Beth and I took the kids home after the party. Later that night, we had wildly inappropriate but erotic sex, first in the hot tub, then in the shower, and finally in front of the standing mirror in the corner of our bedroom. On second thought, it was very appropriate; it was like makeup sex even though we weren’t the ones who had the fight. I got maybe four hours of sleep before jumping in the old Subaru Outback for the drive north.
If Hansel and Gretel left bread crumbs for their father, Jack is leaving loaves of bread for me. He picked up a twelve of Natural Light and a pack of Parliaments in a dive bar in between Hope and Shelbyville. I found the empty twelve-pack and the nearly untouched nineteen-pack of cigarettes—Jack doesn’t smoke—in a rest area in Greenfield.
Later, sometime around two in the morning, Jack went to the Hiphugger strip club in Kokomo. The Hugger’s longtime bouncer—a soft-spoken, smiling giant of a man by the name of Pappy—turned him away at the door. “Gotta love the balls of a sixteen-year-old trying to pass himself off as a thirty-four-year-old,” Pappy told me. “But he might want to check beforehand and make sure the original owner of the driver’s license didn’t spend most of the early nineties in this bar.”
Like I said, Pappy has been there a long time.
At some point after striking out at the Hugger, Jack doubled back to Tipton. He booked the Jacuzzi Suite with some of his birthday money at the Flamingo Motel. In the morning, he went to Sherrill’s, the diner and gas station right off US 31 with the famous marquee that reads Eat Here And Get Gas. He tried to buy everyone in the diner breakfast, but Sherrill thankfully refused the gesture.
I knew where Jack was going the moment he left Mom’s house. He’s a Fitzpatrick, and there’s only one place we drop everything to visit in the middle of April: the campus of the University of Notre Dame, for the Blue & Gold Game spring scrimmage.
The Notre Dame Stadium usher hands me my ticket stub. “You might want to buy some gloves and a hat at the gift shop,” he advises me. “They’re saying this is the coldest Blue and Gold Game ever. Game time temps in the thirties, thirty mile-per-hour wind out of the northwest, maybe even some snow.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I say.
After a couple false positives, I find him. Jack is sitting by himself, about two-thirds the way up in Section 23, corner end zone, the section that had a front-row seat to Pat Terrell batting down Miami’s two-point attempt in ’88. To the west, he’s afforded a clear view of Touchdown Jesus. He’s decked out from head to toe in brand-new ND gear, the campus bookstore apparently the beneficiary of his remaining birthday funds.
Jack doesn’t notice me until I’m three rows away from him. “How did you know that I would—”
“Give me a little credit, Jack.” I sit down next to him but not too close. “I may not be your favorite person right now, but I know you better than just about anyone on this planet.”
He doesn’t respond. The silence is uncomfortable.
“Montana and Zorich honorary captains for the Blue team?” I ask, trying to make small talk.
“Yep,” Jack says, trying to make it even smaller.
“And Theismann and Tim Brown are captains of the Gold team?”
“Yep.”
“Brady Quinn looking good?”
“Yep.”
“Darius Walker running well?”
“Yep.”
“Come on, Jack, talk to me.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing?”
“I mean really talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say, Hank? Is there a proper reaction here? You’ve let me believe my father was dead for sixteen years.”
“Technically, about eleven and a half years.”
“What?”
“I didn’t know you were my son until you were four-and-half years old. Mom kept it from me, too.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that? How could you have not known?”
“My girlfriend lied to me. She and your mother—or should I say, she and your grandmother—faked the abortion, and then Debbie adopted you.”
“Wait a second,” Jack says. “My mother is your high school sweetheart, Laura Elliot?”
“Wow, you put two and two together pretty quick. How’d you know about the so-called abortion?”
“Jeanine told me that summer I visited her in Portland.”
I run my hands through my hair, shaking my head. “Of course she did.”
“And Dad—Grandpa, whatever the hell I’m supposed to call him—he knew all about this?”
“Yes,” I say. “He was initially reluctant, but considering that aborting his grandson was the only alternative, he went along with it. After a while, the deception got easy for most of us, but in hindsight I don’t think it ever got any easier for Dad.”
“He was just never wired that way,” Jack says.
I sigh, my mind on rewind to that moment in the hospital I told Mom about Uncle Mitch’s deception, right before she doubled down on the lies. “It was after Dad died that things started spiraling out of control. In the end, I think he gave his family way too much credit.”
“Credit for what?”
“For doing the right thing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You don’t have to suddenly pull punches for my benefit, Jack. The tone in Dad’s letter was pretty obvious, especially those last few paragraphs. He just assumed we would have told you by now. I feel like I let him down again.”
“Look, Hank, uh, I mean Da—”
“Please, don’t start calling me that. I don’t deserve that. I might never deserve it.”
“Okay, whatever…Hank. Can you just give me some time to process this?”
“Take all the time you need.”
“It’s not that I’m letting you off the hook for this, because I’m not.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“But really, at least with you, what are we talking about here? A debate over semantics? You’ve basically been my father since I was four years old, since before you even found out I was your, you know, your s—”
“Yeah, you don’t have to use that word in conversation either.”
Jack flirts with smiling. “Thanks,” he says.
“You’re welcome, bro.” Jack looks at me. I say “bro” out of habit, but for the very first time, the word feels strange in my mouth.
“Hank, I have a lot of questions. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“How about at the beginning?”
“Okay,” Jack says, his eyes starting to water. “Can you tell me about Laura? What was my mother like?”
“Jack,” I say, standing and patting him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where we going?”
“I’d rather not associate any of this with Notre Dame Stadium.”
“Good call. Where to?”
“How about we have this chat over beer and wings at Hooters and go watch the NFL Draft on some big screens?”
“Beer?” Jack says.
“Why not? We’re just two thirty-four-year-old dudes knocking back a few pitchers of brew.”
“A few pitchers?”
“You got somewhere you need to be?”
“Well, there’s your birthday brunch tomorrow.”
It’s hard to resist the way Jack’s eyes suddenly light up, reminding me he’s still like any sixteen-year-old boy—ready and willing to break the law for little more than a mild buzz. And today at least, I’m more than happy to oblige him.
“You know what, Jack?”
“What?”
“Fuck ’em.”