Subject to Change

by Karen Nesbitt

  Dancing with a loser bad boy is probably on some high school bucket list of hers, like getting a detention. She barely spoke to me when we left. In fact, she acted pissed off. I don’t get girls.

  Finally, the Quatre Saisons truck pulls up along the curb and I trade one set of nerves for another. I wave and climb down from my perch, shrug my jacket onto my shoulders and do up the zipper. One last breath of cool, dog-shit-scented air before getting back in that truck.

  Dad has the window down, and the radio is blaring. He lowers the volume as I open the passenger door. “So, do you have any favorite places to eat?”

  Favorite places? I was hoping to avoid my favorite places. I guess it would be wrong to suggest New York. “Not really.”

  “I know a great little diner in Pincourt. It’ll take a bit of time to get there, but they have breakfast all day. Good and greasy. Are you into it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Sounds perfect. I don’t think I know anyone in Pincourt.

  We don’t talk much. He asks about school. I say it’s fine. He asks about Mom. I say she’s fine. He gives up, and I entertain myself by checking out the truck’s interior. It really is awesome. Eight cylinders. Four-wheel drive. All decked out. It’s not the kind of thing I picture a gay guy driving. What do gay guys drive?

  “Do you mind the radio?”

  “No.”

  “Favorite station?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I don’t tell him it’s already on my favorite station. The name of the song is scrolling on the display: BRIDGE BURNING—Foo Fighters. Is there anything this truck can’t do? I shake my head when I catch the lyrics: “Down crooked stairs and sideways glances comes the king of second chances…They’re all comin’ down…it’s all comin’ round…” Life is funny sometimes. If he notices the lyrics, I can’t tell. His eyes are on the road.

  The sun is intense. The glare off the wet blacktop is almost blinding. The snow is melting so fast, water’s running in black streaks across the road. Dad’s wearing sunglasses, and I notice that his hat says Like a Rock. Through his open window I hear the swishing sound of tires on the pavement as cars pass us. Dad drums out the bass line of the song on the steering wheel with his thumbs. The truck seat is so comfortable. I lean my head against the window, close my eyes and listen to Dave Grohl’s voice.

  “We’re here.” Dad’s tapping me on the shoulder. I open my eyes as we pull into a gas station parking lot. The attached restaurant is called Chez Bob. Hot Coffee is flashing in the window in neon red, and an Open plaque hangs from a chain on the door. This is his favorite place for breakfast? A truck stop?

  “Breakfast or lunch?” the waitress asks.

  Dad looks at me. “Breakfast?”

  “Sure.” I’m not sure I can eat, so it doesn’t really matter.

  She grabs two menus and takes us to a table that looks out onto the forest behind the restaurant. There’s a woodpecker busy in a nearby tree.

  Dad takes off his Chevy cap and hangs it on the back of his chair. I open my menu and hide behind it. I already know what I want. My favorite breakfast is pancakes with bacon and sausages. Lots of maple syrup. Lots of ketchup. Suddenly I’m starving, and I can smell food frying in the kitchen.

  The waitress comes back with coffee. Dad turns up his cup, and I order a glass of juice.

  “Do you still love pancakes?”

  “Yeah.” I check the menu. Yes! They have real maple syrup.

  The place is pretty full, mostly guys who look like they belong to the semis idling outside. A clump of teenagers huddled around a table staring at their phones makes my heart race. Trying to be subtle, checking to see if I know any of them, I knock my cutlery off the table with my menu. Smooth. In a perfect performance of synchronized head turning, four faces bob toward me, then back to their phones. Luckily, I don’t recognize anyone. I swipe my stuff from the ground and bury my head again in Bob’s all-day-breakfast specials.

  The waitress returns. I give her my order, and Dad asks for eggs, bacon and hash browns. He looks at me over his reading glasses. “You really should try the potatoes. They’re famous.” So I tell the waitress to add hash browns to my order. What the hell? It’s not like I’m watching my figure. She walks away with our menus. Dad puts his glasses in his shirt pocket. “How was the soccer meeting?”

