Page 145 of Final Drive

“You saw the whole race?”

“West bank. You were right about the view.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “I’d like to tell you I understood what I was watching. I didn’t. Around fifteen hundred meters, the man next to me started shouting about your steering, so I decided to shout too.”

Something in me comes loose.

“Mom didn’t come.”

“No.” He doesn’t dress it up. He never does. “Your mother is going to file next month. She’s already spoken to Whitmore’s firm about representation, which I think is meant to be a message, and it is one.” He looks toward the water. “She’ll say it’s the statement I gave. It isn’t. It’s that I gave it after she asked me not to.”

“She asked you not to?”

“Twice.”

For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. Somebody’s trailer chain rattles three rows over.

“I got a letter from the state bar,” he says. “Grievance panel in August. My firm has moved me off two matters and put out a statement about cooperating fully. Both of those things are theater, and both of them are the correct theater.”

“Are you going to lose your license?”

“No.” There’s no satisfaction in the answer. “I’m going to get a private reprimand and a great deal of unpleasantness, and in three years nobody will remember. That’s what happens to men like me.”

I stand there with a medal in one pocket, a business card next to it, and my father in front of me.

I don’t thank him. I still can’t. He falsified a document about a sixteen-year-old girl and then spent one afternoon undoing it. That arithmetic doesn’t balance, and we both know it.

What I say is, “There’s a development camp in July.”

He goes still. “They want you.”

“They want me. I don’t know yet whether the bar covers it. It might.”

“Send me the bylaw.”

“Dad.”

“I’m not asking to handle it.” His jaw sets in the same shape mine does. “I’m asking you to send me the language and let me tell you what I think it means. Then you’ll do whatever you want with that, since you’re better at this than I’ve ever given you credit for.” He takes a breath. “That’s the offer. It’s smaller than the one I’d like to make.”

Behind me, somebody drops a rigger bolt on the gravel and Bo starts laughing.

“I’ll send it tonight.”

My father nods once. Then he reaches out and puts his hand flat on the top of my head, exactly where Gray put his an hour ago, and holds it there for about two seconds.

I have no preparation for it at all.

Then he takes his hand back and goes to find his car.

When I get to the trailer, the hitch is fixed, the boat is loaded, and eight men are standing around in the last of the light waiting for me.

Bo comes forward first.

“I’m still angry.”

“You should be.”

“I’m going to stay angry about it, and I’m going to be angry in your general direction, and none of it means what you think it means.” He puts his hand on the side of my neck. “You didn’t have to do it alone.”

“I know that now.”