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Sharon asked me if I was hungry. When I shook my head she went to the bedroom too. The door slammed again. I heard them talking—not arguing, but talking seriously. It went on for a while, then I heard Sharon’s voice, louder than before.

“Why don’t you just tell him? He’ll understand.”

“No!” the old man shouted.

Right after that he came out of the room and into the kitchen, patting his pockets.
“You
seen my keys?” he asked.

A hot sinking feeling rushed into my gut as I suddenly felt the bunch of keys pressing against my leg in the pocket of my jeans. I looked up at the old man as he searched the kitchen counter. Frantically I tried to think of something.

“Uh, why don’t you sit down for a minute.”

“Huh? Why?” The old man looked at me like I had a flower growing out of my forehead.

“I’d, um, I’d like to talk to you about the show. Here, let me get you another … um, a beer.”

I went to the fridge, hoping there’d be another beer left. I should have known. There were more than half a dozen. I twisted the top off one.

“Sit down,” I said, “and relax.”

The old man was still looking at me strangely. No wonder, I thought guiltily. This is the first time I’ve talked normally to him since he picked me up in Toronto. He sat down and took a pull on the beer.

I heard the bedroom door open but Sharon didn’t appear.

“Anyway, like I said, I really liked the show. It was—”

“So how come you took off?”

Good question, I thought. “I don’t know. When I saw the sculpture by the door I was sort of shocked, I guess.”

The old man considered this. He set the bottle down on the table. “Well, guess I can’t blame you.”

At that point Sharon came in and said brightly, “Anybody want coffee?” which was a pretty lame question, since I had half a cup of tea left and the old man had most of his beer. She started fussing around with the coffee makings anyway.

The old man suddenly found his beer bottle interesting. He stared at it and started to run his thumbnail through the label, top to bottom.

“Where did you get the picture of me wrestling?” I asked. “The one you used for the sculpture.”

Sharon shot me a worried look. I realized too late what I had given away.

“I mean,” I added hastily, “I assume you worked from a photo. The sculpture was so life-like.”

But the old man didn’t seem to notice. “Sharon saved it for me. She has a friend in TO. who looks out for stuff about you in the paper.”

He continued to pick fiercely at the label on the bottle. He looked up at Sharon, then back to the label. “I did it for you,” he said. “I wanted to make up for … all those years, even though I knew I couldn’t.”

I felt my throat thicken. I glanced at Sharon, who had given up the show of making coffee. She stood leaning against the sink, arms crossed. She nodded to me.

I looked back at the old man, feeling my face suddenly hot. “Will you tell me one thing?” I blurted. “Why did you leave? How could you do that to me?”

“I had to,” he said.

“Why?
What do you mean?”

“She made me.” He said it so softly I could hardly hear. But I remembered our argument a few days before at Chutes Park. He’d said I didn’t have to come. I had told him Mom made me and he had said I was too old to be told what to do.

All the hurt and anger began to rush in again, the way the wind rushes into your house when you open the door on a stormy night, and I started to get mad.

“Couldn’t you at least have told me
why?”

“No.”

“Bullshit!” I cried. “You could’ve. You didn’t even say goodbye when you left, didn’t say hello in a letter. You just sent those stupid postcards. You were so damn lazy you didn’t even write out the address! Don’t
tell me you loved me and you’re sorry and you missed me. Save that crap, will you.”

“I—”

“Jack,” Sharon said in a calm voice,
“tell him!”

The old man was facing me finally, his face wracked with pain and something worse than pain that I couldn’t identify.

“Steve, I … I just couldn’t,” he said. “I—”

“Yeah, you
couldn’t
Sure. Couldn’t drop a line to your own son. What are you, for god’s sake, illiterate or—”

At that instant I knew what I saw in his face along with the pain. It was humiliation. And at that instant things dropped into place the way the tumblers drop into place when you put the right key in a lock and turn it. Things from way back in the past. Things from the present.

The old man used to listen to the news and talk back to the radio every morning while we had breakfast. But he never read the paper.

He bought me dozens of books, but never read them to me.

He would never help me with my homework, but he’d spend hours helping me with a Lego construction.

