One Good Dog (30 page)

Gina raises a hand and touches Adam’s face gently, tracing the route of his fresh scar. “I was married for two years. A long time ago.”

Adam begins to stroke Gina’s hair back from her face. Waits. He wants to know that she isn’t grieving for a lost love. “What happened?”

“I told him to get out.”

Adam shifts a little under Gina’s weight. “And did he?”

“Went without a protest. Easiest thing I ever did.”

“You are a very strong woman.” Adam bends and kisses her on the forehead.

Gina moves off him, sits up, and takes his face in her hands. “So are you, a strong man, even when it hurts.”

They lay quietly for a time, until Gina moves away from
him, turning in the bed to look at him, putting her hand on the cheek without the slash. “Adam.”

“Yes?”

“You’re doing the right thing.”

Adam has chosen his clothing carefully. Chinos, not jeans. A light blue dress shirt, but one that has been retired from business, demoted to weekend wear. No tie. A golf jacket, not a sports coat. On his feet a pair of Reeboks. At first, Adam thought that he’d wear his best suit, his most expensive shoes, his favorite understated tie, but when he took them out of the closet, they looked wrong, formal wear at the diner. The statement he wants to make needs to be spoken, not bespoke.

Adam has circled the block twice, ostensibly looking for a parking place, but there are several to choose from on this residential street. He finally parks directly in front of the house.

The three-decker house looms over an empty lot on one side and a more recent two-family house on the left. It is painted in graduated shades of brown, tan, and yellow, so that the third floor seems less substantial than the first two. A double driveway takes up the space between the houses, a thin grass strip of border between them; a light gold Marquis sits alone on the right side. The porch steps lead to twin front doors. He knows
that one will lead to a stairwell, the other to the first-floor apartment. Adam checks the address in his hand—42 A, first floor. A fence encircles the property, rhododendron bushes softening the chain link. Adam opens the gate, careful to replace the latch. There is a small round table on the porch, tucked into the corner, a citronella candle full of dead matches in the middle of it. The last few nights have been cold, and a pair of chairs are folded up, leaning against the porch rail as if done for the season.

The door on the left is the one he wants. A brass plate with
March
written in script adorns the doorbell. All Adam has to do is push the white button. He shoves one hand into his jacket pocket, runs the other through his hair, over his face, forgetting that his cheek is quite tender even though the stitches are out. Adam feels a light scrim of sweat prickle against his exposed neck, beneath his arms. This is ridiculous, he thinks. He’s performed far greater acts of courage in the business arena, boldly facing down naysayers and enemies to prove his point. Asking Sterling Carruthers to marry him; asking for her hand from one of the most powerful men he’s ever known. Adam suddenly realizes that he’d either better push the damned doorbell or retreat before someone notices him standing out here like some anxious adolescent on his first date.

None of the other brave moments of his life ever felt so fragile. All the other times, he was absolute in his vision of the outcome. This time, this once, he has no idea what resolution he wants.

Adam presses his forefinger into the bell. Twice.

A woman opens the solid wood door, leaving the storm door latched. The screens are still in, and she looks at him
through the fine mesh. She studies him, looks past him to determine if he’s alone. “You’re not a Jehovah, are you?”

“No.” Adam has forgotten to rehearse what he might say, fully expecting his father to be the one to answer the door. He hasn’t considered this, that there might be a wife.

They study each other through the door.

“I’m Adam March. John’s son.”

She nods slowly, considering this bit of information. “Yes. Yes, you are. Come in.” She unlatches the storm door and stands aside to let him in. The small foyer with an empty hat stand leads to the front parlor. He can smell something baking, brownies or maybe a cake, the aroma coming from beyond the parlor. The room is tidy, uncluttered. Old-fashioned furniture: a sofa and matching wing chairs, a mahogany occasional table with a pair of silver candlesticks on either end, a Revere bowl in the center. “Wait here.” She doesn’t invite him to sit.

He looks around the room but remains standing in the middle of the Oriental area rug. The pattern is worn in the center, but still beautiful in reds, blues, and yellows. Adam realizes he’s looking for something, some item that will connect him to this home. He walks over to the fireplace, where there are three matching silver frames. He studies the photos: a wedding picture, a baby picture, and a family group.

