by Paul Griffin
That night I dreamed my dad was still alive. After all, there was no gravestone for him. He was off living with Hana overseas, in a city. In my dream Hana was tall and pretty, dark eyes, dark hair, with one of those smiles that made you do a double take, a real smile.
They had a son. He looked like me but a lot better-looking, and thin of course.
Dad just hadn’t been able to make himself come back to a quiet life on a peach farm after all the things he and Hana had seen over there together. The life-or-death close calls. He had to be with somebody who’d lived with that danger and lived through it with him. Somebody who knew what he knew now, that every minute counted.
The dream was so real, I woke up mad. He wasn’t my hero anymore. All these years he’d never wanted to know about me or even give me a call now and then. I’m not saying I needed to hear from him every night, but couldn’t he have checked in on my birthday to tell me he hoped all my wishes came true, or even one of them?
But then I remembered it was only a dream. My dad died in the war. He was a hero, my hero.
But Hana was real too. Double told me as much. I had to know, what was the story with Hana?
I was at the kitchen table, Bella and Marty asleep at my feet, when Mom came down for breakfast. “I made the coffee for you,” I said.
“I smelled it,” she said, fixing herself a cup. “Mm, thank you, sweetheart. You look worn out. You sleep at all?”
“I don’t think so. You?”
She shook her head. She sat. “So,” she said.
“So?” I said.
Bella and Marty jumped and barked and groinked. Double was pulling up the driveway. I let Bell and Marty out to say hi, and I followed them to help Double with his backpack. He stepped out of the truck tanned from a couple of days in the North Carolina mountains. He held up a takeout bag from Ricky’s all-night truck stop. “I got us some hushpuppies.”
Marty ran up to give Double a big fat hello after three days of missing him. He tackled Double hard. Double fell back and cracked his head on the step-up to the driver’s seat. He landed with a thud and then his body got still.
“Daddy?” Mom said. “Daddy!”
“Double?” I shook him and he was loose-limbed the way only a dead man can be. “Double!”
“Renzo, get that pig away from my father! Shoo, Marty! Get out of here!”
I kept shaking Double, and there was no response, just nothing.
31. DOUBLE’S KNEE
Double was almost awake by the time the ambulance came up the driveway. The EMTs took him away on a stretcher. His foot was sticking out like God put it on sideways.
I rode with him in the back of the ambulance. Mom rode up front with the driver. She was so upset, they thought it might be better to keep her away from Double, or maybe they meant to keep her away from me.
Double patted my hand and closed his eyes and said what he always said: “Don’t worry, son. It’ll be all right.”
Two hours later Double was in a pre-surgery bed and on some medicine that made him dreamy. His knee had finally given out, and they were going to replace it. Mom paced the halls, on the phone with the insurance company or maybe her church friends. I was glad she was talking to anybody but me.
“I lucked out, huh?” Double said. “I’m gonna get a brand-new knee out of this one. Renz? I been thinking a lot about that talk we had before I left for Chimney Rock. You’re going to find out about your dad sooner or later, probably sooner. I talked with your mom, and she agrees it’s time you know the truth. Now, son, I want you to be ready, because it’s a hard truth.”
What truth isn’t? I wondered.
“I want you to know that your dad will always be a hero to me. Here’s why: There was a man who used to beg out front of the Wal-Mart, a vet who’d had his legs taken from him. He’d wheel up to you, stick his filthy coin cup in your face and shake it until you gave him something. By way of thanks he’d curse you, and then he’d wheel himself straight to the beer case. Oh but he was a loudmouth drunk, a profoundly angry man, I’m sure you can understand. Well, your dad was working seasonal there at the Wal, over Christmas, and he took in that poor man and got him connected with an apartment, helped him find a job too. He got him right, you know? Right with himself. Today he manages the nursery supply.”
“Mr. Santorocco?” I said.
“Yup, and he owns part of that place now, as well.”
I’d wondered why Mom didn’t go straight to him for a job instead of asking around for somebody who could get her an interview with Costco, not to mention she had to drive a half hour farther to get there. But now I knew: Mr. Santorocco would only remind her of my dad.
“That’s the hardest thing,” Double said. “To take in the one who doesn’t seem to fit in. Who needs somebody to see past what he looks like or even acts like, into the spirit. That’s what your dad did for Mr. Santorocco. And son? That’s what you did for Marty, and I never want you to regret it. Okay?”
“Double, I’m so sorry.”
“Stop that. I’m just sad because of what he missed out on, your dad, seeing how great you turned out. Now, I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’ll be home in a day or two, and we’ll figure all this out, I promise.”
32. THE ZOO
They told us Double was going to be in surgery for a while, and maybe we should head down to the cafeteria.
We sat by the courtyard window. The glare outside made my head ache. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate to keep from having to look Mom in the eye. After a long while, she said, “I forgot, Pal texted while I was on the phone with Mrs. McGrath.”
“Pal?”
“She wanted me to have you call her.”