When we were shopping in Sudbury he drove into the wrong place—the I.
D
.A. drugstore instead of the I
G
A grocery. When he asked directions to the IGA, he asked for landmarks, not street names.

His tapes and CDs were arranged by coloured dots. He sent postcards with my address and DAD stamped on them. No handwriting. No signature.

I felt like a fire cracker had exploded in my brain.

“Jesus,” I said as his face reddened. “Jesus, you
couldn’t
write to me! You …” I ran out of words.

“Go ahead and say it!” he shouted, throwing his pipe clattering onto the table. “Go ahead! I’m illiterate! Your father’s a stupid moron!”

“That’s not what I—”

He jumped up, kicking back his chair, and turned to the door. But Sharon was on him in a flash. “No, no! Not this time, Jack! This time you
don’t
leave!” But she couldn’t hold him back. He stumbled out the door, letting it slap shut behind him.

Thoughts whirled inside my head the way dust swirls in the corner of a building on a windy day.

“You knew, didn’t you?” I said to Sharon.

She nodded. “Thank god it’s finally out,” she said, the way you say ‘Oh boy’ when you put down a heavy load. “I couldn’t tell you, Wick. I’m sorry, but I owed it to him to keep my mouth shut. I promised him. Now you’ve got to go out there and tell him to stay.”

I was too mixed up to think for myself so I did as she said. I ran outside and found the old man yanking at the van door, cursing, as if yelling at it would unlock it. I stood for a moment, wracking my brains, not knowing what to say to him.

I reached into my pocket and held out his keys to him in my open palm. He looked at me, his face streaked with tears and humiliation, then down at the keys.

“You can go if you want,” I said. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for leaving the first time. That’s the honest truth. But now I’m asking you to stay.”

He took the keys from my outstretched hand, then weighed them in his own hand, as he looked first at
the house, then at the van, then at me.

He put the keys into his pocket and went back into the house. I followed him in.

“T
O EXPLAIN ALL THIS
I
GOT TO GO
back a ways,” the old man said around the stem of his pipe.

The three of us were sitting at the table. We had eaten supper and Sharon and the old man had done the dishes while I stacked the mountain of firewood I had chopped that afternoon. The old man hadn’t asked me how I had come up with his keys and I didn’t tell him.

“Your mother and me met a little more than a year before you were born. I found the job at the tire plant and she was takin’ business courses at Humber College. We went out for about six months before she took me home to see your grandparents. They didn’t like me, but you probably know that. No education, no good job, no prospects for one. Sometimes I wondered myself what your mother saw in me. I knew that part of the reason she married me was to rebel against her parents, but I loved her, and when you love somebody you don’t look things over too close.

“Anyway, we got married when your mother was still in college and by the time she graduated she was pregnant with you, and a few months later you were born.” The old man paused, took a couple of drags on the pipe, a half smile on his lips. “You sure were a cute baby. I was in the delivery room while you were getting’ born.

“Well, stayin’ at home and takin’ care of you woke your mother up to reality real quick. That’s when things started to go bad. Oh, I don’t mean it was because of you, don’t think that, but she grew so damned frustrated at home all day. I guess she had lots of time to think things over. And I guess she realized she made a mistake marryin’ me and tyin’ herself down.

“I figured it out little by little, over time. I can still remember the day I realized she didn’t love me no more and maybe she never really did. But we went on. A year or so later she wanted to go to university, so we scrimped and saved and borrowed a bit here and there. She took accountin’, and when you were six she graduated, got her papers and stepped right into a pretty good job. She got ahead fast—you know how smart she is. And ambitious.”

He got up and poured coffee into Sharon’s mug and his own.

I was wondering how Sharon was feeling about all this stuff. I mean, sitting there, listening to the old man talk about being in love with my mother and all.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “the more she accomplished, the farther she got from me. Hardly spoke to me. Came home from work, had supper with us and worked on stuff she brought home from the office.

“I knew she was ashamed of me, just like her parents were. She never said nothin’, of course, but I knew. We fought quite a bit, and a couple of times she said she was gonna leave, but I always talked her out of it. I said it was better for you if we stuck together, and I didn’t want to lose her. But deep inside I knew it was only a matter of time.”

