Chapter 33
“That’s right, reel him in slowly.” Papa’s voice held atinge of excitement as he watched me fight to bring in the fish. I was in the front of his ten-foot aluminum fishing boat and he was in the back. It was quiet on this lake, and we were the only ones out here, had been the only one in sight ever since we’d arrive shortly after dawn, nearly an hour ago. To my great surprise, we’d both managed to catch fish, with this one being my second. If I managed to reel it in, I’d equal the two he’d already caught.
“Got him!” Papa’s voice was raised with excitement as the fish broke the surface and he smoothly caught it in the net he was holding out. Minutes later, we had the hook out of the mouth of a decent-sized fish – trout, I think. The fish was put in the steel mesh trap Papa had made himself and joined the other three fish in flopping around as Papa put the whole trap back in the water.
“Thanks for bringing me out here, Papa.” I said with a slight flush warming my chilled cheeks. It was the Wednesday after I’d come back in time, and Papa woke me before dawn to take me fishing. Nanny had protested it was too cold, and it was freezing with snow still visible as Papa’s van climbed into the foothills of the
Papa stared at me in that way he had, like he was studying every single inch of me. It was a little uncomfortable, and I had to resist an urge to shiver. The morning was a cold one, and after Nanny had failed to convince me not to go with Papa, she’d insisted that I be dressed warmly. An old lined flannel shirt of Papa’s had been dug out and while it was really too big, it was warm underneath the jacket he’d bought me. I also wore a pair of his gloves that were too large for me and a black sock hat Nanny had found somewhere.
“You’re welcome, boy.” Papa said after a long silence. I noticed that he’d already put his reel up, and I laid mine down beside his instead of putting more bait on the hook. “I went to see Gus on Monday.”
“I wondered.” I said softly, trying to remember to not talk like an adult. It was probably the hardest, and at times the easiest aspect of being back in my body of seven years, no, today was my birthday so I was eight now.
“We got lucky.” Papa added with a slight shrug, looking away from me and out over the water. He let that statement hang in the quiet, frosty air for a long moment before continuing. “He and I reached a deal on your bet. He paid two thousand in cash, I get free stuff from his store whenever I want, and he doesn’t say anything to…friends of his. You get my meaning?”
“Yes.” I answered after a moment of thought. More than likely, this Gus character was a small fry in some local betting ring.
“He won’t be taking any more bets from me, and he doesn’t want to hear of me making any other bets in town.” Papa added and I frowned slightly before nodding.
“Sorry about that.” I told my grandfather and he actually snorted.
“Ain’t no big deal.” Papa said. “I been thinking though, about what you said on the Super Bowl. You certain?”
“Yes.” I assured him, feeling a bit of a thrill. He took something out of his pocket, and I saw it was a wad of money. Without counting it I knew it’d be the two thousand dollars I’d won and I took it almost reverently from him.
“How about we head back, load up the van and go for a little drive?” Papa suggested, moving to start the boat’s engine. “If you can keep your mouth shut to your Nanny and mom, we might go for a drive all the way to Tahoe before we head back down.”
“Why don’t you hold onto this?” I suggested, handing back the money and his mouth cracked into a wicked smile.
“You want to place a bet?” He asked me with a real chuckle this time, and when I nodded, it turned into one of the few real laughs I’d ever heard from him.
He was still laughing six hours later as we pulled out of
Papa sobered up as he navigated the van down Highway 50 with the boat on the trailer behind us. The area around
I’d still have to wait about a week for the results.
Before placing the bets, Papa had grilled me on point spreads, and even scoring during the quarters of the Super Bowl. Another headache had made it difficult to recall the exact details, but I had managed to get them correct for him. He’d also told me that he wasn’t placing all the money on the information I’d given him. Rather he was spreading it out over bets he knew we’d lose, but enough money was being put on the right ones so that with the long odds he played, the winnings would still be fairly substantial.
“Davey, always remember when you’re trying to fool people to not be obvious about it.” He’d told me right before he left me in the van while he went into the casino to place the bets. It took nearly two hours to leave the mountains behind us, and hit the flat highway on the outskirts of
“How.” Was the single word Papa spoke as he looked at me out of the corner of his eye. There was no need to say more, I knew exactly what he meant.
