by Terri Kraus
Ethan didn’t turn around right away.
I am not this sort of father.
He stared to the south, looking for his son.
I am not that sort of father.
He could see nothing.
He’s not at fault.
He twisted his hands into fists.
It’s not his fault.
He turned back around.
And Cameron was gone as well.
If we wait too long to forgive,
our rage settles in
and claims squatter’s rights to our souls.
—Lewis B. Smedes
Forgiveness is a funny thing.
It warms the heart
and cools the sting.
—William A. Ward
CHAPTER TEN
SUMMER HAD ENDED IN Venango County.
Each year, the Stoneskipping Championship Festival on the River, when professionals and amateurs alike vied for the gerplunking state championship on the third weekend of August, marked the end of the summer season. Books, backpacks, and supplies had been bought, and school had begun.
The days remained warm, but in the evenings an unmistakable intimation, a waft of the scent of fall, tinged the air. An early edging of leaves at Two Mile Run Park had already turned to gold, hinting at the season’s fallow colors soon to come. Flocks of geese and birds assembled in great, squawking crowds at the river’s edge, jostling and strutting, making noisy preparations for their journey south.
For Cameron, something about the end of summer caused a restlessness in her, an unnamed longing. Each year the feeling brought with it a certain sadness that she found difficult to describe. And this year that sadness was intensified.
Activities at The Derrick also intensified in the weeks before the start of the school year. Cameron had been assigned both publishing and editing duties of the back-to-school style and special fashion supplement to the newspaper. This job entailed making sure that the sales department actually sold advertising for the section, that models from the local high school were recruited, that the clothing stores in Franklin and out at the Cranberry Mall were solicited for special back-to-school outfits for the models, that stories and editorial assignments were given out so the pages would be filled. The job was complex, time-consuming—and just the thing Cameron needed.
Since the Flyers’ loss at the championship game, since those explosive minutes just after the game, since Cameron’s carefully constructed daydream had collapsed in her hidden, bitter tears, she and Ethan had not spoken. He had not called or stopped by. During the first few days following the game, she had hoped for some word, even as slight as an e-mail, but nothing was spoken, or written.
To her, Ethan’s silence was more damaging and potent than any cruel word could ever have been.
It was obvious to Cameron that what she had thought was there between them … was not. It was not the first time a woman had fooled herself into thinking that a man was committed to a relationship when he really wasn’t.
But how can he just walk away? Cameron wondered. He didn’t even feel the need for closure. Nothing. I can’t believe it.
She found herself thinking as much about Chase as she thought about Ethan.
The silence grew so loud that Cameron felt grateful for her hectic schedule. By the end of this day, she had to complete several five-hundred-word articles on the current “hot” styles for today’s teens, and she had no idea what kids considered “hot.” Early into the process, she had visited the local stores that specialized in teen fashions. Her time wandering amid the racks of jarring styles confused her. It seemed there was not a single article of apparel in those stores that she would wear, could wear, or would ever have considered wearing.
But she gamely interviewed owners and clerks and the kids themselves. She thumbed through scores of magazines, looking for trends and ideas that she might extrapolate to the local scene in Franklin. She began to show pictures to Paige, who showed an interest at first. Paige’s interest quickly grew to shocked silence—especially at the more skimpy and revealing fashions that seemed to be de rigueur for today’s teens. And then, instead of interest, Paige simply waved Cameron away when she appeared holding a magazine in hand.
“I’m already offended, Cameron. Old and offended.” She coughed from her office. “Don’t make me feel even older than I am. Or more offended … if that’s possible.”
If Paige had wondered why Cameron had stopped talking about Ethan, she had the sensitivity not to ask. Cameron knew her boss must have been wondering. Cameron also knew that Paige already may have heard about what had happened.
Franklin was that small of a town, and this story of anger and public humiliation would have been so wonderfully delicious.
Chase approached the start of eighth grade with neither happy anticipation nor glum acceptance. School was, as he had once told Elliot, not a bad way to spend a few hours a day. This would be his last year at the Franklin Area Middle School.
Since his final baseball game, he and his father had barely spoken. What they were sharing between them, in their tight silence, was not anger. It was something else altogether—a mutual emotion that twisted them, made words unnecessary, even hurtful, and made the silence an angry addiction.
It wasn’t that all words had stopped—just words that spoke to things other than what was necessary and right in front of them.
His father could talk about food and what they might eat for supper.
Chase might answer in a word or two, most often noncommittal.
His father might suggest listening to a ball game.
Chase might accept, but often would demur, claiming fatigue or disinterest.
Less than a few hundred words between father and son had been scattered over the three weeks since that last game, that last grievous error, their last silent parting.
Chase turned it all inside and let his feelings wind and coil. It was a familiar process to both father and son.
And if Ethan had noticed that Chase’s favorite baseball glove was missing, he didn’t say anything about it.