He cleared his throat a few times and fiddled with
his pipe, tamping the tobacco down, relighting it.

“Did … did she know?”

He looked up at me. “No. I never told her. I was gonna, after we got married, then I was scared to.”

“But how could you keep that a secret from your own wife? How come she didn’t notice?”

“Oh, there’s ways. She knew when she met me I never touched a book. Lots of people don’t. And after a life-time of coverin’ up, you learn a lot of strategies. Besides, like I said, once things started to do downhill we didn’t spend much time together. We didn’t talk much any more. Listen,” he added, and his tone changed, “I’m not sayin’ it was all her fault. I can be a real horse’s ass to live with sometimes. She’ll tell you that.”

He nodded to Sharon, who smiled and patted his arm.

“True,” she said, “but worth it.”

“Anyway, time came she got her promotion. She was real happy about that, I can tell you. The bosses in the company were having a big party for all the staff and they decided to announce her promotion at the party. She said I was invited too. I tried to get out of it—what did I want, sippin’ wine with a bunch of suits, not knowin’ what to say to anybody—but she said if I didn’t go it would look bad for her. I decided I was bein’ selfish and maybe I should go. Stupidest thing I ever did.

“So there I was with all them confident educated people in some fancy lounge at the University of Toronto where one of the bosses had connections, tryin’ not to put my foot in my mouth and disgrace your mother, I had a few glasses of wine to loosen up, didn’t talk unless I had to. Then the shit hit the fan.

“Your mother and me were in a group of about half a dozen, talkin’—them, not me—mostly stuff about the office. Her boss was there, his wife, a younger guy from the office and his wife. The younger man was one of these loud pushy types, thinks he knows everythin. ‘Hey, Jack, I must show you this joke card one of my clients gave me,’ he says. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a card about the size of a birthday card and hands it to me, smilin’. There were a couple of cartoon characters on it, a man and a woman, both naked, and the woman’s got a surprised look on her face. There was some writin’ underneath.

“I looked up at the guy. ‘Go on, read it to us,’ he says. I looked down at it like I was readin, then tried to fake it. I laughed and handed it back. Your mother’s boss says to me, ‘Read it to us, Jack.’ He had a big grin on his face.

“I figured they were settin’ me up, makin’ a joke or something because I was only a factory worker, no education, and they were hot-shot intellectuals, and I got mad as hell. Who did they think they were, I thought. A bunch of puffed-up bastards in expensive suits. Your mother had a look on her face like I was embarrassin’ her in front of the jerks and phonies she worked with. I got even madder when I realized that.

“ ‘I forgot my glasses,’ I says. ‘I can’t make it out.’ ”

“Your mother laughed the way you do when you’re real nervous. ‘Jack!’ she says, you don’t wear—’

“I cut her off real quick. ‘I can’t make it out. Do you hear what I’m sayin’? I
can’t
’

“Your mother turned deathly white, then red, then her mouth dropped open in shock. Because she
understood, see, she realized what I was tellin’ her. She excused herself and dashed off, spillin’ her wine on her dress as she rushed away. I went after her and caught up with her outside. That was some trip back home, I’ll tell you.”

The old man related the story as calmly as he could, but his hands shook like leaves on a branch when he relit his pipe.

“A couple of days later she comes home from the office real late—you were in bed—and says she wants to talk. She thought things through, she says. The marriage is over, it’s been over for a long time, and now she wants to call it quits. One of us has to leave, she says, and it isn’t gonna be her. So she wants me to get out. She says if I don’t she’ll tell you I’m illiterate, she’ll phone the factory and tell them. She’ll tell everybody she can. But if I agree to leave she won’t tell nobody. Solemn promise. She says she’s gonna get a divorce from me anyway, and she’s gonna fight for custody of you if she has to. And if I fight her, she’ll bring it all out in court that I can’t read or write, and she’ll win. No judge is gonna give custody to an illiterate father who can hardly hold a job instead of an educated mother who just got a big promotion in an accountin’ company. She said I had to go away and stay away.”