Truly(122)

“For Christ’s sake,” Dean said.

Ben stood and held his hand out for the rag, forcing a smile that he hoped would reassure. “It’s all right,” he said. “I want to help.”

Atticus gave it to him, but if anything he looked more frightened than before.

Ben ran the rag over the edge of the table to stop the spill and then maneuvered around Marnie to the sink, where he rinsed it, wrung it out. “It’s only orange juice,” he said as he finished mopping it up.

His father’s eyes lifted from his plate, and the hard gleam in them woke an old, buried terror in Ben.

Don’t make him mad.

But his father had already stolen his childhood. He’d taken the farm away, kicked him out of his life. There was nothing left he could take.

“Don’t you start,” Dean warned.

All the kids had gone quiet around the table. Marnie wrung a dish towel, her eyes on her husband’s face.

Ben could feel his jaw thrust out, the tightness spreading up his neck from his shoulders and down to his fists. This was what he’d tried to tell May—how good it could feel to be angry. It was right that he should have some power in this place, at this table, where he’d never had it before.

What did I ever start? he wondered. What did I ever do to him?

The wide eyes of the three boys on the other side of the table answered both questions.

They’d done nothing. He’d done nothing.

It was their father who was the problem.

Ben’s fist relaxed.

There was no fight in this kitchen worth getting into. Any angry words he exchanged, any violence he brought here would only be visited on these three boys. They didn’t deserve it.

He resumed his seat and took a polite bite of the scrambled eggs Marnie had placed in front of him.

“You expecting me to give you something?” his father asked. “Hand you money? Beg forgiveness?”

“No. I’m … I just wanted to look around.”

His father dropped his balled-up napkin on top of his plate, signaling that his meal had come to an end. “Look all you want. I’ve got things to do.”

The kitchen door slammed behind him.

Through the screen, Ben watched him walk across the yard toward the barn, a stiff hitch in his step that hadn’t been there the last time Ben was home. More than ever, his father was a rigid son of a bitch. A demanding, difficult bully who’d developed high standards and spent most of his life measuring everyone he met against them and complaining when they fell short.

No wonder Ben hated himself.

Atticus sniffled and shifted in his seat. Marnie put her hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder. Her wide-set gray eyes met Ben’s.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to see the farm.”

“Take a look around,” she said quietly. “We’ll be going to church before too long. But I think when we get back …”

“I’ll be sure to be gone by then.”

“Thank you.”

Ben finished his eggs and toast. He put his plate by the sink and went outside, clinging to the door handle until it came to rest soundlessly against the jamb.

He walked straight to the chicken house.

The building sat on a slope, the back side set into the rise of the land so that a relatively nimble boy could easily climb the bricks and onto the roof. The mortar felt crumbly beneath his fingers. Deteriorating, like the rest of the place.

His father would have made him patch the mortar.

He hauled himself up and breathed in the view. Coming off the lake, the air had a bite. He tightened his abs to lock down a cough that wanted to come.

This had been his place once—this vista out over the farm, the hives to his right at the margin of the patch of woods where they cleared brush, chopped firewood, and found a Christmas tree every December. The neat rows of the berry plants over the rise to the left, put to bed until spring. And far off in front of him, Lake Superior, its vastness answering a yearning inside him for something bigger than himself and this farm. Something so huge as to appear endless.

When he’d felt too much as a boy—when he’d needed it—he would come here and be diminished, the riot of confusion in his head and the pounding in his blood reduced to a minor human storm in a world built on an inhuman scale.

The cold of the roof soaked through his jeans, and Ben wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his chin on his folded hands. He let the water absorb all his roiling, all his turmoil, and turn him flat and calm again. Small enough to disappear.

When he was ready, he looked at himself.

Thirty-two years old. A giant, compared to those boys. Trained as a chef, he’d become a beekeeper and a farmer, like his father.

Like his father, he spent too much time angry, and he unleashed it on the wrong people.