Chapter Forty-One
NASH
Nash tapped his foot underneath the table.
He was many things, but indecisive wasn’t one of them. Yet his mind swung back and forth like a pendulum as he sat in the café.
One second, he wanted to stay, meet his dad, and know what he was missing…and the next second, he berated himself for thinking one coffee could make up for twenty-five years of being gone and wondered why he even bothered.
Morbid curiosity filled him. Did he look more like his father or his mother or act more like one of them? Mom said he was quiet sometimes like Kirk. But what about everything else?
Humans had a fight-or-flight response when threats approached. He could run now, or he could stay and fight.
But the truth was, he didn’t know if he wanted to do either one. Running would continue a trend where he shut out his past and continued to move forward with his career, never really dealing with it—like the damage that could be done to tendons and never fully heal until it caused pain and hurt years later.
But if he stayed and fought, he’d open himself up to more injury. His old wounds would be torn open and left to bleed when Kirk inevitably left again, and in his weakened state without Kiran and under the pressures of dealing with psych patients, he wasn’t in the position to repair the damage.
Nash gave his head a little shake to clear the deafening thoughts.
Brandon had been right. This had thrown him off balance completely.
Nash glanced at the door and froze.
A man, no older than his late forties, stepped into the café. He was wearing a pair of jeans, worn but not tattered, and a green-and-black-plaid shirt rolled up at the cuffs. He had hair exactly the same shade of Nash’s—dirty blond sprinkled with brighter strands. He had hazel eyes under a bush of eyebrows that reminded Nash of the caterpillar-like bushes on his own face. They had the same cheekbones, and Kirk’s smile lines were in the same place as Nash’s, with added wrinkles around his forehead. He could tell they were the same height, even from his seated place in the corner.
Kirk’s gaze fell on Nash almost immediately, and he stopped in the middle of the café.
As the two men locked eyes for the first time in twenty-five years, Nash finally knew where he’d gotten some of his features.
Kirk slowly walked toward him, and Nash got up, unsure what else to do.
They came to a stop three feet from each other and paused, both uncertain about whether to hug.
It was Kirk who put a hand forward first. “Hello, Son.”
Nash glanced down at the peace offering. “Hi…Kirk.”
“Do you come to this place often?” Kirk’s eyes rested on the industrial decor, a far cry from the secondhand coffee maker they’d had when Nash was growing up.
“Every morning on my way to work,” Nash said. “But the coffee stand down the street is better, to be honest.”
“Mmm,” Kirk hummed like an acknowledgment. “You look good, Son.”
Son. He’d said it twice now. But Nash didn’t feel anything attached to the word. There was no long-lost feeling of fondness or belonging that suddenly came upon him in a revelatory wave. Instead, he stared at his father for a few seconds in silence.
“Well, now I know where I got my hair from.”
“Your mother was blond too,” Kirk said with a smile.
“I remember.”
They stood in line in silence. Nash could feel Kirk’s eyes on him, scanning his face, maybe even holding out hope that they’d leave this coffee shop as pals.
Nash shoved his hands in his pockets.
“What can I get you, sir?” the man behind the counter asked both men.
“A black coffee,” Kirk answered.
The server and Kirk looked at Nash.
“Oh, uh…a chai,” Nash said.
He pulled out his wallet, but Kirk beat him to it.
“I got it, Son.”
Nash gave a terse nod.
“So, chai, huh? What happened to good old-fashioned coffee?” Kirk asked.
Between Kirk’s gaze and his smile, Nash couldn’t tell if he was being teased or if it was a genuine question. “I have a…friend. She’s Indian. She got me into it.”
“Indian, huh? Does she wear saris and go on about cows being sacred?”
Judging by his nervous laugh, Kirk may have been trying to fill the air with something other than the frostiness Nash left behind…but Nash bristled, anger and annoyance surging in him.
“Don’t do that. You’re only going to look like a fool when you talk about things you clearly don’t know a thing about.”
Kirk’s face fell. “Just trying to make a joke, Son.”
“Her culture isn’t a punch line.”
They stood in silence, waiting until their drinks were delivered to the end of the bar.
“Do you…do you want to sit down?” Kirk asked.
Not really, Nash wanted to say, but instead, he replied, “Sure.”
They sat across from each other. Kirk hunched over the table, his elbows resting on the wood. Nash’s hands found their way to his pockets again, where he played with his keys.
Awkwardness filled the air. Nash had no idea if Kirk knew Mom was dead. He didn’t know anything, in fact, and suddenly, meeting felt like a mistake.
“Why did you—”
“So, listen, Son—”
They spoke at the same time, and Nash looked away, embarrassed. Kirk gestured for Nash to go ahead.
“Let’s just cut to it. Why did you write?”
“I was diagnosed with cancer last year,” Kirk started. “And chemo was hell. I lost my hair, right down to my eyebrows. And when you’re watchin’ your life flash by and you’re convinced you’re gonna die hooked up to machines, you begin to think about what you’ve done in your lifetime.”
