When I opened the door, my father was peeking out from behind a catcher’s mask, his hands outstretched in a defensive pose. “Friends…?” he asked, an apologetic smile sneaking through.
“Dinner…” I smiled begrudgingly. “That’s the best I can do.”
“That’s a start,” he said, stepping in. He had cleaned himself up. He was wearing a brown sport jacket, pressed pants, an open-collared white shirt. He handed me a bottle of red wine wrapped in paper.
“You didn’t have to,” I said, unfurling the wine, then gasping in surprise as I read the label. It was a first-growth Bordeaux, Chateau Latour, the year 1965.
I looked at him; 1965 was the year I was born.
“I bought it a year after you were born. It was about the only thing I took with me when I left. I always figured we’d drink it on your graduation or something, maybe your wedding.”
“You kept it all these years.” I shook my head.
He shrugged. “Like I said, I bought it for you. Anyway, Lindsay, there’s nothing I’d rather do than drink it here tonight.”
Something warm rose inside me. “You’re making it hard to continue to completely hate you.”
“Don’t hate me, Lindsay.” He tossed me the catcher’s mask. “This doesn’t fit. I don’t ever want to have to use it again.”
I took him into the living room, poured him a beer, and sat down. I had on a wine-colored Eileen Fisher sweater, my hair pulled up in a ponytail. His eyes seemed to twinkle at me.
“You look gorgeous, Buttercup,” my father said.
When I scowled, he smiled. “I can’t help it, you just do.”
For a while we talked, Martha lying beside him as if he were an old friend. We talked about trivial things, things we knew. Who was left from his old cronies on the force. Cat, and her new daughter he hadn’t seen. Whether Jerry Rice would call it quits. We skirted the subject of Mercer and the case.
And as if I were meeting someone for the first time, I found him different from what I imagined. Not garrulous and boastful and full of stories as I remembered, but humble and reserved. Almost contrite. And he still had his sense of humor.
“I’ve got something to show you,” I said. I went into the hall closet and came back with the satin Giants baseball jacket he’d given me over twenty-five years before. It was embroidered with a number 24 and had the name Mays on the front chest.
My father’s eyes flashed in surprise. “I’d forgotten about that. I got it from the equipment manager in nineteen sixty-eight.” He held it in front of him and looked at it a long time, like an old relic that had made the past suddenly vivid. “You have any idea what that thing must be worth today?”
“I always called it my inheritance,” I told him.
Chapter 62
I DID SALMON on the grill in a ginger-miso sauce, fried rice with peppers, leeks, and peas. I remembered that my father liked Chinese. We cracked the ’65 Latour. It was a dream wine, silky and gemlike. We sat in the alcove overlooking the bay. My father said it was the best bottle of wine he’d ever tasted.
The conversation gradually drifted toward more personal things. He asked what kind of man I had been married to, and I admitted, unfortunately, someone like himself. He asked if I resented him, and I had to tell him the truth. “Yeah. A lot, Dad.”
Gradually, we even talked about the case. I told him how tough it was to solve, how I held it against myself that I couldn’t crack it. How I was sure it was a serial, but four murders into the case, I still had nothing.
We talked for three more hours, until after eleven, the wine bottle empty, Martha asleep at his feet. Every once in a while I had to remind myself that I was talking to my own father. That I was sitting across from him for the first time in my adult life. And slowly, I began to see. He was just a man who had made mistakes, and who had been punished for them. He was no longer someone I could blindly resent, or hate. He hadn’t murdered anybody. He wasn’t Chimera. By the standards I dealt with, his sins were forgivable.
Gradually, I could no longer hold back the question I’d been wanting to ask for so many years. “I have to know the answer to this. Why did you leave?”
He took a swallow of wine and leaned back against the couch. His blue eyes looked so sad. “There’s nothing I could say that would make sense of it to you. Not now… You’re a grown woman. You’re on the force. You know how things get. Your mother and I… Let’s just say we were never a good match, even for the old school. I had squandered most of what we had on the games. I had a lot of debts, borrowed money on the street. That’s not exactly kosher for a cop. I did a lot of things I wasn’t very proud of… as a man and as a cop.”
I noticed his hands were trembling. “You know how sometimes, someone commits a crime simply because the situation gets so bad that one by one, the options just close off and they’re unable to do anything else? That’s how it was for me. The debts, what was going on on the job… I didn’t see any other choice. I just left. I know it’s a little late to say this, but I’ve regretted it every day of my life.”
“And when Mom got sick…?”
“I was sorry when she got sick. But by then I had a new life, and no one made it seem like I was welcome to come back. I thought it would hurt her more than help.”
“I know Mom always told me you were a pathological liar.”
“That’s the truth, Lindsay,” my father said. I liked the way he admitted it. I liked my father, actually.