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Hollie adjusts her denim-clad seat on the bench now that I’m gone from it. “Why did you?”
I look across the river. Its ripples pass, each ridge like the ticking off of my bad decisions. “Because I was selfish. Because it was evident from the minute I said I do that I’d made a mistake—and I wasn’t about to sacrifice my dreams for anyone, especially not for someone I increasingly disliked, and for something that never should have happened in the first place.”
Her lips pull down.
“I assume you wanted the truth?”
She shifts again. “Of course.”
Her softness contrasts with the hardness of my words, which punch me in the gut. Some of the puff seeps out of me. “I did—do—love Tyler, but back then, my love was in the way of a juvenile, self-focused child.” And the only pattern of fatherhood I’d been privy to up to that point was a workaholic dad who brought home the bacon and called his job done.
Excuses, excuses.
I meander to the trunk of the elm that shades the bench and the grassy riverbank. “I was often out of touch as it was, and then, when I got the chance for an assignment south of the border that I was told could easily last a year, I took it.”
Hollie rubs a finger over the silver ring she wore today.
“Father of the year material, right?”
One of her shoulders shrugs, more in agreement than argument. Is she thinking of the lousy jerk who left her to raise a child alone?
The need to hear her story clinches like a vise in my stomach. I make a vow to myself: I’ll know it one day.
“When I came home ten months later, our apartment had been cleaned out, she’d moved in with her parents, and I was promptly served divorce papers.” I kick back against the rough bark. “And I was happy. Relieved. Deann was obsessive. Contentious. Cutting. Almost from the start.” Another thing I’d have noticed had I simply slowed my roll for a hot minute when I was a twenty-year-old kid. But how do I blame a dead womannow, especially given my own litany of wrongdoing?
“By that time, Tyler already looked at me like a stranger when I did try to visit. Cried his eyes out when I held him.” I drag my hand down my neck, swatting at a mosquito. “I guess that’s the moment I should have fought for him.” l look into Hollie’s watching eyes. “Trust me, I now know that was my worst mistake.”
She twists the ring. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I got what I deserved.”
Her chin comes up. “Yes—and Tyler got the opposite.”
Zing. Yeah, she’s thinking ofthatman.
“What about the murder?”
I strain to discern some sort of irony in her tone, something to indicate she still holds me harmless in my wife’s death. Has my story to this point altered her opinion? “Ah, yes, the fun part of the story.”
Hollie frowns.
I don’t intend to be flip—but I am who I am. Take it or leave it. I can already guess her choice and won’t blame her a bit. “Thanks to my attorney, who made more effort than I did, I received visitation. Standard weekend a month, a holiday here and there. And of course, there was child support.” I sigh. “But mostly, I left Tyler alone. It seemed to be what he wanted.”
Years passed before I realized the consequences of my choices, not to mention how deliberately Deann was shaping his opinion of me. “The little Deann and I communicated always ended in argument about something or other.” I slip my hands in my pockets. “Over time, she got louder and louder about wanting more than the court had ordered, and I usually obliged.” I told myself I did it for my son,
All I really wanted was her off my back.
I return to sit beside Hollie. She doesn’t draw in—much—when I do.
“Deann and her parents also tried to cut my mom and dad out of the picture. They went to court and got their own visitation rights. Honestly, my parents saw Tyler more than I did and developed a relationship. I should have listened more closely when they warned me that something was up with Deann. But I was lazy and wrote off their stories of her crazy behavior as, well, her brand of normal.”
I scrape my fingers through my hair. “I was supposed to spend the day with Tyler on his eighth birthday, and I’d made up my mind that I was going to put my foot down with Deann about shelling out more cash. I didn’t trust how she was spending it. My intention was to wait until I brought Tyler home later that evening and speak with her privately…but she was in rare form when I went to pick him up. The moment she opened the apartment door she launched into me about all kinds of things. We…I...” My woven fingers throb, pressing into each other. “She was unhinged, Hollie. Yelling and screaming, profanities and all kinds of things. She grabbed me. Hit me.”
I pause, remembering, and Hollie waits patiently for the conclusion.
“I’d come from work and was wearing my gun. She caught me completely off guard and got it out of the holster. She started waving it around.” Closing my eyes, I bend my neck toward my feet. “Waved it all over the place, threatening herself. Me. I had to stop her. We…we wrestled for the gun. It went off.”
I face Hollie, her features undefined in the near dark.
