My father had been warm and understanding, given to periodic bouts of capriciousness and whimsy when the spirit struck. Before Kyle died, he had been a good father—so I suddenly hated myself for my inability to summon any memory of him other than the day when he beat me black and blue with his belt.
“Just a regular guy,” I said.
“Our father,” he said, and it was as if he were about to recite a prayer, “was crazy before he ever went crazy. This crazy man would tie his children to trees out in the yard when they were little. If you broke a dish, you would have to kneel on the pieces. You leave the stovetop dirty, you felt just what those hot burners could do. Hold your hand. Hold it. Keep it there until you learn your lesson.” He thrust his chin at me. “You ever learn your lesson when you were a kid?”
“No. Not like that.”
“He made me do things that no grown person—especially no father—should ever make a child do. He did worse things to Veronica. Things he couldn’t do to me.”
This summoned images so brutal and horrific in my head, I could feel a physical illness breaking out in my stomach and spilling like poison through the conduits of my veins. The horrible things Veronica suffered in that house . . .
“See,” Dentman went on, unflustered, “I left him once I was old enough. But then I came back for Veronica. I couldn’t let him . . . let him at her like that anymore. I had to go back. That room in the basement? The one hidden behind the wall? He built that room for her. She was terrified of it, but he’d lock her down there every night.”
“Jesus.”
“And sometimes he would be down there with her,” he added. “In the dark.”
“Stop,” I heard myself say distantly and ineffectually, like the yowl of a lost cat somewhere in the woods.
“One day I came back for her and we both left. Together. Fuck, she was a mess.” Dentman sounded instantly disgusted with the whole thing yet strangely rehearsed at the same time. “She hit some roadblocks and spent time in the hospital. Then, of course, she fell in with people who didn’t know how delicate she was. That’s how she got Elijah.” There was a curious combination of offhandedness and affection in his voice. It took me a moment to understand that maybe in a confused and intricate way he had loved the boy.
Dentman poured two more shots. He knocked his back before I even picked up my glass.
“When she heard he was sick, she said we needed to go back. She said it was her duty as a daughter to take care of him in his final days.” His eyes glittered like jewels. I watched him with more intensity than I had ever watched anything in my life. “Can you believe that? After all he’d done to her?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He glanced at my shot glass. I had my fingers on it but hadn’t moved it from its spot on the table. “Drink it,” he told me.
“I don’t want it.”
“Drink it or I’ll push that shot glass through your forehead.”
It burned like acid going down my throat. I felt it trigger my gag reflex, and I thought I was going to vomit.
“Look at you,” Dentman growled, pleased with himself.
My eyes blurry with tears, I slammed the shot glass on the table.
“I hate you but I need to thank you, too.” He stared at his hands. Palms up, fingers only slightly curled, they looked like a pair of undiscovered sea creatures tossed on the deck of a ship. “I hate you because she’s going to go away for a little while. Doctors want to make sure she’s stable, that she’s okay. You stirred up a lot of emotion in her. You did some damage to my little sister.”
On a gale of laughter, the pub’s door swung open.
I cocked my head to see if Adam had arrived. I recognized the men who entered—they were two of Tooey’s regulars—but my brother was not among them. When I turned back around, Dentman had poured a couple more shots. “Jesus, I can’t . . .”
“Drink it. We’re doing this thing, aren’t we?”
“Doing what?”
“Drink,” he said.
My hand shaking, I downed the shot. Dentman doubled, trebled, grew fuzzy around the edges. I watched in detachment as one of his reddened hands curled into an enormous fist. A man was at his most dangerous when he had nothing left to lose.
“David,” I managed after too much uncomfortable silence.
“You’re a pretty fucking good writer,” he said in a calm, steady voice. He slipped two fingers into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt and pinched out a folded sheet of paper. I thought it might have been torn from a newspaper, but when he unfolded it and laid it on the table, I could tell it was a single page torn from a book. “It’s my favorite passage,” he said.
He’d highlighted the text in the middle of the page. Just one line. Nothing more.
Because he is my brother, I will suffer a thousand deaths to vindicate his.
Wordlessly, I pushed the torn sheet of paper across the table to him.
Dentman picked it up, folded it neatly into squares, and pushed it back into his shirt pocket. “I spent many nights wondering just what had happened.” His eyes distant, he was midway between reality and some outlying recollection. “Did Veronica remember what she did to Elijah, or had her mind wiped the memory clean? Had all those horrible things our father had done to her finally caused her to snap? I’m not stupid. They say that kind of abuse is hereditary, that it’s passed down the way alcoholism is passed down. I went to sleep every night believing my sister had done something horrible to her boy.”
Returning to the present, he looked directly at me. “She’s my sister. So thank you for showing me my sister’s not a monster, that our father hadn’t completely ruined her. Thank you for clearing that much up for me.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me. Something you’re leaving out.”
I thought I saw the hint of a smile play at the corner of his lips. “See, you’re a good writer. But you’re not a great writer. To be a great writer, you got to upend every little stone and look underneath each one, almost like a detective would. You got to examine all the possibilities. No matter how much you want to force characters to behave one way, you got to let them do what comes natural.”
“That’s pretty fucking astute.”
“You remember the cemetery? You called me a murderer. And I told you I didn’t kill my nephew.” He picked up the bottle of bourbon and poured two more shots. “What I’m saying, Glasgow, is maybe we’re both right.”
We stared at each other for a long, long time. At first I didn’t understand what he meant . . . and when it finally dawned on me, it didn’t strike me all at once like an epiphany but rather it gradually trickled in, filling all the recesses and crevices and gouges of my brain like black water into a pair of drowning lungs.
David Dentman eased back in his seat. Sweat dampened his brow. He lifted his shot glass and examined it as if it might be the last drink he’d ever take.
“To fathers,” he toasted.
When Adam arrived at the bar, I was still at Dentman’s table, although Dentman had left some time ago. Adam came up behind me, dropping a hand on my shoulder.
Startled, I jumped out of my seat, nearly knocking the half-empty bottle of cruddy bourbon to the floor, where presumably it would have eaten through the floorboards.
“Who walked on your grave?” Adam said.
“Forget it.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said, summoning a smile. “Sit down. Have a drink with your little brother before he leaves you for sunny California.”
Adam sat, picking up the bottle and pulling a face. “What is this stuff?”