The kid FLICKED my father’s ear like he was checking a melon at the grocery store.
My dad is sixty-eight and he drove four hours to meet me at this bar because I am leaving my husband and I didn’t want to say it over the phone. He ordered a Coors Light. He was halfway through it when the three of them walked in.
I was in the bathroom when it started. I came out and saw the one in the backwards cap holding his phone sideways, filming, grinning at his friends like they’d already won something.
“Grandpa lost,” the tall one said. “Senior center’s down the street.”
My dad didn’t move. He has this thing he does where he goes very still, and I’ve only seen it twice in my life. Once when a dog cornered my little brother in someone’s yard. Once at my mother’s funeral when my uncle said something about her.
The third kid, the one doing the flicking, leaned in close. “I said you don’t BELONG here, old man.”
My father set his beer down. Quarter inch of foam left.
He started rolling up his right sleeve. Slow. Methodical, the way he used to roll them up to do dishes when Mom was sick.
I saw the tattoo before they did. I’d seen it a thousand times growing up. Faded green skull, beret, a number underneath I was never allowed to ask about. He told me once it was from “a job a long time ago” and that was the end of that conversation forever.
The kid with the phone stopped grinning.
“Put it down,” my dad said to him. Not loud. Just clear.
The phone didn’t go down.
My dad turned his head, fully, toward the one who’d flicked him. Tilted his good ear forward.
“My right ear works just fine,” he said. “Say it again. Clearly.”
The bar got very quiet. The bartender, a woman maybe fifty, put both hands flat on the wood and didn’t move them.
“Bro,” the tall one said. “Bro, let’s just – “
“No,” my dad said. “He had something to say.”
The flicker’s mouth opened.
Then the door behind us opened too, and a voice I hadn’t heard since I was nine said, “Don’t, son. That’s the man I told you about.”
The Man at the Door
I turned around.
He was maybe sixty-five. Big through the shoulders, gone soft at the middle the way men do when they stop needing to be hard. Gray at the temples. He was wearing a flannel shirt and work boots and he had his hand already on his kid’s arm, the flicker, and his grip looked like it hurt.
I didn’t recognize his face at first. Then I did.
Dale Pruitt. He used to live two streets over from us. He moved away when I was in fourth grade, maybe third. I remembered him because he had a truck that backfired and because once, when I was maybe seven, he carried me on his shoulders at a block party so I could see the fireworks over the rooflines.
He was looking at my dad the way you look at something you’re not sure is real.
My dad looked at him for a long second. Then: “Dale.”
“Gene,” Dale said. His voice had something in it I couldn’t name.
The kid, the flicker, was staring at his father like he’d never seen him before. His hand was still up, sort of, the one he’d used. He lowered it.
“I’m sorry,” Dale said. He wasn’t talking to me. “Gene, I’m sorry. He didn’t know.”
“He knew enough,” my dad said. But it was flat. Not mean. Just true.
What Dale Said Next
Dale walked his son to the bar. Not gently. He sat him down on a stool and stood next to him and he spoke low enough that I only caught pieces. Something about you don’t know who. Something about I told you there are men. Something about sit there and don’t open your mouth again.
Then Dale came over to our table.
He pulled out a chair without asking. My dad didn’t stop him.
“Your daughter?” Dale said, nodding at me.
“Yeah.”
“She looks like Carol.”
My dad’s jaw moved once. “I know.”
That was the whole conversation about my mother. Two lines. I’ve sat through entire eulogies that said less.
Dale put his hands on the table. He had a scar across the back of his left one, wide and old, the kind that comes from something fast. “I told Marcus about you. About the both of you. When he was maybe twelve.” He shook his head. “Didn’t stick the way I thought it would.”
“Things don’t always,” my dad said.
“No.” Dale looked at his son at the bar. Marcus was staring at his phone now, or pretending to. The tall friend had already left. The one with the backwards cap was one stool down, very still, looking at nothing. “He’s not bad. He’s just twenty-two.”
“I know what twenty-two is,” my dad said.
Dale nodded. He knew my dad knew.
What I Know About the Tattoo
I am forty-one years old. I have asked about that tattoo maybe a dozen times across my whole life and I have gotten exactly nothing. A job a long time ago. Before your mother. Before this town. That’s all.