He is still studying the photo when the woman comes back into the room.

“That’s my family. My son, Carl, his wife, Jennifer, and their kids.” She doesn’t take the picture down, doesn’t touch it. “I’m Bea. John’s wife.”

“I’m Adam. And this is awkward.”

Bea March smiles at him. “I know it is.”

“Is he here?”

“Yes. I’ll take you to him. I have to warn you: He’s not well. Bedridden.” She looks away, studies the pattern in the rug. “It’s lung cancer. Couldn’t get him to give them up.” Bea pulls her gaze from the floor to meet Adam’s eyes. “I don’t want him riled up, and he’s already riled up knowing that you’re here. You probably have a million questions, but if you can keep it to a few, that would be best. I won’t have him tired out.”

“Just one. Just one question.”

“Okay. One question.”

Bea leads Adam through the dining room and down a short hallway. The scent of baking is now mingled with a mild pungency beneath an overlay of air freshener. She knocks on the door with a single knuckle and Adam can see how nervous she is. “Johnny, he’s here.”

There is a sound, a hissing susurration of air accented by an audible blip, like the sound made by someone clearing a piece of tobacco off his tongue. Bea doesn’t wait for an answer, but swings the dark-stained door open to let Adam in. John March is in a hospital bed, the head cranked up so that he is sitting at an angle, the foot bent slightly so that his legs are elevated. A white sheet is pulled up to his waist, folded down, and straightened over an orange thermal blanket, and Adam knows that Bea has just tidied him up for company. The gray face that looks at him is hollow-cheeked, a nasal cannula fitted under the nose. The eyes, deep brown, stare at him, assessing him, quite obviously reconciling this man with the boy he last saw nearly forty years ago. The boy he left behind, the boy he gave to the state. Adam swallows. The shape in the bed raises a hand, reaches out. That hand is shaking, trembling with nerves or with palsy. Adam can’t tell which,
but his own hand is equally tremulous. There is a folding chair placed beside the bed. Bea touches Adam on the shoulder and points to it, then walks out of the tiny, claustrophobic room and shuts the door behind her.

Adam is close enough now to see the places where Bea has missed when shaving his father. His hair is steel gray, slicked back from his forehead and longish in back. Adam remembers that his father always wore his hair in what used to be called a pompadour, a style that required an application of Brylcreem. He remembers the tube on the sink in the bathroom, the smell of it. It comes back to him in a flood of recollection. His father, standing at the bathroom mirror, black comb sweeping this way and that. His dark brown hair turned jet black, glistening from the hair cream. He’d sing the slogan: “A little dab’ll do ya.” Adam would sing it, too, ask for a dab of Brylcreem.

It’s the first time he’s thought of that, ever. All the thoughts he’s ever had about his father have been of his temper, his fighting with Veronica, of her leaving. A little dab’ll do ya.

“Hello, Dad.”

His father smiles, and over the sound of the oxygen machine, his own voice a breathy susurration, he answers. “Hello, son.” He taps the covers with a hand that is bruised from the permanent line in his vein, and Adam wonders if he’s supposed to take it.

Adam gets one question, if he’s to play by Bea’s rules. One question after a lifetime.

John March licks his dry lips. “How you been?”

His father’s first question after a lifetime.

“Why, Dad? Why did you let me go?”

His father reaches up for the cannula, pulls it away from
his nose. “I had no choice. I was alone.” He puts the cannula back but misses one nostril.

“Why didn’t you come back? When I was old enough? Why did you leave me in the system?” Adam reaches over and helps replace the tube.

“Complicated.”

Adam knows that he’s used up his allotted question, and he still has no answer. The old man is struggling to remove the cannula again, and Adam presses his hand away from his face. “I know it is. I just don’t understand why you stopped contacting me even once a year. But you know what? I managed. I succeeded. I have a daughter. You have a grandchild. You missed knowing her. You missed knowing me.”