“I…you don’t want to know.” I stumbled, not really having thought out what to say if he asked.
“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil, did you boy?” Papa asked and I knew he was being totally serious.
“No.” I answered seriously, and he turned his head to look at me for a long moment. He looked long enough that I began to worry he wasn’t watching where he was going. This highway was a lot narrower than I remembered it being inpast timelines.
“You haven’t been the same since you came home from school that day.” Papa said in a voice that was both hard edged and soft. “Something happened that day. You’ve been…more a man since then, less like the boy you were last Thursday.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him with wide eyes. I had thought I was doing better at covering up the differences between a seven-year-old mind and seventy-year-old mind.
“You act more like you’re grown up than a little boy.” Papa said, surprising me with the accuracy of his words. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you’d grown up over night.”
“You know not to look a gift horse in the mouth, Papa.” I said as softly as I dared, hoping he’d drop it right there. He was silent for a long time, just looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Apparently he didn’t take my response as being disrespectful because there was no rebuke.
“I’ll figure it out eventually.” He said as we passed through the southern section of
“I won’t.” I assured him.
“That’s my part of the money, from my bet.” He insisted, taking his eyes off the road again to look at me before turning them back to the truck that was far too close for my comfort. Then again, many people had complained about my driving in other timelines. I wondered how much riding with him as a kid had affected my own driving habits. “We still have to decide what to do about your share. You know it’s going to be nearly a quarter of a million dollars after taxes, don’t you?”
“I know.” I said softly. I knew what I wanted to happen, since there really were only two people I trusted with my money and I couldn’t legally take control of it as a minor. “I was hoping you and I might work out an agreement. People always say you’re tight with money, but as I see it that’s a good thing for me, and I know you won’t steal it from me.”
“You’re damn right I won’t.” Papa growled. “I don’t want your father getting his grubby hands on the money either. Lord only knows what junk he’d waste it on and by the time you got old enough for college it’d all be gone. Your mom’s hardly better with money. She told your Nanny last night that she still wants to get back together with him.”
“I think that’s for the best.” I said cautiously, noticing the grimace on his face. “He has to admit what he did wrong, though, at least to the family, and ask for forgiveness. That’s what the bible says, right?”
“Near enough.” Papa groused. Pulling the bible card was a cheap shot with him, and it usually worked as long as it was done right. “If he does something like that again, I’m going to cut off his balls.”
“That’s between you and him, Papa.” I said with a slight grin and got a grunt from him. “I just know I trust you with the money more than him.”
“Then we’ll set you up a bank account when we get the money.” Papa said with a firm nod of his head. “I’ll wait a few weeks to tell your Nanny, and then you’ll have to go to her or me to pull money out of the bank. I won’t have you wasting it on candy.”
“That sounds good, Papa.” I agreed with him. At least Nanny would be easier to get money for things like clothes. My wardrobe was seriously lacking and I had to be honest, in the last two timelines I’d become a bit of a clotheshorse. I liked having nice, new clothes and didn’t want to have to wait for my birthday, Christmas, or the beginning of a new school year for them.
“Your folks are going to need a place to live when they decide to get back together.” Papa said as we passed through
“Maybe we can work something out with part of my money.” I said absentmindedly and got a grunt of disapproval.
“No, I’ll handle that.” Papa said with a frown. “Your parents don’t know how lucky they are that Mom and I handle our money so well. We could get them a house without the money coming in if we need to, and your mom has already been through hell when she was a girl.”
I knew he was talking about her bout with scoliosis. They’d caught it too late, and I knew in some way he blamed himself for the curving of her spine, the six months she spent in a body cast after surgery, and the permanent hump she had on her back because of it. That was why he did things for her he’d never do for any of his own kids or his other two step-kids.
“I’ll be damned if they live anywhere other than
“That sounds fun.” I said with a wider grin and he nodded.
“Not a word to your mom, you hear?” He told me and I nodded again. I knew he was talking both about the house hunting and my own money. It went without saying that he’d not want anything said to dad. “Oh, and if it makes you feel better, we’ll use some of your money as well to get a bigger house.”
Now that was the miserly man I knew.