  “Fine.” I start playing with the salt and pepper shakers, rolling their flat sides against each other.

  “That was really great news from the police.”

  “Yup.” It’s not news when you knew it already.

  He still has tooth marks—two scabs—on his forehead. Great. I’ll have to be reminded all through breakfast what a maniac I was before.

  “Declan, I owe you an apology.”

  “Huh?”

  “I know I said before that I thought you guys needed me gone. All that stuff in the truck.” He waves both arms around his head like he’s imitating a crazy person. “You made me think. I told myself you guys were better off without me.” His arms land with a thud on the table. “But you were right. I made a decision, and you helped me to see that some part of it was selfish. The truth is, I was afraid to face you. Kate and Seamus were so angry. I just couldn’t handle it. It was up to me—your mom and me, I guess—to do damage control, to find a new way to be a family. We—I—dropped the ball.” His eyes are down, and he shakes his head. He keeps curling and flattening the corners of his paper place mat.

  I just stare at him. Getting an apology is nice and everything, and I can tell he’s actually feeling bad, but what am I supposed to do with it? I try to let his words sink in, but the truth is, I don’t know what to say. I don’t really feel anything. He makes eye contact with me again and continues. “I hope one day you’ll be able to forgive me, not for being gay—”

  A reflex kicks in and I scan the other tables, especially the one with the teenagers. But nobody’s paying any attention to us.

  “—but for being selfish and pretending I left because of something else.”

  I nod and try to keep up with what he’s saying about how hard he’s had to work to accept himself because of his own homophobia. He was homophobic. I want to hear what he’s saying, but I can’t help glancing once in a while to see if anyone’s listening to our conversation. He tells me he hated himself because he thought everyone else hated what he was, and he couldn’t change it. That makes me think about us—me and Mom and Seamus and Kate. It makes me think it wasn’t fair, what we did, if he had no choice about who he was. He had to learn not to be ashamed.

  I’m relieved when our food arrives. I stop checking for eavesdroppers and dig into some of the fluffiest pancakes and most perfect crisp bacon I’ve ever had. I drown everything in syrup and ketchup. The fried-potato smell reaches my nostrils, and I stab one and pop it into my mouth. He’s right—the hash browns are out of this world. Golden and hot, with little chunks of browned onion. Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. Salty. Spicy. They barely even need ketchup.

  He smiles as he watches me, then pokes a potato chunk on his own plate, dips it in ketchup and tells me that when the shit hit the fan at home, they tried to keep the details from his father. My grandfather was about to make Dad a partner in the landscaping business, O’Reilly et fils. The company would have been his when Grandpa retired except he found out Dad was gay, and he was so angry he fired him instead. Dad chuckles and waves a forkful of potato in the air. “And then he told me to stay away from the house too. That I wasn’t welcome at either place unless I could straighten up and fly right.” He shoves the hash brown in his mouth. His fork makes a loud clang when it hits the plate. “He sold the business out from under me, and I just let him.”

  Ditched by your own dad, eh? Yeah, that’s tough. But I don’t say that. I’m starting to get a picture of what was going on at the time, what we never even knew about. I knew Grandpa had sold the company, and that Mom had to leave because the new owner didn’t need he
r anymore. I guess I could have put two and two together and filled in the rest myself.

  “Why did you tell Grandpa—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how did he—”

  Dad hesitates, his head tipped to the side like he’s deciding how to answer. “He and Seamus had a heart-to-heart.”

  Prickly heat creeps up my neck and into my face as I begin to understand that my brother outed my father. And that maybe this whole fucked-up mess is as much his fault as Dad’s. It’s getting so I can’t keep track of the crap my family has dumped on each other.

  He shrugs, like he can read my mind. “I’m not mad at Seamus. He had no idea. He was just an angry, confused, thirteen-year-old kid. From his point of view, I had betrayed him. I don’t need anyone to feel sorry for me. I spent years lying about who I was, mostly to myself. After everything else that happened, I had no right to expect you kids to—”

  “Wait, are you saying you knew you were gay when you married Mom?”

