It was terrible timing.
Not that my dad would slip away into the crowd the minute I turned my back, but that I would run into my sister before I found him. I would’ve rather run into an old girlfriend I’d dumped, a friend I owed money to, a professor who wondered if I had ever lived up to my potential. (No, Professor, no, I have not.)
I figured an old man in whale-patterned pants in a sea full of kids with squirt guns would not be that difficult to find. Two minutes, I thought, tops. But my sister’s face, grim with fury, was a cinch to spot in a joyous crowd. It radiated heat. It singed. It stung.
We’d stopped at the piano bar at the Club Car, at Dad’s request, since he loved to sing. That’s where he and Mom had always had a drink before dinner in town, so I figured, what’s the harm? It’s a holiday. I hope to God when I’m Dad’s age, no matter what my issues are, that I’m not denied a slab of beef, a tumbler of whiskey, a bowl of ice cream, and a place to sing at the top of my lungs. It’s ridiculous what hard-asses my mother and sister have become. He’s headed for lockup, for Christ’s sake. Is there going to be a piano bar and Glenfiddich in assisted living? I fucking doubt it. So Caroline wanted my rationale, demanded my rationale, and there it is. I felt for the guy. He was moving to a place with bad food, no music, and no Scotch.
There were other men in there, refugees from the nonsense outside. Dad sat at the corner of the bar, closest to the front door, and that was my mistake.
At the end of a Billy Joel song, I walked three steps over and put a five-dollar bill in the tip jar. Three steps, five dollars. And my dad was gone, the door swinging on its hinges.
A woman at the cabstand told me he’d headed right, toward the top of Main Street, in a hurry. Remembered his whale-patterned pants. I was relieved that he hadn’t headed toward Straight Wharf, toward the water, where a man taking off his shoes, boarding a boat, even jumping in the water to check something, wouldn’t seem odd in the slightest.
“Do you want us to call the police?” the woman called out to me as I sprinted past.
“No!” I called out. Christ, that would be just what I needed—Billy Clayton. How many more police reports would it take until someone in my family was arrested for something? Heckling, arson, conspiracy, theft, drinking and singing with the elderly without a permit?
I headed up the cobblestone street, looking at a taco truck, a flower truck, a pickup full of CSA vegetables. Had he taken another truck? Would he try to find Sydney, his partner in crime?
Would he head home?
I stood in the middle of Main Street, with the painted faces and balloons and guitars, looking in every direction for a man lost at sea. Did my father know his days were numbered? It was entirely possible, in that thin-walled house, that he had feigned sleep, heard our whispered plans. Or maybe, as an old man, you know it in your bones: They’re coming for you.
I walked a half block toward the farmers market, scanning the crowd. I texted John, to give him a heads-up, enlist a little backup. Maybe he’d seen him. Maybe he could look for him in his spare time between holding his wife’s purse and buying his daughter candy. I turned in circles, eyes open, debating my options, trying not to panic, when my sister’s gaze laser-beamed onto mine. Too late. She saw me. I couldn’t hear her above the crowd and the music, but I saw her lips move. What the fuck!
“I can’t find Dad,” I said quietly, evenly.
“I can’t find Sydney,” she replied.
Okay, Caroline, you win. She always won. I almost believed she had made it up, had urged her daughter to run away and hide just so she could have the upper hand.
“Is she with Courtney?”
“I don’t know, Tom, since I can’t currently see her!”
“I mean, Courtney’s not here either? So they’re together then, and—”
She held up her hand. “Stop talking,” she said. “I don’t need a man with no children to tell me about the buddy system and how she’s old enough to take care of herself.”
“Where’s John?”
“We split up to look.”
“Mom?”
“She went home.”
I nodded. “Good,” I said. “In case anyone is headed there.”
My mother’s point of view was always that nothing illegal ever happened on Nantucket except a bonfire. But she couldn’t say those things to Caroline. Caroline didn’t believe those things anymore, even if the world did.
“So you didn’t call 911?”
“No, did you?”
“I think the Nantucket police are a little tired of hearing our name, don’t you?”
We were standing there, squabbling, doing nothing to help the situation, when John walked up the small alley near Met on Main with the girls in tow.
“Sydney,” Caroline said sternly, “I told you to stay with your father!”
“But Mom—”
“We thought you’d run off with the gypsies,” I said, ruffling her hair. Keeping it light. But Caroline glared at me.
“We needed to get water for the puppy!”
“Where is this man with the puppy? Show me!”
“It wasn’t a man. It was the boys from the band.”
Sydney and Courtney bent over their phones, laughing.
“We took a Snapchat. It’s so funny!”
Caroline spun in every direction around until she saw them. The boys from the band, now walking a tiny dog with a thick red rope. She started off, and John grabbed her arm.
“Honey,” he said.
“Don’t ‘honey’ me,” she said, ripping her arm from his grasp.
I ran ahead and blocked her path. “Don’t do this, Caroline. Don’t embarrass your kid.”
“What the hell do you know about raising a child, Tom? Get out of my fucking way!”
What did I know? Once upon a time, I’d been the guy with the puppy. I could get girls of any age to fawn over me, walking through a park with a dog.
“No,” I said. “I won’t let you do that to her.” I grabbed her arms and crossed them, wrapping her up like a straitjacket.
She kicked her feet wildly, bruising my legs.
“Let me go!” Caroline screamed.
I carried her past the liquor store and deposited her outside the Starlight, a half block away from her family.
“Calm the fuck down,” I said. “We need to find Dad.”
“You lost him, you find him,” she said, shoving me in the shoulder.
“Maybe he went back to the Club Car.”
“Unbelievable. Can you not go one hour without a drink? You’re drunk, aren’t you? Jesus, Tom!”
“I am not drunk!”
“That’s why you keep losing him. You’ve been drunk the whole time!”
John joined us while the girls held back, on their phones. Probably terrified to see Caroline raving like a loon.
“John, man,” I said. “Do you think maybe Tripp headed home? If he knew no one was there?”
“What?” Caroline said. “Why would you think that?”
John and I exchanged a glance. I knew what that meant—I had to tell her.
“He seemed intent on going up to the widow’s walk,” I said. “He, uh, went up there alone.”
“When?”
“A few nights ago.” It seemed like an eternity to me now. “He was a little obsessed. I guess I could run back there, see if anyone saw him.”
“Saw who?” Sydney asked, suddenly alert after focusing on her phone. She looked like she had just emerged from a swim and found strangers on the beach.
“Pop,” I said.
“Oh, we saw him.”
“What? Where?”
She pointed behind her. “He said he was going to go up to the church tower. He wanted us to come, but I told him we had to help the puppy. And then—”
“What, honey? What?”
“I was afraid to go, because of the van.”
“Yes, honey, good. You did the right thing.”
“But, Mom,” she said quietly. “He tried to convince me. He said ‘koala.’”
“Oh my God,” Courtney said. “I cannot believe you still have a code word! Mine was ‘unicorn.’ Ha-ha, can you stand it?”
I didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. I didn’t walk. I ran up to the Congregational Church. Three blocks, four, uphill. A beautiful church, white, soaring. The lawn manicured. A picture postcard, most of the time. But not now. The tower was closed. The white church was wrapped in gray steel scaffolding.
And when I caught my father near the back of the property, looking up, trying to find a way to swing up his legs and climb, when I touched him on his arm and told him it was time to go home, he simply said, “I just wanted to see it all, Tommo. I wanted to see it all before it’s gone.”