We pulled into the driveway about an hour before dinner, and my sister came bounding out of the house to give me a hug. She had her platinum blond hair done up in pig tails and was probably the cutest little girl I’d ever seen. I’d forgotten just how cute she had been as a little girl and it went a good distance to subduing the memories of her in a wheelchair at the end of the last timeline, her leg amputated when they couldn’t save it after she’d been shot rescuing kids during the sapper raid on the church camp.
I helped Papa back the boat trailer under the awning he’d built for it and we started cleaning the fish. Mom came and hustled me into the house to get showered and changed for dinner.
At this point in time, she was just twenty-five, and looked remarkably young to my eyes. Somehow I’d never really thought of her as being this young, and it was a slight shock to see her face free of the worry lines that had always been there in the previous timelines. I knew they were forming now, from things Dad had said in the last timeline about our family’s history, but as of this moment, they weren’t there yet.
Showering in Nanny’s house was always a mini-adventure in and of itself. There was a hallway off of the main entrance that went down to the left as you entered the house. On the right side of the hallway were two bedrooms. The first bedroom held two beds, as it had for years beyond count in the first and second timelines. This was where my sister and I currently slept. The second bedroom on the right was now occupied by my mother and held a bed and two dressers. She used one dresser my sister and I used the other. On the left side of the hallway, the first door was to the ‘public’ bathroom. It only had a bathtub. The second door on the left was to Nanny and Papa’s bedroom, and it had an adjoining bathroom that held the shower. In order to take a shower, I had to get a towel from a linen closet in the hall, go in Mom’s bedroom to get some clean clothes and go in Nanny and Papa’s bathroom to use the shower. I went to my dresser and pulled out some underwear, socks, a nice polo shirt and a pair of only slightly-tattered slacks. Even my underwear (a pair of spider-man Underoos) was slightly tattered and a bit too small.
Twenty minutes later I was done with my shower, dressed, and in the family room chatting with my cousin Chris about some total nonsense stuff. It was just kid talk, and while he was two years older he and I got on pretty well. He was a lot more open and friendly than I remembered him being, and the reason suddenly came to me just as Nanny announced that dinner was ready.
He hadn’t been molested yet.
One more thing got added to the list of things I needed to change, and thanks to events in the last timeline, I had a better idea of when things had started to happen to him. That was one thing I was going to change – even if it killed me! All I had to do was come up with a way to make it happen without getting directly involved.
Nanny had made hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries for dinner. By the time everything was ready, everyone was there. Aunt Fran had come with Shantill, Chris, Josh, and the toddler Tiffany. Aunt Priscilla was there with Brian, the youngest of her kids who was currently around sixteen or so. My mother, sister, Nanny and Papa rounded out the list of those who’d been able to make it from this side of the family.
As we ate dinner, I began to realize just how little attention I’d paid to this time period of my family history. Maybe part of that had been how…troubled this period was with my parents being split up, and another part was that we’d just spent the last three and a half years living on the other side of the country. I was a stranger to most of my cousins, who for the most part didn’t remember me and if I hadn’t come back in time, I really wouldn’t know them at all. As it was I didn’t really know them in the here and now.
After dinner and blowing out the candles on the homemade German Chocolate cake (my favorite), I got to open presents.
Most of them were clothes, and a few toys as well as a couple of cards, each with five dollars in them. By eight o’clock, they’d all left, leaving Nanny and Mom to clean up the dishes, and Mom had sent me over to my other grandmother’s house for the rest of my birthday celebration. Jenny pouted when she was told she couldn’t go, and I was given very explicit instructions to not spend too much time over there because I would be going to school in the morning.
“Hi son.” Dad said as I walked up the driveway to Grandma Jones’s house. He must have been waiting for me, because he’d been sitting on the porch and stood up as I jogged around the corner. It was dark outside, but the porch light was on, giving me a good look at my father in this timeline.
“Hi dad.” I told him, moving close enough to get a hug from him before he held me out at arm’s length to look me up and down. I was doing the same, trying to notice the difference and similarities between this time and my memories. He had dark circles under his eyes, most likely from lack of sleep and was less overweight than I seemed to remember him being. He also had a big, bushy mustache that I remembered him growing off and on throughout the seventies and early eighties.