  He nods. “Of course I knew.”

  “But—”

  “Declan, I’m not proud of it. People weren’t out then like they are now. Marrying your mom was a way to have a life I wanted, with someone I loved, without having to face who I really was. I never thought it would end like it did. I assumed I could pull it off. It was your mom who figured it out.” He mimes tipping a drink to his mouth. “She sent me to AA.”

  I scrunch up my face. I don’t remember anything about a drinking problem.

  “That’s where I met Brian.”

  I can’t help it, but I get this image of my dad having sex with a guy named Brian. What does he look like? What color is his hair? Is he tall? Does he wear a Chevy cap? Pajamas? I have to push the image out of my mind. “Did you even love her?”

  “I know it’s hard to understand, but I did. I still do. I guess there are different kinds of love. From the moment your mom and I met, we hit it off. And all our friends were getting hitched, so we did too. It was what everyone expected. We spent almost every day together until…I think deep down I believed she would accept me no matter what. She’s a very special person, your mom.”

  I can’t believe he just said that. He betrayed her, lied to her, took advantage of her. That’s how you treat someone you think is special? She even lost her job. But then I remember it was Seamus’s fault too. It must have been a horrible time for them both. I lower my eyebrows, get rid of the what the fuck? look on my face and try hard to understand what was going on back then. What’s going on now?

  “Brian and AA helped me see I couldn’t keep being dishonest—to everyone, to myself. I couldn’t keep living that way. It wasn’t fair.”

  “So that’s when you and”—I hesitate, try to make the name in my mouth—“Brian had the affair?” My heart beats fast in my throat. I’m expecting him to get angry, but he barely flinches.

  “Oh yeah. That.” He looks down, shaking his head. “I screwed up—badly. I should’ve faced things with your mom first. But I needed some hope.” He shrugs with his knife in the air and glances up at me. “Brian was just there.” For a few long moments he sits, hanging his head over his half-eaten breakfast. I don’t know what else to do, so I stare at the top of his head through his thinning blond hair. “I had blind spots, you know? Couldn’t see what I was doing. When I look back, I can’t believe what an asshole I was.” He puts his knife and fork on his plate, folds his napkin over everything and pushes it away. He finds a hangnail and picks at it for a while, his hands in front of him where his plate used to be. I can’t help but wonder if he’s going to finish his hash browns. “I couldn’t handle everyone’s reactions, and losing your mom and you kids. It was agony, and I’d caused it myself. I deserved it. So I hid.”

  It’s no gift to be able to see the other side. I always thought of my dad leaving as something he did to us. Now I can’t help but see what we did too. Everything is way more complicated than I thought. In a single day, my life had turned into confusion and chaos. But when we pushed him away, he was lost and struggling too.

  “I shouldn’t have. And I was wrong to say I thought it was better for you. It was a mistake. A big one. When I hear what it’s done to Seamus, how off the rails he is…He needed a father—a man—in his life.”

  “But you’re not—” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I realize what an asshole I am.

  “A man?”

  I wish there was something left on my plate to stick my fork into, but there’s not. I drag my finger through a line of ketchup and syrup and try to catch the look on his face without him noticing. This time I’m sure he’s going to be angry, insulted, but no. I wipe my finger on my napkin, and he just continues talking. “Being a father, having my family—those were the best years of my life. I like to think I was pretty good at being a dad. I enjoyed it. Your mom and I were happy together. Lots of good memories. I could never regret anything because I’m glad there’s a Kate and a Seamus and a Declan in the world. Maybe it’s too late to reach Seamus, but Mandy—”

  I look up, because he’s stopped talking. Little pools of tears brim in his eyes and reflect the lights of the diner overhead, like sparkles. He shakes his head. “You’re great kids. It’s been hard for your mom with nothing from me but a check once a month.”

