Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  Mom looks at me, her mouth still agape. “And what’s that, Hank?”

  “A random coincidence,” I say. “Please, Father, continue.”

  “Very well,” he says. “So John tells me that he isn’t afraid of dying—rather, he’s afraid of not getting to grow old with Debbie and most of all not getting to know Jack. He felt like he was so busy with getting into the car business that he missed Hank and Jeanine growing up. He saw Jack as his second chance, his new lease on life, his blank canvas, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be there to help paint it.”

  “Hence the vasectomy reversal in his forties?” I say.

  “Exactly,” Father affirms.

  “And he told this all to you?”

  “Every word of it, Hank.” Father slides the manila envelope across the patio table. Jack stops it with his hand. “Inside that envelope is a letter from John Henry Fitzpatrick to you, Jack. I was instructed by John that if he died prematurely, I was to deliver it to you on your sixteenth birthday. Well, here I am. Granted, I’m a couple months late.”

  I shoot Mom a look. “His excuse was missionary work in Third World countries. What’s yours?”

  Jack grabs my arm, shaking his head at me. “Some other time, Hank.”

  “Agreed,” Father Fish says. “Anyway, there’s your letter. May God bless you.”

  The wise old priest turns on his heels and walks toward the house to leave.

  “Wait, Father,” Jack says. “You don’t want to know what he had to say?”

  “Yeah, Father,” I echo Jack’s sentiments. “It’s not like you’re Moses and I’m going to be the ass who kicks you out on Canaan’s doorstep right before the party gets started.”

  Father closes his eyes, purses his lips, and sighs. He opens his eyes, nodding at the letter. “Jack, those words are for you and your father.”

  Almost everybody gets the hint. We spend about a half hour saying our goodbyes and thank yous. Gillman leaves with Lila and Chris on an evening drive. (Mormons do that a lot.) Joan and Stan take the grandkids out to see a movie. Jack asks Mom, Jeanine, Beth, and me to stay.

  Jack has yet to move from the patio table. We sit down next to him. I stop the pretense and bring up the Miller High Life from the mini-fridge, sitting it on the patio table.

  “Where’d you get that?” Mom asks.

  “Jack’s room,” I say.

  Mom turns to Jack. “Young man!”

  “It’s not my beer, Mom.”

  “Relax, Debbie,” I say, unscrewing a cap off the fluted beer bottle. “They’re mine.”

  “Well…” my sister says, taking one of the beers and handing another to Beth. “Are you going to read it or what?”

  “I can’t,” Jack says, his eyes welling up with tears. “Hank, you read it for me.”

  “I-I don’t think I should, buddy.”

  Jack slides me the manila envelope. “Either you’re reading it or no one is.”

  I take the envelope in my hand. Straightening the clasp through the hole, I run my finger under the flap. “You sure about this, bro?”

  “No,” Jack says. “But do it anyway.”

  Slowly, I peel back the flap, careful not to rip the envelope. I pull out the white unlined letter. It’s written on Fitzpatrick Oldsmobile-Cadillac-Subaru letterhead and dated February 11, 1991, Jack’s second birthday. The handwriting is unmistakably Dad’s, his capital letters sweeping, confident, and nearly illegible. It’s probably best I’m doing the reading, as I was one of the only people I knew who could ever translate Dad’s Sanskrit.

  I begin to read…

  Dear Jack,

  If you are reading this letter, it means I am no longer in your life, and for that I am profoundly saddened. The circumstances of why I’m not there are irrelevant, but know that I am sorry and that if it were in my power I would never leave you.

  I love your brother and sister, but I feel like I missed their lives. While their mother taught them how to do things like walk, talk, tie their shoes, write in cursive, do long division, and not pee their pants—granted, Hank is still working on that one—I was working sixteen-hour days selling Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Subarus. The fact I missed both Hank and Jeanine say their first words and take their first steps just so Mr. Spangler would be happy with his Coupe DeVille sickens me. If I had to do it all over again, I would have stayed a music teacher.

  You were my reset button, Jack. You were my chance to make things right. I saw you take your first steps. I taught you how to walk and how to tie your shoes. When you took your first big-boy poop in the potty, I was there cheering you on harder than if Notre Dame had won another national championship. You were the only Fitzpatrick whose first word was “Daddy” instead of “Mommy.” While your mother still gets credit for teaching you cursive and advanced mathematics—two skills I admittedly lack—I feel like you were really and truly, more than Hank or Jeanine, all mine.

  Choosing to reverse my vasectomy and try for a second family was the craziest and most wonderful choice I ever made in my life. While it did not give me or Debbie the gift either of us expected, it did bring us to you. You may not be of me, but you’re of us, and that is more than enough. It is more than I deserve. And I will always call you my son.

  I almost forgot. Happy sixteenth birthday, and here’s to many more. Don’t be too hard on Hank. I fear this fatherhood thing won’t come easy to him, but I know in my heart he’ll be a great dad to you.

