T. Parker - Full Measure

“Did I ever tell you about meeting your mother?”

“Sure, Dad. It was in a restaurant and love at first sight.”

Archie gathered his attention on Patrick and smiled. “Well, that was the party line. There was a bit more going on. Some of which may be pertinent. May I speak frankly?”

“You should.”

“It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a biker bar in Oceanside. Kind of a dump. I’d gone there with a buddy. I was forty years old, ten years widowed. The farm was making me some good money. I had plenty of energy and girlfriends. I was steering solo and happy with that. I’d loved my first wife perfectly, I thought. Or as close to perfect as I could manage. She died young. Cancer, as you know. And because our love was young, she was ideal. Even in death and after, she remained ideal. So who could compete with that memory? Well, when Caroline walked into the biker bar she was beautiful, troubled, drunk, and about half my age. But she had an indefinable thing that was absolutely unmistakable in spite of the ideal love I’d once had. My heart registered it immediately. My first wife welcomed her. I felt things I hadn’t felt in years. Helpless, for one. I berated myself for foolishness, but it did no good. Does it ever? Caroline’s boyfriend was with her, a biker, a big guy who seemed to think he was in charge. When she took off her sunglasses I saw the smudges of bruises near her eyes. I’ll confess to being unimpressed by the boyfriend and saying so. The short version is we took it outside and I gave him a terrible whipping. Caroline called two days later with a story to tell. We made a date for the telling. Among others things it involved mental and physical cruelty, and pronounced recreational drug abuse.” Archie drank and looked at his son. “But she was something, Patrick. Sobered up, she had the looks and brains and appetites I’d intuited. Her heart was good and hungry. What a match for mine. And she was about to have something I had resigned myself to not having. She delivered him into the world approximately seven months later.”

“Ted.”

“None other.”

“I suspected.”

“As did many others. We were married before she showed. We delighted in our wicked little mystery. No confessions but nothing hidden, either. No explanations, nothing revealed, then the arrival of our little Ted. I pledged to save him from his own... unfortunate nativity. Ted’s father was a charming, brutal pig. Like Caroline’s father, he humiliated and hurt her. Her father was from money and of money. Layers of privilege and recklessness. Staggering unaccountability. The biker was intended as an antidote. Imagine. But you can’t satisfy swine of either type because they only want more. It takes a lot to fill a tiny heart. So she broke, Pat — right here in the house, right in front of my eyes. She broke, utterly and completely. And then she started over. Began to make herself again. To make herself herself for the first time. The baby was my project, my contribution to turning Caroline’s life around. It was my job to make that baby right. She chose me to accompany her on that journey. I have been honored. She’s become the strongest person I’ve ever known. She still frightens me in every good way and I would still lay down my life for hers in an instant.”

Patrick felt history falling into place behind him, followed by a strange liberating pleasure, like looking down from a cliff but feeling fully capable of flight. “Not sure what to say, Dad.”

“The upshot is I couldn’t do anything for Ted. His seizures or fevers, or his feet, or his odd inabilities. And over the years I went from hope to forbearance to disappointment to annoyance to resentment to hostility. The headshrinkers assigned him different mental maladies, some of which seemed accurate. Others not. No consensus. Your mother has always worried that he’d do something bad to himself or someone else. There’s an anger in him he rarely lets show. I don’t think he’s a bad person. I don’t think he’s severely retarded. I did love him and I will learn to love him again. And I’ve punished him enough for disappointing me. I know that, and I intend to stop.”

Patrick let all this rattle around his brain. He took another slug of the bourbon and felt the good warm passage of it. “You’ve never told Ted?”

“He asked me when he was eleven years old if I was his father. Once. I lied once and that was that.”

“You should tell him the truth. And forgive him for disappointing you.”

“I will. I hope he can forgive me for being such a pure and unalloyed son of a bitch for so many years.”

Patrick nodded and Archie poured more bourbon into their glasses and they touched them. “He’s got a good heart,” said Patrick.

Archie nodded and stared out past the things around him. Patrick knew what his father was going to say before Archie said it — like he’d seen what would happen to Sheffield and Lavinder. “I hope I don’t have to sell all this,” said Archie. “Your mother and I would walk away with almost nothing. Nothing for us and nothing for our sons. Sixty years of Norris blood, sweat and tears come to nada.”

“We’re doing what we can. It’s up to the rain and the trees now.”

“Farm Credit bank in El Centro turned me down today. We’ve got enough money in savings to pay the bills for four months. That’ll take us through February. No more. If we get a good survival rate, the earliest we could start selling would be two whole years from then, but we would be able to borrow against the surviving trees. Even the Farm Credit banks can’t say no to living avocados. We’ll see signs of life by February, on any trees with life left in them, and we’ll know where we stand in the eyes of God. If His curse continues and all the trees are dead, your mother and I will sell off our modest investments with Anders Wealth to buy replacement trees. That would make real a forty percent loss in the current market. Or, of course, we just sell the whole damned place and walk away.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad.”

Archie sipped. “Time is running out. This makes me fearful and angry. So I take it out on the people I love. I’ve never felt this way before, Pat. Never this low for this long. I never thought that I would prove to be a miserable failure, and turn into a furious little man. I detest my reflection in the mirror. I despise my God. I often have dreams now where Caroline has simply vanished.”

“What’s it take to stay afloat for a month, Dad?”

“Six grand or so for the basics.”

Patrick looked at his skiff and saw almost two months of living expenses for his family. He figured his pickup truck was worth maybe seven, given the low mileage. Another month plus change. So he could contribute three months. And what, ride his bike to Domino’s and deliver pizzas on it? Although, he thought, there was the old red Honda 90 over in the corner, a beloved Norris family relic. Not much more than a scooter, but it was street legal and he could rebuild the engine in a few hours, rig some sort of pizza rack to the back. He wondered how Iris would like being a passenger on it. “I’ll sell the boat and kick in eleven grand. That would give you two more months.”

“I note you don’t say give us two more months.”

“I don’t want to farm, Dad. I never did and never will.”

The silence was abrupt and complex. “No. Then don’t sell your dream to float the dreams of your mother and father. That would be ass-backwards.”

“I’ll do it if it makes a difference.”

“I pray every night it won’t be necessary. To a god that I—” Archie refilled Patrick’s glass then carried his own and the bottle to the big open door of the barn. “I see light in the bunkhouse. Maybe I’ll have my talk with Ted. I’m on a roll tonight, aren’t I?”