Paloma Lee was pretty much the last person I wanted to talk with right then. Probably calling to tell me about ukulele boy. She’d fallen in love with him, and now her heart was broken, and she wanted good old fat Renzo’s shoulder to cry on.
“I’ll call her later,” I said.
“Renzo, look at me. Double could have broken his neck, and then where are we with a quadriplegic in the house? Renz?”
Here it was, the verdict.
“Marty has to go. I’m just so sorry. Mrs. McGrath’s cousin has a friend who owns a petting zoo up in Michigan. I sent pictures and told the people how you trained him, how he was raised in a house and loves people to bits. They want him. The say he’s ideal. He’ll be appreciated for who he is up there. He’ll be safe.”
“I can train him not to jump up on people—”
“Renz? No. We don’t have a lot of time here, and this is the best I can come up with on short notice. I looked into some of the animal sanctuaries, but they’re full, and the waitlists go on for months, and there are no guarantees he’ll ever be placed. If we don’t do this now, they may very well put Marty down.”
“Who?” I said.
“The Animal Control people. Mr. Lee called. The hospital had to file a report with the police. Whenever an animal causes bodily injury, the authorities make a site visit. Mr. Lee says there’s no way they’ll let Marty stay with us in the house, not after what happened to Double. So, if they don’t take him away, and we’re allowed to keep him, what do we do? Put him out in the barn, all alone, no Bella to cuddle up with, no you? His heart would break. He’d forever be wondering what he did to make you hate him.”
“I’ll sleep in the barn with him,” I said. “Mom, please.”
“We’re very likely going to have to sell Maple Clutch,” she said. “Then what happens to Marty? Try to find a landlord who’ll let us bring a four-hundred-pound pig into his building. I’m begging you, don’t fight me on this. I’m just so worn out over it. At the petting zoo he’ll be around other animals and kids all day. Isn’t that the best plan, if not the only one?”
I couldn’t match her stare.
I’d looked into the petting zoos back in t
he spring, before Mom said Marty could stay, when I was scrambling for any way to keep him off the auction block. The problem was, you can’t put pigs into the same pen when they haven’t grown up together. They’ll fight to the death sometimes, I’d read. So Marty would be alone all day. And if a kid jumped the petting fence and then Marty knocked her over? They’d have to put him down for sure. I’d checked out the animal sanctuaries too, and Mom wasn’t lying when she said that finding one with room for a four-hundred-pound pig could take a long time.
“Renz, maybe you want to go home and spend some time with him. They’re coming tomorrow, the petting zoo people, to pick him up.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I want to get Marty out of Maple Clutch before Animal Control comes to investigate,” she said. “Go on now, okay? I’ll keep you posted about Double. The doctor told me he does ten of these operations a week, and we have nothing to worry about. You have bus money?”
“I, yeah, I think so.”
“Renz, you understand it has to be this way, don’t you?”
I forced myself to nod, but there was no chance I was letting Marty go to a zoo up in Michigan, where he’d never see Bella again, where he’d never see me. He would forever wonder what he’d done to make me send him away.
I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I sure knew what I wasn’t.
“The petting zoo people,” I said. “They’re giving you money, right?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars, and thank the Lord. What, you want me to turn it down? I’d give them money, if I had any, if it would keep Marty safe. The way you’re looking at me, Renzo, I don’t know. You break my heart.”
“You break mine too, lying to me all these years.” I grabbed my tray and made to leave, but she snatched my arm.
“Lying to you?”
“About Dad. About this Hana person.”
She frowned. “We’ll talk about it, him, her, when the time is right.”
“I’ve been hearing the same story from you my whole life, which is no story. I know what happened anyway. He didn’t get killed. He ran off with Hana, and you’re still jealous about it. There, you don’t have to worry about telling me anymore.”
“He would never do that,” she said. “He wasn’t that type. I can’t have you think that way about him. Hey, look at me. You don’t know him.”
“And I never will, thanks to you.”
“He didn’t leave us for anybody else.” She got hold of my hand and squeezed it. “He’s gone, Renz. He’s dead. He shot himself.”
“Wait, say that again? Wait, don’t.” The cobbler I’d eaten was coming up a lot faster than I’d put it down.
33. THE TRUTH ABOUT SERGEANT MARTIN ANTHONY VENTURA
I made it outside to the courtyard trash can in time to throw up the cobbler before I choked on it. I was weak and shivering, never mind the August heat. I had to sit before I fell. The cement bench was baking hot and burned through my jeans.
My father had made all those people happy with his music. He’d saved his buddy Raj. How does that same person kill himself a week before I was born?
Now I wished he really had run off with Hana. Anything would have been better than what my mother said he’d done. It made no sense.
She was sitting with me now, wiping my chin with a napkin, rubbing my back. “Renzo, sweetheart, I know. I was the same way when I found out.”
“Why?” I said. “Why’d he do it?”
“There was a last letter,” she said. “The one I never gave you. I’ll show it to you in a few days, after everything settles down.”
“Tell me now,” I said. “Tell me what he said.”