  Love, Dad

  I don’t know why I read the whole letter. It’s not like I hadn’t already looked ahead and knew what was coming. Maybe I let it happen. Like a subconscious switch, my brain just shut everything down and said, Fuck it, let’s finally get this over with. I’ve told Beth more than once I was tired of carrying this burden. But that’s not the point. The point is that, just like with Uncle Mitch, it was my burden to bear and my burden to relinquish. Right or wrong, these were my choices to make. Yet here I stand again, outed from the fucking grave by my goddamn father.

  “Please,” I say. “Let me explain.”

  “No!” Jack, my brother no longer, stands and walks around the table. He rips the paper out of my hand and holds it in front of my face. He screams through his tears. “This isn’t possible.”

  Though galactically inappropriate, an Empire Strikes Back allusion sneaks into my brain. I try to snuff it out, but the Beam and the High Life don’t let me. It’s the only thing I can think to say. “Search your feelings, Jack. You know it to be true.”

  Jack pushes me to the ground. He stands over me with his fists clenched, the letter balled up in his right hand. “Fuck you, Dad. And fuck you too, Grandma.” Jack throws the letter in Mom’s face, giving her a forearm to the chest as he brushes by her. He walks out the patio gate that opens directly to the front yard.

  “Where are you going?” Mom shouts after him.

  “Let him go. Nothing we say right now is going to help.”

  “You okay, honey?” Beth reaches for my hand, helping me to my feet.

  I lean in, kiss her on the cheek. “Better than I’ve been in a while actually.”

  Mom makes toward the patio gate. “We have to stop him.”

  I reach for Mom, grabbing her elbow as she runs past me. “Don’t make a bad situation worse.”

  “But you don’t understand.”

  “I think I understand plenty.”

  That’s when I hear it: the throaty growl of a 390-horsepower ’68 Oldsmobile.

  “The Beast?” I release Mom’s elbow. “But she was in storage. We haven’t been able to get her started in years.”

  “It was Gillman’s surprise,” Mom says. “He rebuilt the engine himself. Did you really think I was just going to get Jack the same old soccer camp gift for his sixteenth birthday?”

  “Of course I thought that, Mom. You’re not a considerate person.” />
  “You have to go after him, Hank.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “The hell you aren’t.”

  “I’m drunk,” I say, sitting in Jack’s recently vacated chair. “Besides, I have an idea where he’s going. He’ll be fine.”

  Mom starts crying. “You don’t know that.”

  “The hell I don’t.” I say, purposely snickering for effect. “Jack has about twelve years’ experience making it on his own.”

  Chapter ninety-one

  Beth and I took the kids home after the party. Later that night, we had wildly inappropriate but erotic sex, first in the hot tub, then in the shower, and finally in front of the standing mirror in the corner of our bedroom. On second thought, it was very appropriate; it was like makeup sex even though we weren’t the ones who had the fight. I got maybe four hours of sleep before jumping in the old Subaru Outback for the drive north.

  If Hansel and Gretel left bread crumbs for their father, Jack is leaving loaves of bread for me. He picked up a twelve of Natural Light and a pack of Parliaments in a dive bar in between Hope and Shelbyville. I found the empty twelve-pack and the nearly untouched nineteen-pack of cigarettes—Jack doesn’t smoke—in a rest area in Greenfield.

  Later, sometime around two in the morning, Jack went to the Hiphugger strip club in Kokomo. The Hugger’s longtime bouncer—a soft-spoken, smiling giant of a man by the name of Pappy—turned him away at the door. “Gotta love the balls of a sixteen-year-old trying to pass himself off as a thirty-four-year-old,” Pappy told me. “But he might want to check beforehand and make sure the original owner of the driver’s license didn’t spend most of the early nineties in this bar.”

  Like I said, Pappy has been there a long time.

  At some point after striking out at the Hugger, Jack doubled back to Tipton. He booked the Jacuzzi Suite with some of his birthday money at the Flamingo Motel. In the morning, he went to Sherrill’s, the diner and gas station right off US 31 with the famous marquee that reads Eat Here And Get Gas. He tried to buy everyone in the diner breakfast, but Sherrill thankfully refused the gesture.

  I knew where Jack was going the moment he left Mom’s house. He’s a Fitzpatrick, and there’s only one place we drop everything to visit in the middle of April: the campus of the University of Notre Dame, for the Blue & Gold Game spring scrimmage.

  The Notre Dame Stadium usher hands me my ticket stub. “You might want to buy some gloves and a hat at the gift shop,” he advises me. “They’re saying this is the coldest Blue and Gold Game ever. Game time temps in the thirties, thirty mile-per-hour wind out of the northwest, maybe even some snow.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I say.

  After a couple false positives, I find him. Jack is sitting by himself, about two-thirds the way up in Section 23, corner end zone, the section that had a front-row seat to Pat Terrell batting down Miami’s two-point attempt in ’88. To the west, he’s afforded a clear view of Touchdown Jesus. He’s decked out from head to toe in brand-new ND gear, the campus bookstore apparently the beneficiary of his remaining birthday funds.

  Jack doesn’t notice me until I’m three rows away from him. “How did you know that I would—”

  “Give me a little credit, Jack.” I sit down next to him but not too close. “I may not be your favorite person right now, but I know you better than just about anyone on this planet.”

