Dovetail: A Novel(72)

Joe couldn’t help himself. “It seems like not wanting to talk about things runs in the family.” He braced himself for some backlash; his dad didn’t take well to anything resembling criticism. Instead of being irritated, his father chuckled.

“We’re not the best communicators—that much is true,” he said. “That’s probably something I should work on.”

“Probably. And as long as you mentioned wanting to work on it, how about you start with this? What exactly happened that made you cut your mother out of your life?”

“This again.” His father’s voice had a tone of resignation.

“Yeah, this again. Neither of you will tell me, and since she’s dying of cancer, I’m thinking it has to come from you.”

Maybe it was the reference to dying, but Joe sensed a shift in his father. “I can give you my take on it, but you know that she’ll probably have a different version of events?”

“Sure.”

“She can say what she wants, but I was there. I saw it.” He exhaled. “My father, your grandfather, was a troubled man. He fought in the First World War and came back missing a leg. He was in pain much of the time from that and other injuries, and he started drinking. A lot. And when he got drunk, which was all the time, he was morose, feeling sorry for himself, for how his life turned out. His family had owned a prosperous farm, but he wasn’t coping well, so his younger brother took over managing it. After he and my mother got married, they moved into town, and he took a job in an office, which he hated. My mother wasn’t helpful, what with her nagging all the time. She wanted to travel and to dress in all the latest fashions, but they couldn’t afford it. Whatever she wanted in a husband, it wasn’t him. Frankly, I don’t know why those two ever got married. There was no love there that I saw. But you know, I didn’t really know the difference when I was a kid. It was just my life, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“So one Saturday when I was seventeen, almost eighteen, my dad and I leave for the day to go target shooting out in the country. No sooner do we get all the way out there than he says he feels sick, and we have to go back home. When we get there, we notice a car pulling out of the driveway, and at the wheel is Howard Donohue, a friend of my folks. My dad gets really mad and says to wait in the car, and I did at first, but it seemed like he was gone a really long time, and I got tired of waiting.”

Joe clutched the phone to his ear, not knowing what to say.

“So I finally go inside, and my father is crying, sobbing, and my mother is in her bathrobe, screaming at him that he should mind his own business. And he’s saying that she is his business, that she’s his wife, and he can’t believe she just cheated on him with Howard, of all people. And she says that she and Howard are just friends, that my dad was blowing the whole thing out of proportion as usual. And then she says no one would fault her if she was cheating on him because he was barely half a man, and he’d ruined her life.”

He paused. Joe waited a minute before saying, “Then what happened?”

“My mother said she wished she’d never married him, that the only reason she did was because she felt sorry for him. That no one else would want him. And he straightens up and says kind of quietly, ‘It was your idea that we get married. I did it for you. I’ve done everything for you.’”

“What was he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “And then she just goes off, telling him things like her life would have been better without him, and she never loved him, not even for a minute. That he just made everyone miserable, and that she’d have been better off if he’d died in the war.”

“That’s terrible.” Joe could imagine it. His father as a teenager finding out his mother had been with another man and then watching his parents fight, his mother so cruel, his father falling apart emotionally.

“And then he said if anyone made a sacrifice, it was him, and she laughed and laughed like she was mocking him. And right after that, he put a gun to his head.”

That last sentence took Joe by shocked surprise. All he could manage to utter was, “What?”

“I didn’t see him take the handgun into the house with him. The first I noticed it was when he raised it to the side of his head. My mother stops laughing and goes, ‘We both know you don’t have the balls to do it.’” There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

Joe said, “He shot himself?”

“No.” His father’s voice got quieter. “He handed her the gun and asked her to shoot him and put him out of his pain, and she said, ‘You aren’t worth the bullet.’ Then they noticed me standing there. My mother told me to go to my room, and my dad went outside to the garage. An hour later, my mom told me to go tell my dad it was time for dinner. That was how she operated. Pretend like nothing happened. So I go out to get him and . . .” He choked back the words. “And he was hanging from the rafters. I got the ladder and cut him down, but it was too late.”

“Oh my God. I’m sorry, Dad.” Joe felt a wave of sympathy for what his father had endured. He couldn’t even imagine it.

“You never get over a thing like that. At least, I didn’t.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he was aware of how inadequate they were.