“You’ll need to be steady to read it. To be prepared the way I wasn’t. I can’t even think about it sometimes. I can’t not think about it. We’ll read it together, with Double, when he comes home. For a long time I blamed myself. There were signs after all. Warnings. My mother, on her deathbed, said, ‘That man is beautiful, and he is so very good, but he needs watching. He’s got the rain in his eyes.’”
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“The sadness,” my mother said. “You see it in people sometimes, even when they’re smiling and making you crack up with a good story or hooting along with a song. They’re thinking, Yes, this is fun, this life. And lovely. Too lovely. But not for everybody. For some it’s so hard, the world, cold in the way it’s set up. The way we all suffer through at times, on the sharp end of somebody else’s greed, or our own. It’s bittersweet, the living, right? I was so mad, Renz. I still am, in my more vulnerable moments. Why couldn’t he come home to me for help? Didn’t he trust that I would listen? That I would have stayed right alongside him, gotten him to the right doctor, the right medicine maybe?”
Her phone buzzed.
“Oh no, please Lord,” she said, fishing in her back pocket. “They said he’d be in surgery another three hours.”
My stomach tightened, until I saw the relief in her face.
“Pal again,” she said. She offered me her phone. “You better call her. She’s all caps and exclamation points.”
“I’ll call her when I get home.” I took another napkin from my mother and wiped the sweat out of my eyes, except new sweat dribbled in. “I better get back to Marty and Bella. They were freaked out when we left.”
“Lorenzo Ventura, can you ever forgive me? I knew I had to tell you sooner or later, but I kept thinking let it be later. Double said you could handle it. From the looks of you, he was right. You’re strong, Renz.”
“Double lied to me,” I said. “He told me Dad’s smile was just plain true.”
“It was, Renz. He was. This is why I didn’t tell you. I close my eyes and do my best to imagine being in his place, seeing the things he’d seen, doing the things he had to do. I still have trouble getting there, but it’s the only way I come a little closer to understanding, to forgiving him, to forgiving myself for not being able to quit being angry with him. I work so hard to find gratitude for the time we had together. But I backslide all the time. All the time.”
Now it made sense, when Mason said, Wait, say that again, when he was on the phone with his buddy at the VA. The friend must have pulled up my dad’s file and told Mason that Sergeant Martin Anthony Ventura died by his own hand. Even John Mason, a stranger, knew about my father before I did.
“I just wish you would have told me sooner, Mom.”
“When?” she said. “On your fifth birthday? Your tenth? Yesterday? Would you have been able to make sense of it then? The last twelve years, a day doesn’t pass when I don’t wonder about it, the same thing you’ll keep wondering now. How could somebody that beautiful do something so ugly?”
Her phone buzzed with another text. She read, “‘Mom, I keep trying the home phone, no luck. Do you know where he is? I’m begging you, make Renzo call me. This is a 911.’”
I took my mother’s phone to a shady corner. I swear my eyes were going to pop with the glare.
34. THE (NON) EMERGENCY
Pal answered her phone on the first ring. “Mom?”
“Pal, it’s me. What’s up?”
“Renz? It doesn’t sound like you.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“Is everything okay?” she said.
“Fine.” I almost told her about Double and Marty and even my dad, but why? She couldn’t fix any of it. The safe place didn’t exist anymore.
“Renz, I’m in serious trouble. It’s awful. I didn’t get the part. The lead role for the summer finale. They gave it to this girl who’s twice as stuck up as that one from the Jamboree, the one who called you fat boy. Remember?”
“Believe it or not I do.”
“They have me playing second fiddle to the likes of her.”
“But you still got a part, right?”
“Renz, it’s like three scene
s. This is my life. If I can’t get the good parts in summer camp, how am I ever going to—”
“Pal? That’s not serious trouble, okay? That’s not even trouble.”
“Wow,” she said. “Okay. So much for coming to you for a little compassion.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I’ve been waiting night after night for you to call.”
“That’s because you don’t have your own phone, you stupid jerk! I can’t even text you. The only way I can get you is the home phone, and I’m up at five to be on time for classes all morning, and then it’s straight through with rehearsals and performances till midnight. You think I’m gonna call then and wake up Mom and Double? If you only knew what I’m going through—”
“Well, I’ll never know either, will I? It isn’t always about you, okay? While you’re up there in dreamland, I’m down here dealing with stuff too. Real stuff.”
“Renz, this isn’t you, being mean like this. What stuff? Tell me. I never heard you so upset.”
“Pal, I’m really sorry, but I have to go.” I clicked off and brought the phone back to Mom.
“Is she okay?” she said.
I nodded. “Call me as soon as Double gets out of surgery?”
“Course.” She did her best not to look worn out. She stood tall and pulled my hair a little. “That mop.”
“I know,” I said.
“Hey you? It’ll be all right.”
I was so sick of hearing that. What people really meant was, it’s rotten but you’ll learn to live with it. “Mom, do I have it too? Do I have the rain in my eyes?”
She brushed my hair back from my forehead. “No,” she said. “You’re my sunshine.”