Lawrence says again, gesturing with one hand, the kind of circular beckoning motion that’s universal for come in . “Please, come take a seat, son. I’ve been wanting to have a word with you.”

Sighing, I take a few steps, the old wood floorboards creaking under my feet as I go. The rest of the bar is empty, aside from one old guy in the back corner booth, who looks like he might be asleep.

“He’s not dead,” Lawrence says, chuckling when my gaze lingers on that area for a second. “He always looks like that.”

“I don’t want your condolences,” I say, knowing the moment the words come out that they’re too harsh, but I’m unable to take them back. They’re true, though. I don’t want Lawrence to say he’s sorry for my loss.

Especially not when he knows exactly how I feel about my father. How I felt about him. That I hadn’t seen him in the five years before his death.

“Great, because I’m all out of them.”

When he says it, I realize he might be more in need of condolences than me. I hated my father, but somehow, against all odds, Lawrence was friends with the guy. He must have actually been hurt the day that he died.

“Can I get you a beer?”

My eyes drift past him and to the shelf of liquor on the back wall. I’m two years legal on alcohol and have been drinking it since my freshman year of college, but something about ordering one from Lawrence feels like a sin. It feels like going to a strip club with your grandma.

And beyond that, turning to alcohol to drown my anger feels like I’m falling right into the rut my father carved out for me.

“Actually,” I sigh, running my hand down my face. “I’ll take a cola, please.”

Lawrence chuckles but grabs a tumbler and fills it for me from the gun, gamely sliding it over like I’m a kid just playing an adult at the bar. I take it, take a sip, remember I don’t really like the taste of soda that much, and set it back down on the counter.

“You’ve been wanting to have a word with me?” I ask, watching as Lawrence goes back to polishing glasses. I imagine he does a lot of that around here on weeknights. If anything, this bar is more of a food place, especially in the summer when people would rather drink out at the lake.

“Yeah,” he says, eyeing me like one good look can tell him exactly what’s going on in my head. “I have.”

Lawrence has never been a very big guy, but there’s something about him that screams authority. He’s the kind of guy who would make a good coach, a man that you can’t help but listen to when he speaks. I sit quietly until he clears his throat.

“You know that your father and I were friends in high school, right?”

I open my mouth to reject this, to tell him that I’m not interested in cute little stories about my dad. That I don’t want to hear him humanized. He had his chance with me, and he threw it away.

But Lawrence holds up his hand, stopping me before I can say any of that. “But I was also friends with your mother.”

I blink. For some reason, the thought of my mother as a teenager had never crossed my mind. Logically, I knew that my parents had met in high school, but I never thought back that far. “You were?”

“That’s right. Oh man, your dad was pissed. Hated that she and I got along so well, until he realized she wasn’t interested in me. She was only ever interested in him but loved to see him get jealous. See him get riled up over things.”

Hearing about my mother always feels like hearing about a unicorn. Growing up, information about her was like contraband, something that Shelby and I could only whisper about. My dad didn’t like hearing about her, didn’t like talking about her.

I’d always assumed that he hated her for strapping him with two kids and dying.

“Your dad was always that kind of guy. Really intense, and could channel that into really great stuff. Back in Industrial Tech, he could make the coolest stuff. He’d talked about moving somewhere like Los Angeles and becoming a furniture designer - living somewhere that people might pay a lot of money for fancy furniture. But Wildfern Ridge wasn’t that place.”

“Duh,” I say, more into my cola than to Lawrence. He laughs, and I see his hands land on the edge of the bar.

“Your mom found out she was pregnant over winter break of our senior year. She wanted… well, she wanted to get an abortion. It was your dad who convinced her they could be a real family. That he was willing to stay in Wildfern Ridge with her. She wanted to be a teacher, and they made a plan - he would work on starting up his construction business, then when you were old enough to go to school, your mom would go back for her education.”

I take a drink, get an ice cube in my mouth, push it back and forth. In some way, I knew a cobbled version of this story. Enough of it had seeped out over the years. I knew that I was from a teen pregnancy. I knew that it was a tough decision to keep me.

“Miles’ mom died just a month after your mother,” Lawrence says, clearing his throat. “It doesn’t excuse a damn thing he ever did, but he lost both of them, just like that. Instant.”

I stare at the counter. Lawrence is giving me the sad-guy speech about my dad, and instead of shutting it out, I’m letting it in. The anger sits, still sticky, still inside me.

Growing up, I obviously knew that Shelby and I didn’t have any living grandparents. My memories of my grandmother are even hazier than those of my mom. But I’d never thought about what it might be like for my dad to lose both of them, just like that.

“I get that he was your friend, Lawrence,” I say, raising my gaze to his, not wanting to let the wall I’ve built between me and my dad crumble. Because if I do, then I might have to mourn the father I never had. And that seems like a little too much grief for me.

Especially considering what I’ve just learned about my own little family. About what Lara kept from me for five whole years.

Going on, I say, “But it doesn’t mean anything to me. He boxed up my shit and stuck it out on the curb a few weeks before I was supposed to leave. I ended up couch surfing in Ann Arbor because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“He didn’t want you to go, Jake.”

I blink, shake my head, not sure what to make of that. “You think him putting my shit on the curb meant he didn’t want me to go?”

“You remember what I said about him being intense? About him always feeling too much, being that guy? Yeah, I think that he was having a lot of feelings about you leaving and he didn’t want you to go.

He dealt with that by kicking you out a lot sooner, because he thought he could avoid the pain that way.

That was Miles’ big problem. He fooled himself into thinking he could avoid the pain. ”

After a beat of silence passes, Lawrence clears his throat again, reaching across the bar and knocking twice on the spot in front of me. “He was doing his best, kid. Maybe his best wasn’t enough, and that’s okay. But I swear to you, he was.”

I swallow that down, swallow down my cola, and Lawrence doesn’t let me pay for it before I leave, walking back out into the cool, muggy night. Mosquitoes swarm around me and I ignore them, only thinking about my dad.

Thinking about how complicated he was, the stuff I never knew about him.

How afraid I’ve been to become exactly like him.

And the chance I have now to prove to myself that I’m not like him. That my best can be good enough.

That I can be a good dad… if I want to.