“You look like you’ve grown a whole inch!” He exclaimed with so much enthusiasm that it sounded really forced. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he really was glad to see me or if he still blamed me for catching him in the act of cheating on my mother, and for telling her about what I’d seen. “C’mon inside.”
“Okay.” I said without allowing the shrug I was feeling to become visible. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight into him as we went up the single step onto the very small front porch. I’d barely noticed one big difference in Grandma’s house between now and the 1980’s. The garage was still a garage instead of being converted to a bedroom for Aunt Bev who had just had her accident a few months ago. That raised a question I honestly couldn’t remember the answer to and I asked it as dad opened the door. “Is Aunt Bev home yet?”
“No, she’s still in the hospital.” Dad’s voice held an edge to it as we entered the kitchen and I was snatched out of his one-armed embrace by my paternal Grandmother.
“Oh look at you!” She said while slobbering me with kisses. There was no need to act like a kid who was being given too much affection by a grandparent, I squirmed in her arms without thinking and didn’t bother resisting the urge to wipe off the slobbers. “You’ve grown so much. How awful that you’re right around the corner and I don’t even get to see you!”
“Hi grandma.” I said, resisting the urge to use the insulting version of that name most of my family had used for her all my life. I didn’t think me using ‘Nag-ma’ as an eight-year-old would go over too well.
“Who’re you?” A young, piping voice asked from the other side of Grandma, near the dining room area of the house and I peered around her to see a little boy, no more than four, with a wild shock of brown hair staring at me with a frown.
“I’m your cousin, Brian.” I answered my younger cousin. He was Bev’s son, and had been in the van the day she was hit by the cement truck. He’d made it through the crash without any problems.
“But I’m Brian.” He said plaintively and it was fun to roll my eyes.
“I know that.” I told him. “I’m Davey.”
“Oh.” Brian said with a gleam of understanding in his eyes. “You’re the ‘no-good brat’.”
“Brian!” Dad’s voice was sharp from behind me, and I almost let out a snicker. Oh yeah, Brian always did have a habit of saying the most embarrassing things at just the right moment. I debated whether to be amused or hurt, and settled for pretending to not understand the implication of the statement.
“Would you like to see the cake I made?” Grandma asked and I nodded with relief and a smile. She took my hand and led me to the dining room table where a lopsided, home made Chocolate cake (my second favorite) was sitting with eight unlit candles in a circle on top. As Dad used a match to light the candles, Grandma began nattering on about how bad it was that she hadn’t seen me in two whole weeks and how bad my mom was for not letting me come see her. It took a sharp comment from Dad to make her shut up as he finished lighting the candles and I looked over at Brian, who was rolling his eyes at Grandma. We shared a brief smile when he noticed me noticing him rolling his eyes.
“Make a wish, Davey.” Dad said and I closed my eyes before making a very fervent wish that I’d be able to improve things here very quickly. The rendition of “Happy Birthday” that I was treated to by them was enough to make me almost give up hope. Brian screeched at the top of his lungs, not really knowing the words or tune, but making noise nonetheless. Dad belted it out in a deep bass as if he was singing a hymnal, and Grandma’s singing reminded me all too much of Mrs. Mandragorn’s nails across the chalkboard. I really was glad when they were done, and clapped to show my joy.
“Open your presents!” Brian demanded, before Dad had cut even a single piece of cake, and he shoved two boxes at me.
“We have to eat cake first!” Grandma chided him, pushing the boxes away before taking the piece of cake dad had just put on a saucer and shoving it at me. Luckily, I caught it before it could fall off the saucer and land on my chest. Grandma was frowning now, and barely waited for Dad to finish cutting three more pieces before grabbing them and putting them around the table. Next she shoved me into a chair, sat down next to me and focused her glare upon me. “Now, tell me all the things you’ve been doing, Davey.”
The two bites of cake I managed to eat amidst her interrogation of me proved that while the cake was lopsided, it tasted good. Both times I’d shoved the bite of cake into my mouth to keep from saying something I shouldn’t when she went on another tirade about how evil my mother was. I’m sure Nanny was saying things just as bad about my father right now, but at least she had the decency not to say them where Jenny or I could hear them. It was even harder to not point that out to Grandma when she started nagging on Nanny and all the awful things she imagined Nanny must be saying about her.