That morning Ethan sat in his kitchen, staring at The Derrick without reading a word, nursing a fourth cup of coffee. He could have simply slipped out and headed to the jobsite. Perhaps he should have. He knew Chase was awake; had heard the hiss of water from the bathroom, and the shower spray echo hard against the tub. Chase was dressing, rattling about upstairs. Ethan no longer had to worry about a lunch. This year the middle school offered a hot lunch for a few dollars a week. To Ethan, it was a small price to pay for not having to worry about finding food that would please Chase—most often at six in the morning.
There were other issues Ethan faced, troubling issues as well. He and his crew were weeks behind schedule on the Carter Mansion project. They had run into plumbing problems on the second floor and spent an angry week slowly working around and behind a plumbing outfit from French Creek.
The stairs groaned as Chase made his way down. Ethan could clearly see that Chase was surprised to see his father still at home. Ethan had decided that their uneasy cease-fire, their unstated armistice, had gone on long enough.
“Chase,” Ethan said calmly, “we need to talk.”
“Okay.”
Ethan put his coffee cup on the counter. He wasn’t going to drink it anyhow. The coffee was tepid at best, tasting more like cough syrup.
“I’m sorry for what I said to you at the game.”
“It’s okay.”
“No. I was wrong. I always told you it was only a game, but I didn’t act like it.”
“It’s okay, really.”
“No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t have yelled like that.”
Chase only glanced up for a moment. “It was a bad play.”
Ethan h
ad a speech prepared, and he was following that speech. But Chase’s part was not going quite according to the lines he had written in his head.
“No. It was just a game,” Ethan said again. “I’m really sorry for yelling at you like that.”
Chase simply shrugged.
Ethan wanted to shout at him all over again. In spite of his best intentions, his shoulders tightened. What is that shrug for? Ethan wanted to say. I’m apologizing here, and you just shrug at me?
But he kept his words as even and as calm as he could. “Am I forgiven?”
Chase looked up at him, stared into his eyes, and almost shrugged again. Ethan saw his shoulders move just ever so much.
“Sure, Dad. Forgiven. No big deal.”
Ethan waited and fumed silently. It was a big deal, and Chase dismisses it like it was nothing—like it’s not even worth his time to discuss it.
Chase didn’t speak.
After a long time, Ethan added, “So, we’re okay then?”
“Sure. We’re okay,” Chase replied, not giving his answer any time for reflection.
“Good. You’re sure we’re okay?”
“Yep.”
Neither Ethan nor Chase spoke for a minute.
“Well, I’ll see you tonight.”
“Sure. I’ll be here.”
Silence.
“Maybe McCort’s?”
“Sure.”
But as Ethan picked up his lunch box and thermos, he wondered why his carefully planned apology felt so absolutely and horribly wrong, like none of his feelings that lay behind and under the words mattered.
Forgiven. Easy for him to ask. He doesn’t understand any of this. He doesn’t understand anything, Chase thought as he cinched up his backpack and headed out the door. He saw Elliot coming down the street. He grinned at his friend, offered a wide wave, and waited as Elliot started to jog toward him, taking loping, circular strides.
Forgiven.
I wonder what that feels like.
Ethan was not having a good day. In fact, he had not had a good day in several days. Immediately after his clenched-teeth apology resulting in a clenched-teeth forgiveness from Chase, he entered another situation filled with tension—but including none of the clenched-teeth drama. It was just out-and-out yelling.
It had all begun two days earlier, when Todd Thomas and Sons, a plumbing outfit from French Creek, began to complain about the location of the third-floor powder room.
“Too far from the soil stack. Never be able to make the grade. You gotta move the room—or move the pipe,” declared the senior Thomas loudly, arms folded across his chest, his son several steps behind, holding a tape measure in one hand and a blueprint in the other.
Ethan had years of experience dealing with subcontractors. You yell back—it’s the only way.
Ethan did exactly that. Not mean, aggressive, angry yelling, but passionate yelling.
“We can’t do either!” Ethan explained—loudly. “She wants the toilet here. That’s what the plan says, and at this point I can’t move that soil stack short of tearing up the entire house. I’m not doing that.”
“Easy for you to say. I gotta rip all the floor between here and there—and none of that work is in my quote.”
Ethan shrugged. “You had the plans and drawings. It had better be in the quote. You looked at the job. If you misquoted, too bad. You’ll just have to eat the difference. You’ve been in business too long to pull this.”
The senior Thomas muttered, turned away, and snatched the blueprints from the hands of the still-silent Thomas junior.
Ethan stayed out of the plumbers’ way for the rest of the day. Plumbers worked on different schedules than carpenters, and neither felt at ease working with each other. It would do no one any good to get into another shouting match. Arguments on the jobsite always meant an afternoon of jumbled and sometimes substandard work.
