The Summer Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

limp from a long-ago broken hip, his face beaten into leather by the changing seasons on the back of a drilling rig, Dad looked older than his seventy-one years.
    “What are you doing here, sport?”
    “Figured I’d come out and see how you were doing.”
    He looked me over. “Why?”
    “Do I need a reason?”
    He headed back up the stairs toward the front door, and I followed. “You don’t need a reason.” He paused before opening the door, then said, “Might feel better about this if you offered one, though.”
    “Well, I guess you’re just going to have to live with the truth. You’re my dad, and I wanted to see you.”
    That earned me a Jim Quillen snort—a half-quizzical, half-dismissive acknowledgment that I had been heard if not believed. He opened the door and waved me through.
    My desperate, unlikely hope that this might be a simple task was snuffed when I saw and smelled what was inside. Dad’s place bore little resemblance to what I had seen months earlier. A home of gingham patterns and throw pillows and country charm had ceded to strewn newspapers and clothes. It looked as though he was simply retrieving the wash and dumping it out into the middle of the floor. I saw dozens of food-stained paper plates set here and there. The place reeked of garbage.
    “Holy shit.”
    “I’d have cleaned up if I’d known you were coming,” Dad said. He would have needed a month’s notice.
    “Where you staying?” Dad asked.
    “I was hoping here. Would that be all right?”
    Dad didn’t say yes or no, in so many words. He simply pointed down the hallway. I followed the direction of his finger while he started plucking up newspapers.

BILLINGS | SEPTEMBER 17, 2007
     
    I GOT THE NEWS that Dad had married a third time in much the same way that I had received the news about his second wife. He called me and said, “You have a new mother.” That’s where the similarities ended. The first call, in ’76, had been to an eight-year-old boy who thrilled at the idea of a whole new member of the family. The second, twenty years later, had been to a twenty-eight-year-old man who barked back, “I have a mother,” and reluctantly stayed on the phone to give a perfunctory greeting to Mrs. Quillen number three. Helen had said something like “I’m just so thrilled to have such a talented son.” I had shot back, “You’re my father’s wife. Let’s just leave it at that.”
    In the years that followed, Helen surprised me. If she had been hurt by my coldness, she didn’t reveal it. She simply treated me with consistent kindness when I called Dad or he called me. She would hop on the extension and fill the considerable gaps in the conversation. Once, she called me out of the blue and asked why I never came to see Dad. I suggested that she ask him. If she ever did, I didn’t hear about it.
    When Mom died, one of the most thoughtful and unexpected notes came from Helen.
     
     
    There is nothing I can or would attempt to say that could make the pain of losing your mother go away. My own parents have been gone for more than thirty years, and not a day goes by that they don’t cross my mind.
    But please remember this: you’re her legacy, her greatest work. And she did a wonderful job with you. You are a good, honest, forthright man, and you’re living the life that she gave you a foundation to live. Every day that you wake up is another day that Leila’s legacy lives on.
    I’m proud to know you, proud to be related to you. And I thank God every day that you’re who you are. So, you could say, I also thank God that she was who she was.
     
     
    A few years later, when Helen began her fight with cancer—an arduous battle that she and Dad bore stoically—I would bring that note out from time to time and reread it as I prayed for her to get better, and then, toward the end, for her to go quietly and without pain. Looking at what had become of their home in her absence, I missed her all over again.
     
     
    In the