“Why don’t you open your presents, Davey.” My father said after far too much nagging from Grandma. I knew if I was going to make things better I had to see my father and talk with him, but there had to be someway I could do that without having to listen to my Nag-ma. “Mother, you know Davey has school in the morning and we can’t keep him up too late.”
“I just don’t get to see him enough!” Grandma whined, for the entire world like she was my age, or maybe even Brian’s. Poor Brian, what hell he must have to go through stuck here with her all the time. Oh wait, I dimly remembered something about him being picked up by his father and dropped off in pre-school before he brought the boy back here. His father, George, hadn’t yet divorced Aunt Bev, but was shuffling between here and the Bay Area to see her, while still working as a painter. After she came back from the hospital and the reality hit him that she’d never walk again, and that she’d need constant care, he’d left her for good, and had left Brian as well.
“Well I told you after our talk with Pastor Wright that Sandy and I were going to be working things out.” Dad said in an exasperated voice as he pushed the two wrapped boxes towards me. For a brief moment, I saw a look of anger on his face, and part of that anger was directed towards me. Oh yeah, this wasn’t going to be easy.
“Thanks dad.” I said as I reached out for the two boxes.
“Open the bottom one first!” Grandma ordered and I moved to obey. After tearing into the wrapping paper (I was a kid again, I could tear away to my heart’s content! Besides, tearing things apart when feeling frustrated always helped!) I opened up a JC Penney’s box to find a shirt I remembered very well. It was a bright pink button-down shirt and had a little rainbow flag over the pocket. In 1976, it didn’t quite scream ‘QUEER’ the way it would in later years, but I’d always looked back at a picture taken somewhere near this time, a picture in which I’d been wearing the shirt, and wondered why no one had figured out I was gay long before I did.
“Thanks, Grandma!” I said with more delight than I expected. It was like finding an old friend again. I’d really liked this shirt as a kid, and now I got to enjoy it again, for a lot of reasons. “I like it!”
“It’s too bright.” Brian groused and this time I did laugh at his comment. He flinched at my laugh, but then smiled shyly when the laugh grew a little deeper.
“Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to wear it, right?” Dad said to Brian who nodded while looking at me like I was crazy. The laughter I was belting out had a tinge of hysteria to it, and I had to fight to get it under control before I started weeping.
Talk about your dysfunctional families.
“This one is from me.” Dad said, reaching across the table and flicking the remaining box with his fingers. I took it gingerly, and unwrapped this one much more carefully. By the time I was opening the box under the wrapping, Brian was fidgeting in his seat, anxious to see what was inside.
“Thanks dad.” I said with a genuine smile as I pulled out the brand new baseball glove. The sight of it brought up a lot of memories, some good, some very bitter. All of a sudden, and with a stab of pain, memories began flooding into me of this birthday from my very first lifetime, and I knew what was coming next. It was the reason why I’d never really played baseball as a kid, despite loving the sport.
“Why don’t we go out back, turn on the lights and play some catch?” Dad asked me and I nodded slowly, putting on the glove and stretching it out slightly. It was brand new, not a used one, and I knew it’d require some care before being really usable, but it was still a good glove.
Shame that it had only been used once in my original life.
“I want to play!” Brian shouted and jumped out of his chair only to be corralled by Grandma’s arm and hustled off towards the bathroom.
“It’s your bedtime and you have to take a bath first!” Grandma said to him sternly.
“I don’t wanna!” Brian shouted as I followed Dad through the living room and out the back patio door. Part of me dreaded what had happened next in my original life, and part of me debated on how to respond when it happened again. Suddenly, Grandma’s blue shag carpeting, and how similar it was to Nanny’s green shag carpet seemed much more important a fact than that we were going outside, and I knew my brain was stalling, trying to think about anything other than what was coming. Dad flipped a switch before going through the patio doorway and two bright floodlights lit the back yard enough that we could see to throw a ball around.