  A check once a month? Well, of course, dickhead. It was a divorce. That’s how it works. But Mom never said anything about getting child support. I’m shaking my head, and he’s still holding back tears. There was real regret in his voice. I have to look away because it’s too intense watching him while he tries to get his shit together. It’s not about money or responsibility. I see that. It’s about time. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it already is too late for my brother.

  “Well, what about Seamus?” I say.

  Dad swirls the rest of his coffee around in his cup. “Seamus is struggling with his own demons.”

  “He acts like he hates everyone. He doesn’t care how much he hurts us.”

  “I guess he’s hurting. Some guys are ashamed of feelings like that. They think it means they’re”—he pauses—“weak.”

  I get it. The way he says it, I know he means gay. Seamus is afraid he’s gay? “So that’s why he’s acting like a jerk?”

  “Soft on the inside, tough on the outside. Like a crab.”

  I consider the idea of Seamus as a crab. So he’s just hurt and fighting like hell because it scares him? Scares him that maybe he’s weak. Or scares him that he’s like his father. “So you think he’s afraid he’s gay?”

  Dad shrugs. “There’s no reason to think he is gay. You can’t catch it or inherit it, you know.”

  “No. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we were all pretty affected when you”— there’s a term for what I want to say—“came out.”

  “I know, Deck.” He sighs. “I’d just like to reboot.”

  Deck. He called me Deck. Not Dekkie, like Mom. And he listened to what I said, is even thinking about it. All of a sudden it strikes me that I’m having a conversation with him. This must have been what it was like for him and Seamus when they went camping together. I’ve been lost in it, not thinking about anything else. Just sitting here, having a convo with my dad. It doesn’t make any difference that he’s gay. He acts like any other dad. Nice, like Mitch’s dad, who takes him shopping, or like Dave’s dad, who goes to concerts with him, or Leah’s dad, who drives her friends around. Only he’s mine. Maybe I would like to reboot too.

  He still thinks of himself as our dad; that’s pretty clear. Wants to help Seamus. I try to picture any situation where my brother would give Dad that chance, and I can’t. Who knows though? I never expected to be sitting down for lunch with my dad, and here I am. Maybe he’s right about Seamus. Seamus the crab. I start to get a worried feeling in the pit of my stomach. Where the hell is he?

  “Declan.” Dad’s voice brings me back to our table in the diner. “I’ve had five years to think
about things. To make sense of my life, past and present. Lots of therapy. Lots of soul-searching. Lots of mistakes. I’m better now. Sober. But it took a long time. And I’m missing my family—my kids.” His voice catches.

  My stomach is a ball of nerves. I pick up my fork and scratch zigzags into the smudges of ketchup on my plate. I’m not sure what I want anymore. In the truck, I yelled at him, told him I wasn’t interested. He still reminds me of so many bad feelings. At the same time, I’m sitting here talking with my dad. Like, for the first time in years, I have one.

  I put my fork down. “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?” He looks surprised.

  “I don’t know. Okay, I hear what you’re saying, I guess.”

  He leans his head forward like he’s trying to get a better look at me. Our eyes meet. “We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for Kate. She’s trying to make it better. At first I thought it was just for Mandy. But after you left the other night, she told me to give you time. Kate wants this, and I want this, so bad. I thought I’d messed things up for good…”

  I still don’t get why she never said anything to me. “How did you start seeing her?”

  “Total accident. I bumped into her and Mandy at Canadian Tire.” He pauses. “I couldn’t believe Mandy. Such a gorgeous kid. It breaks my heart.” He breathes in really fast, almost gasping.

  Suddenly it hits me, what he’s missed. It’s all summed up in this: when Mandy was born, we were all there except him. He obviously loves her. I remember those times he and Seamus spent together, camping and snowmobiling, and when he coached me in soccer. He made us a garden, and then he was just…gone.

  My chair screeches backward. I mumble an excuse and make a beeline for the bathroom. I lock myself in the stall and try to be silent, scrubbing tears off my face with toilet paper. A couple of guys come in to use the urinal. Thank God no one needs the toilet. It’s quiet for a while, and then the door opens. I hear my dad’s voice.