There are tears in the old man’s eyes, but they seem less like tears of regret than tears of defiance. Adam sits back, taking a deep breath that is filled with the smells of illness and old man. Two eight-by-ten framed photographs sit on the bureau. For a moment, Adam thinks that one is a picture of Ariel that has somehow come into his father’s possession. The long blond hair, the angle of the chin to eye, the closed-lip Mona Lisa smile. Veronica. The other is of him, a gap-toothed five-year-old with a crew cut and wearing a plaid shirt. Sears portraits. The photographer had him hold a toy train. Adam remembers this. And the swoop of recognition, of memory, threatens to force him to run from the room. His father has kept those studio portraits, taken weeks before Veronica was dead and he was placed into the foster system.

“Why did you—” Adam stops. There are no answers to his questions. None that he wants to hear; none that will make forty years of anger go away. He stands and opens the bedroom door. “Good-bye.”

John March raises his hand again, struggles against his disease to speak. “Will I see you again?”

Adam is aware of the irony. He has turned the tables on his father; he has the upper hand, the ability to choose to see him or not. The choice to get even. The last time he asked his father that question, “Will I see you again?” his father had said, “Sure. Soon.” And then he disappeared from his life. The hurt, the anger, the grief eventually mellowed into a dissonant memory. Adam turned his sights to a future that he would have control of. That he thought he had control of. One that turned out to be beyond his control.

“Sure. Soon.”

Beatrice March is waiting for him. She takes him into the kitchen, despite Adam’s protests that he has to go. She sits him down and puts a cup of coffee in front of him; a plate with warm brownies cools in the middle of the kitchen table. She is wearing an old-fashioned apron, the kind that slips over the shoulders and crisscrosses in back. She doesn’t sit down, stands to one side instead, her hands busy with wiping the counter, her back to him. He feels like a little boy waiting in a neighbor’s kitchen. Waiting quietly for a parent to return to fetch him, or a pal to burst into the room. Waiting for an adult to take over the moment.

“He told me about you.” Bea wrings the sponge out into the sink. She doesn’t look at him as she says this. “About having a child he had to give up. Broke his heart. I will tell you that.”

“If it broke his heart so badly, why didn’t he keep in touch with me? He did, you know, for a few years. Come see me, take me out to lunch. Then, when I was maybe ten, he didn’t
come. No contact. No one ever told me why. I began to assume he was dead.”

Bea turns to Adam, pulls out the chair opposite, and sits down. “No one ever said what happened?”

Adam’s heart does a tricky little quickstep. “No.”

Bea presses her hand to her forehead. “Men don’t admit failure easily. John doesn’t admit failure easily. He’d failed with poor Veronica. He was adrift with a five-year-old, couldn’t work enough hours to make a living. Right after Veronica left, he was offered a job doing long-distance trucking. It was good money, but he knew that he would never be home. He had no prospects of being able to offer a kid a consistent home life. It was the best choice he could make at the time. To put you in state care. He wanted you to have a family, to be adopted. As painful as that was, it’s what he saw as the best choice for you.”

“You’re excusing him.”

“Damn right I am. The first thing he told me about himself when we met, and we’ve been married twenty-five years, is that he’d lost his family. And how it had been his fault. He’s rarely spoken of it since. It’s too painful.”

The quickstep has settled into an arrhythmic thumping.

“Then they told him you were unadoptable as long as there was a parent in the picture. He wanted a better chance for you, a chance at a stable home. He had no family to help. He thought that if you were adoptable, you’d finally have that stability. He anguished over it until he finally gave you up.”

“And I was never adopted.”

“He never knew that. The belief that you had a happy home was all that cheered him when he got despondent about the past. The belief that you had ended up with a better life than that of the son of a transient.”

“He doesn’t look very transient to me. You’ve got a nice home. You raised kids together.”

“No. I raised Carl, in this house, by myself. I met your father after he retired. Course, he wasn’t a trucker anymore; he retired as a mechanic, so, yes, he wasn’t transient anymore. He lived next door. Rented from the Garritys. Turned their backyard into a vegetable garden. I used to watch him from the kitchen window. I knew who you were in a minute because you look just like he did back then. Handsome.” Bea covers her mouth with one hand, then reaches for her coffee cup. “Since he’s been sick, he’s been talking a lot about you. Wondering about you.”