“Okay, I’m going to toss the ball to you son and I want you to catch it in the mitt.” Dad said when we were both outside and I’d shut the sliding glass door behind me. I nodded, putting the new glove on my left hand. “You go to the other side of the yard.”
“Okay.” I said and trotted about ten feet away from him.
“Here you go son.” Dad said as he tossed the ball to me in a soft throw. I almost sighed with relief as I caught it easily and threw it back to him. He caught it barehanded and smiled.
“Good!” He said with more enthusiasm than he’d shown all night. He tossed it back to me again, and we went like that for five minutes in silence before he spoke again. “How’s school going?”
“It’s okay.” I said softly.
“Your mom was saying you had some problems the other day.” He said as we continued to toss the ball in long, slow throws. I was catching it every time and as we continued to throw back and forth, his throws became a little harder, a little more direct.
“I don’t like my new teacher.” I said honestly and he frowned.
“That’s no reason to talk back to her.” He told me sternly and I nodded. This was where it happened, in that first lifetime and I prayed it wasn’t going to happen again. It did though and the next throw from him was far different than any of the others. He threw the ball hard and fast, as fast as he could really, and it came right at my face. A surge of anger filled my young body and I knew then that I had pushed a lot of memories of these years out of my head on purpose.
Even after he and mom had gotten back together in February of 1976, life hadn’t suddenly gotten more pleasant for me. There were numerous scrapes, falls, and other little things that had happened whenever I was around my father – nothing really overt, just little accidents here and there. This night had been the one real event that couldn’t be just some clumsiness on my part, or an accident. In the first lifetime, the ball that was now speeding towards me had come too fast for me to catch, and had been perfectly aimed to hit me right on the nose. I’d gone back to Nanny’s with a broken, bleeding nose that had been slightly crooked eversince, and the brand new glove had been left behind in Grandma’s back yard, never to be picked up again.
Not this time.
I caught the ball far easier than a normal eight-year-old would have been able to do, and with a smooth motion that had come from playing ball in the previous timelines, I threw the ball right back at him with as much force as my eight-year-old body could muster. Without thinking about it, I’d thrown it as a curve ball, just like David Wells had taught me while we were dating, and he misjudged it just enough that his bare hand missed the ball as it curved in to hit him in the groin. My father doubled over in pain as the ball dropped to the ground, and his hands went to cover his private parts too late to do any good. I realized I was panting heavily as an after-effect of the level of anger that had shook my entire body. As he lay on the ground, whimpering slightly in pain, I stomped across the grass and stood over him, looking down at him with a gaze that no eight-year-old could have mustered. He recovered enough to see me looking down at him and started to say something.
“Don’t.” I warned him with a tone that likely should have resulted in any child being whipped for using it to speak to an adult. I didn’t care at that moment. “Don’t ever try that again, Dad. I’m not some stupid kid. I know you blame me for everything that happened, but I’m not the one to blame. You made the mistake, you did something wrong, and you got caught. Don’t blame me for your failings as a husband, as a father.”
“How dare you…” He panted out, outrage in his eyes.
“You tried to hit me on purpose.” I argued with him, moving back a step as he started to recover enough to sit up a little straighter. “You threw that ball thinking I’d never catch it in time to stop it from hitting me in the face. You got angry and you reacted by trying to hurt me. When you can stop doing things like that, maybe we can be a family again, but don’t even think about trying to be a father until you’ve dealt with your anger and stopped trying to blame me for your screw-ups.”
“You can’t talk to me that way.” Dad fumed, getting to his feet and reaching out for me angrily. I slipped under his arm and danced back a few steps. He glared at me and I knew his temper was about to break. It wouldn’t be a good thing to be within his reach when it did. “You’re just a kid, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not just a kid.” I retorted, moving a few more steps backwards for safety. “I haven’t been ‘just a kid’ since I walked in on my father having sex with his secretary. Thanks to his inability to keep his pants zipped, I’ve had to grow up a lot faster than a kid should have to grow up. Just be glad I’m still willing to call you ‘father’ and be glad I’m willing to see you and mom get back together and for us to be a family. You messed up, Dad, and the sooner you’re ready to admit that and move on, the sooner we can get back together as a family. Until then, don’t try to use me as something to take your anger out on.”