My brother Kevin thinks it’s Special Forces. He’s said this so many times it’s become family background noise, like the way the furnace clicks in winter.
What I actually know: my dad was in the Army. He went in at eighteen and came back at twenty-three and never talked about what happened in between those five years except once, when he’d had three beers at Kevin’s wedding and said, I was in some places where the trees were wrong. Kevin and I looked at each other and neither of us asked what that meant and he never said it again.
The number under the skull is eight digits. I memorized it when I was a kid the way kids memorize things that feel important. I’ve never looked it up. I don’t know why. Some part of me has always understood that it’s not mine to look up.
Dale Pruitt knew what it meant. That much was obvious from the second he walked through the door.
The Bartender
The bartender’s name was Pam. I know because Dale called her that when he ordered a club soda for his son and a beer for himself.
Pam had not moved from her spot at the wood. She’d watched the whole thing. When Dale sat down she finally exhaled and picked up a glass and started drying it, and she looked at my dad with an expression I recognized because it was the same one my mom used to make. The one that means I see you and I’m not going to make it weird.
She brought my dad a fresh Coors Light without him asking. Set it down next to the old one, which still had that quarter inch of foam, gone flat now.
“On the house,” she said.
My dad looked up at her. “Thank you, Pam.”
She nodded and went back to her end of the bar.
He didn’t touch the new beer for a while.
Why I Came Here
I should back up.
I picked this bar because it’s in Dellwood, which is the halfway point between my dad’s house and mine, more or less. I picked it because it looked like the kind of place where nobody would bother us. A Tuesday afternoon. Quiet. I figured we’d sit in a corner booth and I’d tell him about Marcus, my husband Marcus, which is a coincidence in naming that I only just now noticed and which feels like some kind of joke the universe is making at my expense.
I’ve been with my husband for eleven years. Married for eight. No kids. We tried. That’s a whole other story.
I called my dad three weeks ago and said I need to tell you something in person and he said when and where and that was it. He didn’t ask what. He didn’t speculate. He drove four hours on a Thursday and sat down and ordered a Coors Light and waited.
That’s my dad.
I hadn’t even started talking yet when those three walked in.
After Dale Left
Dale and Marcus left about twenty minutes later. Dale stopped at our table on the way out. He put his hand on my dad’s shoulder, just for a second, and my dad let him.
“You still up in Garrett?” Dale asked.
“Same house,” my dad said.
“Good.” Dale looked like he wanted to say more. He didn’t. He steered his son toward the door and they were gone.
The bar settled back into whatever it normally was. Pam turned the TV up a little. A couple at the far end went back to their conversation. The backwards-cap kid slipped out without looking at anyone.
My dad picked up the new beer. Took a sip. Set it down.
“Okay,” he said. He looked at me. “Tell me.”
So I did.
I told him about the last two years. The distance that grew so slow I almost didn’t notice it until I was standing on one side of it looking across at a man I didn’t know how to reach anymore. The counseling we tried and stopped. The night in February when I sat in my car in our own driveway for forty minutes because I didn’t want to go inside. The morning I woke up and thought, this is not my life, and couldn’t un-think it.
My dad listened. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t offer anything until I was completely done, and even then he waited another ten seconds.
“Are you safe?” he said. First thing.
“Yes. He’s not like that.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Are you sure?”
“Dad. Yes.”
“Okay,” he said again. And then: “Do you need money?”
I almost laughed. “No.”
“Do you need a place to stay?”
“I have a plan. I have somewhere to go.”
He looked at his beer. Then at me. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
We sat there a while. The TV showed a baseball game nobody was watching. Pam refilled my water without asking.
“Dad,” I said. “What did you and Dale do? Back then.”
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “We kept each other alive for a while.”
I didn’t ask anything else.
He rolled his sleeve back down. Buttoned the cuff. Picked up his beer and finished it in two swallows.
“You want food?” he said. “I saw a menu.”
—
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For more stories that show how shocking real-life encounters can be, check out My Daughter Was Burning Up and the ER Made Me Fill Out Forms First or My Wife Couldn’t Breathe and the Clerk Smiled at Me Like I Was the Problem.