As a gesture of conciliation, Ethan said he would call the architect that afternoon—“to see if there was anything that could be done to help.” He was sure there wasn’t, but he needed the Thomas boys to stay on the job. They had been the least expensive bid on the plumbing. Every added and unforeseen cost escalation was money out of Ethan’s pocket—money he could not afford to spend.
Ethan held the cell phone tight to his ear. He was standing in a quiet corner on the third floor, looking out to the street below.
“Well, Ethan, what a surprise. I was just thinking about you,” said Michelle, who always seemed as if she was genuinely happy to hear from him. “So, tell me what problems we have today.”
“What makes you think we have a problem?” Ethan asked.
“A contractor calling the architect? Please. I’ve been around long enough. It’s for a problem. Is it something I caused?”
Ethan laid out the concerns of the Thomas boys. Michelle kept repeating “uh-huh” as Ethan suggested some possible alternatives.
“Don’t we have two feet between the floor and the ceiling below? That’s more than enough for their angle. It’s what—a one inch of drop per horizontal foot? They have to lay less than twenty feet of pipe. It should work fine.”
“That’s what I thought too. They may be worried about cutting through too many joists.”
“They’re covered there too. I’m sure that they only cut through two—but make sure they rebrace the area, and then they have a straight run to the soil stack. Should be an easy fix.”
Ethan conveyed the architect’s diagnosis and suggestions to his plumbing subcontractors.
“Sounds easy, but she ain’t here to see the mess,” the senior Thomas growled. “She wants us to run the pipe under two walls. That’s too much work. I didn’t figure on that. I ain’t doin’ it that way.”
Ethan stood up straighter. “You have to make it work. You quoted the job. You saw the plans. Now do what your bid said you’re going to do.”
The following day, the Thomas crew did not show up until after lunch, and then cut massive holes in the two walls and into the ceiling below before Ethan or anyone else saw them do it.
“You want pipes? You got pipes,” Thomas senior barked out at Ethan.
It was just at that moment that Mrs. Moretti breezed in with her interior designer, Tessa Winberry, in on another visit from San Francisco, both carrying shopping bags of carpet samples, fabric swatches, and biscotti.
CeCe stopped in her steps and stared hard at the hole in the ceiling by the second-floor landing. The soil pipe angled awkwardly through the plasterboard, protruding at least a foot into the space.
“We can’t have that there,” she said with dismay, pointing at the pipe, the pipe still dripping purple with plumber’s glue. “That’s all wrong.”
The Thomas and Sons plumbing team picked that moment to swagger down the stairs, banging their dolly filled with equipment on the steps, chipping a nice divot of wood from the stair tread, the piece landing on Tessa’s foot.
“You need a pipe? You got a pipe,” Thomas senior said as he turned the corner and bounced down the remaining steps, banging the front door open and closed.
CeCe looked over imploringly at a silent Tessa, then stared hard at Ethan before speaking again. “That … pipe … has to be removed.”
“We’ll fix it. We can lower the ceiling a bit in that area. You’ll never notice it.”
CeCe dropped the shopping bag and walked closer to the wall. “No. Not lowered. Removed. Do you hear? Removed. There is not going to be a lower ceiling in the hall. There is not.”
Ethan could tell his crew was trying hard to not hear what was going on between their boss and his client. But that was impossible. So they all tried to find something to occupy themselves as far from the field of battle as they could.
“Removed.”
Ethan could onl
y nod in reply, as CeCe and Tessa picked up their designer shopping bags and went downstairs.
The Franklin Area Middle School had been built on former farmland, three miles south of town, across the highway from the Venango County Municipal Airport. Aircraft noises were seldom interruptions; the airport was rarely used.
Virtually every student had to take a bus to school. Chase and Elliot were no exceptions. The thirty-minute, meandering trip gave them a last-minute opportunity to finish any homework they had forgotten, either deliberately or accidentally, from the day prior. Since school had just begun, Chase did not feel overwhelmed with schoolwork. He did most of his work in study period or during class. Elliot, however, always seemed to have a sheaf of papers needing correction or revision.
“I’m not stupid,” Elliot would insist. “I’m just not as organized as you.”
Chase would help as he could.
Today, as always, the bus turned along the river, stopping every block, allowing students to jostle aboard, the noise increasing at each stop.
“So your dad finally said he was sorry?”
Chase just nodded. Ethan and Chase may have thought no one heard their brief argument that day, but virtually the whole team—or at least the parents of the entire team—had heard. The parking lot was only steps from the field, and voices in anger carried well on the breeze. Chase had invited himself to Elliot’s house for dinner the evening of the game, and no one made mention of anything relating to baseball. They talked about fishing, and school, and church, and movies—but not a word about Chase’s dad or what he had said that afternoon. It was obvious from their silence that everyone had overheard, and everyone was acting polite.
“Yeah. He apologized.”
“So?”
“So, what?”