“Get back here!” Dad said as I turned and ran around the corner of the house. I didn’t even bother to open the back gate, I just jumped and scrambled over the fence, landing on the other side and taking off for Nanny’s. It was just around the corner, but I was panting, out of breath from the flat-out run by the time I stopped on Nanny’s front porch. I hadn’t yet resumed my workouts in this timeline, and I silently vowed to do that as I took the glove off of my left hand and stared at it. It seemed to mark a difference in this timeline for me, even though several things had changed already. In my original life, I had come back with the pink shirt and the glove had been left behind. Now, the glove was with me and the pink shirt was back at Grandma’s. It was a little change, and I wasn’t quite sure of the symbolism it represented, but I could almost feel a major shifting as if it was this moment the timeline made its first major change in direction.
“You’re back.” Papa’s voice startled me and I jumped slightly. I hadn’t heard him open the front door. He took one look at me, and I realized there were tears streaking down my face for the first time. His craggy face broke into a look of concern for a fleeting moment before he shut the door behind him put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me in front of him, out into the front yard. He guided me to the right, towards the covered patio he’d built on the side of the house where he kept his fishing boat, and he turned on the flood light for the patio after pulling back the wooden gate to let us on the patio. “What happened?”
“I…he…it’s a long story.” I stuttered, not sure where to begin.
“We’re not going anywhere.” He told me firmly and I let out a sigh, looking at the boat we’d used earlier today. It had been so peaceful on that lake. I’d truly enjoyed the morning, just simply fishing. An odd feeling washed over me. Papa had always seemed this cold, distant figure in my first lifetime, and hadn’t really played much of a role in either of the last two timelines, but now I realized that what I’d viewed as ‘cold’ and ‘distant’ had just been a gruff exterior covering a man who really cared. He was a strict man, expecting certain things from those around him, and he had high standards, and many times he took enjoyment in some cruel things, but he was also fair, and he really did care in his own way. I wondered why it had taken me three lifetimes to realize that, and what else I’d missed in my other family members. In the last timeline, Dad had shown me just how good of a father he could be, and seeing what he was now, versus what he’d been just a few days ago in my life, was a hard thing to deal with.
“You need to learn that even if what you’re saying is right, there are certain things you just don’t say to adults.” Papa said angrily when I finished telling him and my eyes widened slightly. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting and when his hand went to his belt, I almost gave in to a sudden desire to start running again. “Bend over.”
Five hard swats followed, although they weren’t as hard as they could have been, and didn’t hurt nearly as much with my pants still up. By the time he was done and I was standing back up, the tears from earlier were gone, and for some odd reason I felt better, more clear-headed. I didn’t think it was the spanking, and was shocked when I realized that I felt better because Papa’s reaction had been ordinary, it had been what I should have expected from him. He believed very much in people sticking to their ‘proper’ places, and I’d stepped over that line in how I’d said the things I’d said, and even voicing them at all.
“Davey, your words were right, but you have no right to say them to your father.” Papa explained as he put his belt back on his pants. “That’s your mother’s job, and maybe mine. You leave it to the adults to handle, you hear me?”
“Yes, Papa.” I answered him. I heard him, although I might have to step in at some point or another, but I wasn’t going to argue with him.
“If he ever tries something like throwing that ball again, I want you to tell me.” Papa added with a hint of anger. “Don’t come to me crying if he spanks you for something you deserve, you hear, but somethin’ like trying to hit you with that ball, you let me know.”
“Okay Papa.” I answered, this time meaning it. There was a world of difference between discipline and abuse and I knew that. I also knew there were other ways of handling abuse than screaming to the authorities. Papa would make sure it didn’t happen again if I ever told him that Dad had tried again.
“Good, go kiss your mother and Nanny good night and then head to bed.” He told me and I nodded before turning to head back towards the front door.
“Good night, Papa.” I said as he shut the patio gate.
“Good night, Davey.” He told me. When he didn’t follow me inside, but rather headed off down the street, I knew there was no need to ask where he was going, or what he was going to do. Now I just had to figure out how to turn the night’s events into something good instead of just some more bad memories.
As with all my stories, E provides immeasurable input, grammar checking, and all those other lovely editing thingies that make the story so much better!
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