Saturday in the Park

She looked up and in an instant stopped.

And, still looking at Micah, he watched as the boy went to her and how he hugged her tight.

"It's okay Mom. Really, everything will be okay."

And all of a sudden he knew he was watching the same show all over again. The cast of characters had changed...a little...but this die had been cast a long time ago.

So, he wondered, how do you break the cycle? How do you fix what, really, can't be fixed? Or do you just give up and walk away -- again? Pretend you didn't see what you'd just seen?

He drifted back to other days, to that other life. The life that came with Denise, then with Perry and all the chaos he'd thought he'd never have to deal with again.

Until the phone rang last night, that is, interrupting his reveries and bringing all that forgotten life back into the present.

And now, here he was, in the flash of another lie back in the middle of it all. Denise. Married for just a few months when he discovered she'd cheated on him. And how, when he found the hastily concealed evidence, she'd blamed him for everything. He was gone too much of the time, she said; never home when she needed him, and the first time had been easy enough because, of course, in her mind, he was to blame. The second and third times were harder to justify, but by then she'd ratified everything in her own mind -- and he'd begun to see the light.

Because there were patterns buried within her all her little deceits. As familiar as an averted gaze, or subterfuges concealed within misplaced words, repeated again and again until everything became clear...

Then out of the blue, she was pregnant, and after that everything started to fall apart. The numbers didn't add up, and yet, for Denise, a sudden reexamination of her life's recent choices brought him back into the picture.

She wanted the baby and began talking to him as if she wanted him around as a father, and really, that too made perfect sense. If she was going to have a baby that meant she needed his steady income, and, in the end, he realized that was really all that mattered. Like a chameleon, she turned into the loving wife he'd hoped she might be and once again he allowed himself to fall into her tender trap.

He wasn't the first man to fall into those grasping claws, he told himself, and he surely wouldn't be the last. Because we never learn.

But in the end, he understood that if she was going to have a child it was better for all concerned if the child grew up with both a father and a mother under one roof.

But, of course, none of that mattered. Denise was what she was, trying to undo all the broken dreams she carried around by fucking the next man, and the next, and the next. To him, the only real surprise was that she had really expected he would just sit there and take all her endless humiliations...

So when he was served with papers he wasn't surprised. He was surprised when she alleged he had been an abusive husband, but then again in short order, he learned that almost every divorce attorney sprinkled that allegation into the filings as a kind of ritual guarantee of success. Yet when he produced endless documentation of her almost ritual infidelities he was astonished at how quickly the allegations of abuse were taken off the table.

Just sign over custody and all that will disappear.

"I'll sign when the alimony figure gets reasonable."

And in an instant the allegations resurfaced.

"It's nothing personal," his own lawyer told him. "Just one of the tools of the trade."

And he had never been more glad he'd decided against law school.

When a figure acceptable to both parties was hammered out he was, in an instant, free of her and, as part of this hastily arrived at package deal, free of his son -- except for one weekend a month.

And, in a way, he felt lucky. Not to be free of Denise, but to be free of a system that seemed contrived to inflict as much emotional damage as possible on the combatants. As if a terminal marriage wasn't brutal enough...

But...the numbers just didn't add up. They never had. And that still remained the first big lie, intact to this day. To this very day.

And so here he was, looking at this manipulatively sobbing woman and her manipulated son out here in the park, and she was deceiving her husband -- not for attention, but for some kind of truth. She had no way of knowing her life was already broken beyond repair, and that her son would harbor feelings of guilt and despair that would shape the rest of his life, perpetuating cycles upon cycles of an unwillingness to face even the most simple truth.

'My marriage is a farce. It is a farce because I never really had any idea what love truly means. What commitment really means. What taking an oath before God requires -- namely endless compromise in the name of this thing lawyers and judges have come to define as love -- no matter the toll.'

He took a sip of tea then slowly stood and walked down to the water's edge. He bent down, took a pebble and threw it as far out over the water as he could, then he turned his back to the ripples, and walked away from their endless implications.

And he saw them again, still sitting on their thousand-dollar blanket lost in the clutches of their despair, and all he could do was shake his head...

"Because nothing ever really added up, did it? Never."

Fog started to form over by the bridge and he nodded. "Why not?"

Clouds formed and blotted out the sun. "You too? You want to get in on the fun?"

He heard a growling motor and squealing tires, saw the rakish Mercedes convertible turning off JFK, headed straight for his Porsche. "Yes, this is just perfect. I am Gary Cooper in High Noon. But...where is my Grace Kelly?"

Screeching brakes, a slamming door, he looks and sees the gun in the hand, the anger in those eyes.

"I told you!" screamed the little boy who grew up without one crucial piece of information, "I told you and I told you! I want nothing to do with you, ever again..."

"Perry," she screamed, "I called him. I told him you said it was okay...!"

And then, the not-so-little boy running for his father, his outstretched arms now capped by balled-fists, his hatred manifest, the circle almost complete.

David tried to step between Perry and Micah as the gun came up.

"I made a mistake once," David said. "I never told you the truth about something important."

Was it too late? Too late for the words to reach him?

He felt his body as it was pushed aside, heard the muffled pistol as it fired into soft flesh at close range. He stumbled, caught himself, and turned in time to see Micah falling to the ground, a spreading crimson stain on the back of his sweater -- now just covered by his father's hand.

_______________________________

Saturday evening

The police had long-since finished taking their photographs, making measurements for their diagrams that one day they would show to a jury. He gave a statement to an earnest-faced young cop who dutifully took down everything he said, and he looked on with a knot in his stomach as firemen helped load Micah's body in the Coroner's wagon.

Abby looked like a dried-out husk sitting on her blanket, their half-eaten sandwiches strewn across navy fields of prancing polo ponies, her tears cold and gone now, like sand on a windswept dune.

A wrecker backed up to Perry's Mercedes, and he shook his head before he walked over to one of the cops standing by the patrol car where Perry still sat.

"Mind if I ask him something?" he said to the nearest cop.

"No, go ahead."

He walked over to the back right door, saw the window was about half-way down so he leaned close: "There's something I need to tell you. I don't know if you can hear me, but I need you to listen."

"What is it, Dad?"

"Well, just that, Perry. I'm not your father."

Their eyes met. "What did you say?"

"I'm not your father. I'm sorry..."

The boy seemed to turn inward for a while, buried under the weight of so many lies, then he spoke one more time: "Did you know who he was?"

"No, I never knew their names. Any of them. I'm sorry."

The boy struggled to nod but turned away, and a cop got behind the wheel and they drove off.

He turned and looked at Abby, still sitting on the blanket down on the sand, and he walked over to her. He knelt and took her hand, squeezed it gently until she blinked once, then again.

"It's getting cold," she whispered, and he nodded.

"Is there somewhere I can take you?"

"My parents. They live just outside of Boston."

He nodded as he helped her stand, and he caught her when her knees gave way. She leaned into him for a moment, until she opened her eyes to the reality of her need.

"Could you take me to the house, please?"

"Sure." He helped her to the little car and put her trembling body in the passenger's seat, then he got behind the wheel and turned on the heat, closed the convertible top and latched it shut. "Where do you live?"

She told him and he turned into traffic and drove away.

And as he looked at the receding scene in the rearview mirror he couldn't help but ask himself one more time, that all those things had never really added up. Not even once.

But why, now, did those things seem so far away, yet so very important?

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© 2020 adrian leverkühn | abw | as always, this short story is a work of fiction, and a continuation -- of sorts -- of an earlier story -- but as always, thanks for reading.