  He doesn’t respond. The silence is uncomfortable.

  “Montana and Zorich honorary captains for the Blue team?” I ask, trying to make small talk.

  “Yep,” Jack says, trying to make it even smaller.

  “And Theismann and Tim Brown are captains of the Gold team?”

  “Yep.”

  “Brady Quinn looking good?”

  “Yep.”

  “Darius Walker running well?”

  “Yep.”

  “Come on, Jack, talk to me.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

  “I mean really talk to me.”

  “What do you want me to say, Hank? Is there a proper reaction here? You’ve let me believe my father was dead for sixteen years.”

  “Technically, about eleven and a half years.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know you were my son until you were four-and-half years old. Mom kept it from me, too.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that? How could you have not known?”

  “My girlfriend lied to me. She and your mother—or should I say, she and your grandmother—faked the abortion, and then Debbie adopted you.”

  “Wait a second,” Jack says. “My mother is your high school sweetheart, Laura Elliot?”

  “Wow, you put two and two together pretty quick. How’d you know about the so-called abortion?”

  “Jeanine told me that summer I visited her in Portland.”

  I run my hands through my hair, shaking my head. “Of course she did.”

  “And Dad—Grandpa, whatever the hell I’m supposed to call him—he knew all about this?”

  “Yes,” I say. “He was initially reluctant, but considering that aborting his grandson was the only alternative, he went along with it. After a while, the deception got easy for most of us, but in hindsight I don’t think it ever got any easier for Dad.”

  “He was just never wired that way,” Jack says.

  I sigh, my mind on rewind to that moment in the hospital I told Mom about Uncle Mitch’s deception, right before she doubled down on the lies. “It was after Dad died that things started spiraling out of control. In the end, I think he gave his family way too much credit.”

  “Credit for what?”

  “For doing the right thing.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You don’t have to suddenly pull punches for my benefit, Jack. The tone in Dad’s letter was pretty obvious, especially those last few paragraphs. He just assumed we would have told you by now. I feel like I let him down again.”

  “Look, Hank, uh, I mean Da—”

  “Please, don’t start calling me that. I don’t deserve that. I might never deserve it.”

  “Okay, whatever…Hank. Can you just give me some time to process this?”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “It’s not that I’m letting you off the hook for this, because I’m not.”

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  “But really, at least with you, what are we talking about here? A debate over semantics? You’ve basically been my father since I was four years old, since before you even found out I was your, you know, your s—”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to use that word in conversation either.”

  Jack flirts with smiling. “Thanks,” he says.

  “You’re welcome, bro.” Jack looks at me. I say “bro” out of habit, but for the very first time, the word feels strange in my mouth.

  “Hank, I have a lot of questions. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “How about at the beginning?”

  “Okay,” Jack says, his eyes starting to water. “Can you tell me about Laura? What was my mother like?”

  “Jack,” I say, standing and patting him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where we going?”

  “I’d rather not associate any of this with Notre Dame Stadium.”

  “Good call. Where to?”

  “How about we have this chat over beer and wings at Hooters and go watch the NFL Draft on some big screens?”

  “Beer?” Jack says.

  “Why not? We’re just two thirty-four-year-old dudes knocking back a few pitchers of brew.”

  “A few pitchers?”

  “You got somewhere you need to be?”

  “Well, there’s your birthday brunch tomorrow.”


  It’s hard to resist the way Jack’s eyes suddenly light up, reminding me he’s still like any sixteen-year-old boy—ready and willing to break the law for little more than a mild buzz. And today at least, I’m more than happy to oblige him.

  “You know what, Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck ’em.”

  Chapter ninety-two

  Jack and I ended up getting too drunk to drive. We spent the night sleeping in our cars in the Hooters parking lot, but we made good time this morning on the drive back from South Bend.

  I pull into my garage. Jack parks the Beast behind me in the driveway. He steps out of his car. “So you’re really not going to your birthday brunch?”

  “Are you going?” I ask.

  “Hell no,” Jack says.

  “Then that makes two of us.”

  Jack points to the empty stall next to the Subaru. “Where are Beth and the kids?”

  “At church.”

  “Church? Since when?”

  “Since about a year ago.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Don’t think we need a reason to be closer to God.”

  “Hank, this is me you’re talking to.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I know you’re trying especially hard to set a good example for me right now, but you finding religion is like you waking up with a vagina instead of a penis. It just ain’t natural.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Okay, you got me. We’re doing it for Sasha.”

  “Ah, yes. Giving her that good foundation.”

  “Bingo.”

  “I guess it beats having your ass dragged to a Mormon service.”

  “Gillman do that to you?”

  “Every Sunday. Three hours of hell on earth.”

  “Sounds like Easter Vigil.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “It isn’t so much the length that bothers me. The last couple hours are usually just Sunday school and administrative stuff. Debbie and I skip that a lot.”

  “Debbie?”

  “You call her that when you’re pissed at her, so I think I’ve earned the right to call her that for eternity.”