Nash watched his dad. His father’s voice was as deep as the flashes of memory Nash had from his childhood.
“Anyway, I was sittin’ with my chemo drip, two divorces under my belt, not even fifty yet… I began to think about my biggest regrets. And I kept thinkin’ about how I left you and your mama behind.”
“So this is you atoning for it because you didn’t die?” Nash’s words were edged with glass.
“No. This is me wantin’ to say I’m sorry I left. I wish I could take it back.”
“You can’t,” Nash said roughly. “You’ve been gone twenty-five years, and I’m supposed to say it’s okay now because you’ve magically seen the light and want to make amends?”
“You don’t have to say it’s okay, Son. God knows I’ll never forgive myself. I wanted to see your face, I guess, and tell you like a man that I’m truly, from the bottom of my heart, sorry that I didn’t see you grow up.”
Nash wanted to fire back that the manly thing would have been to stick around and raise his child. But as he gazed at his dad, older and apologetic, he found himself asking another question with less animosity.
“How did you find me?”
“Well, Facebook and the internet are helpful sometimes.” Kirk shrugged with a chuckle. “And then I tracked down your aunt Kate.”
“You spoke to Kate?” Nash asked in surprise.
“Only last week, after I hadn’t heard from you. She’s still a spitfire, that one. Gave me an earful before she told me she’d listen to whatever I had to say. I was thankful for that.”
Kate’s missed phone calls and requests to call her suddenly made sense to Nash. “Yeah, that sounds like Aunt Kate all right.”
“I’m sorry you had to face your mom’s passin’ and her addiction by yourself.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like you were around. I didn’t have a choice.” Nash tried not to sound bitter, but long-buried emotions were digging out of their graves and rising to the surface.
“You shouldn’t have had to go through it without a father.”
“Why did you leave? I mean, even if you were unhappy, didn’t you ever think about a divorce or any other option other than leaving your five-year-old son behind with an alcoholic? Do you know how many things you missed?” Nash hissed.
Kirk’s eyes drooped, and he looked at the table, shamefaced. “I wish I had a reason other than being young and stupid, but that’s all it was. I was hotheaded. I grabbed my stuff and left and started driving. I didn’t realize until I’d reached Ohio what I’d done, and by then, I thought the damage was done. Your mama and I were fightin’, and I didn’t want to face that. Eventually when she signed the divorce papers without a fight, I figured she never wanted me back anyway and she was glad to see my backside.”
“I would never do what you did,” Nash stated furiously.
“You’re a better man than I am, Nash. By all accounts… A psychologist. A man who didn’t go down the same paths as your mama and I did. I can’t ever picture you doing to your kids what I did to you.”
At the mention of kids, Nash thought of Kiran and how he had imagined their children running around a large backyard.
“You look like I slapped you with a sausage, Son. Spit it out.” Kirk waited expectantly for Nash’s outburst.
Nash shook his head. “It’s nothing. A lot on my mind.”
“Kate told me you were datin’ a new girl. How’s that been going?”
The disbelief washed over Nash. Was he really about to talk to his dad about girl problems? The same dad who he was meeting for the first time since he was a child?
Nash shrugged. “We broke up.”
“Did you love her?” Kirk asked, and the earnestness in his eyes struck Nash.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.
“I really did love your mom, but I gave up on her too fast… And maybe if I hadn’t, if I’d hung in there and insisted we work it out, we would have gotten to be a family.”
“But we didn’t, Kirk,” Nash snapped at the word family. “Do you know who my family was? Aunt Kate. Brandon. And lately, Kiran. It never included you. Hell, it just barely involved Mom. I’ve had to fend for myself all these years, and now you’re back, on your own time, like it’s not going to fuck me up all over again. So don’t talk to me about what a family is supposed to be like and all we could have been, because anything I learned about that concept sure as hell didn’t come from the two of you.”
The words were out there. Nash grunted slightly at the effort it took to unleash the anger he’d kept deep inside, locked away in his heart, for the better part of his life. He swallowed hard, a lump forming in his throat, and thought he’d choke on the Herculean task it became.
He rubbed his eyes furiously, as if he were trying to wipe away the stinging in them.
Kirk’s eyes too were red-rimmed as he took in the magnitude of hurt he’d caused his son.
“I wish I could show you how sorry I am,” he whispered.
“You can’t,” Nash said simply.
All he wanted was to get out of there. Suddenly, every piece of him, all the way down to his soul, was exhausted. He stood.
“I should go, Kirk.”
As he stepped toward the door, Kirk grabbed Nash’s wrist gently. Nash grew aware how soft his grasp was, nothing like the strong mechanic that Mom had described.
“Thank you for comin’ today, Son. I know I haven’t been there for you…but I hope I can be when you’re ready. I love you, and there hasn’t been a day I didn’t think about you.”
Those were words that Nash had wanted more than anything when he’d been waiting by the door for his dad to come home. But now…now, he wasn’t sure if they meant anything at all.