Ah, my brother.
* * *
An hour later, I was on the lawn of St. Timothy’s. I had spent every Sunday morning of the first eighteen years of my life inside this early 1800s church filled with stained glass and dark wood pews. The quiet was otherworldly inside that church. Even when it was empty, you could walk inside and know you weren’t alone. My mother had made me serve as an acolyte every Sunday from the time I was big enough to carry the cross until the week I left for college. Sometimes, when the days were really hard, I could close my eyes and picture myself sitting in a chair beside the altar, wearing my vestment, and everything inside me would get still.
I saw my dad walking across the lawn and greeted him with a bear hug. Everybody said my dad could have spit me out. We were both just over six feet tall, with the same dimples and the same skinny legs. I got Mom’s blond hair, not his dark, but now that he’d gone gray, the difference wasn’t so pronounced.
“Son,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder. “Glad to have you home.”
Dad still owned his family’s farmland, but had scarcely seen a tractor since he was eighteen years old. He’d thought he’d break his dad’s heart by telling him that he wasn’t going to go into farming. He was going to go into insurance. He had been shocked when his parents were relieved.
Of all the jobs in the world, farming might be the toughest. In a life where little can be controlled, farming is a job where nothing—not the rain or the sun or the yield or the pests—can be controlled. Hurricane season is a horror, and tornado season is almost as bad. Ironically—or maybe not—my dad had gone into a business where he helped people safeguard against tragedy. After a life of living and dying by the corn season, he knew exactly what was at stake.
Looking around the front lawn at the old brick church, I saw my history. My family had lived in this town forever; these people scattered around eating lemon squares were my people. They would all hug me and ask me how I was, and for a minute, between the people who loved me and the two bourbons, I would feel like maybe I was okay.
I heard squeals coming from the adjacent softball field and laughed to see my brother pitching, underhanded, to a group of kids. He was laughing, too, which made me happy. For years and years he couldn’t even drive by this softball field, much less step onto it and throw a pitch. My brother was healing.
A hand clamped my shoulder and I turned to hug my friend Bart Steele, who I’d known since we were in diapers. “Watson, Spence, and I are fishing. Leaving the dock at five. You in?” The thing about having known someone since you were babies is you don’t have to make small talk.
I nodded. I’d been fishing offshore with those three guys, my best buddies, with our dads since we were three, and by ourselves since we were fifteen—which, in retrospect, was too young. If you can’t drive a car, you probably shouldn’t be able to take a Sportfish thirty miles out into the ocean. “Want me to bring fried chicken or sandwiches?” This was our ritual. Melon, sandwiches, fried chicken, and someone’s mom’s brownies. Well, now, someone’s wife’s brownies.
He winked at me. “Just beer.”
I made eye contact with Amelia, who was sipping lemonade and laughing with Mary Lou Jackson. She smiled apologetically, and I walked toward her. Kind of like when neighbors bond over a natural disaster or a shitty landlord, we had been thrust together. She was the only breathing person who knew my current situation.
I wasn’t ready to broach the topic with my parents. My dad, who I was positive had never changed a diaper, would think I had lost my mind. My mother, who had raised me to be the kind of man my dad was, would think I wasn’t capable. I couldn’t take that energy right now. Not when this idea was so fresh and new. It wasn’t real yet, and it never had to be real. I could just think about it and feel happy.
Mary Lou slyly walked away as I made my way toward Amelia. “Am I crazy?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Damn,” she said. “So you are thinking about it! I knew it.”
I felt a prickle of happiness like that really great feeling you get from a big idea, like starting a new business or building a new house. You haven’t considered yet how much work it might be, how hard it might be, how much your life is going to change. You just feel the good parts. That’s where I was.
“They’re half of her, Lia,” I said. “I have four little babies waiting for me that are half-Greer.”
She sighed. “Parker, you’re being dramatic.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Parker, look,” she continued. “One of the things everyone loves about you is that you’re a romantic. You see the starry-eyed version of the truth. But come on. You’re young. You’ll remarry. You’ll have babies with a new love. If you do this, it’ll prevent that. You’ll never want to move on.”
“I don’t want to move on,” I said, feeling indignant.
She took a sip of her lemonade and shrugged. “I can’t be responsible for this. I mean, you’re going to do what? Hire a surrogate? Quit your job and stay home with kids?”
I hadn’t thought of that yet. Stupid logistics licked the red off my candy. I couldn’t really see being a stay-at-home dad. But Greer wouldn’t have been a stay-at-home mom, either, so that didn’t matter.
“And what if you have girls? What are you going to do when they get their period?”
I laughed. “I’m sorry. What?”
“Well, it’s just an example. There are all these mom things that happen in life that you aren’t going to be able to give your kids.”
I crossed my arms. “Plenty of people grow up without mothers and turn out fine.”
She bit her lip. I could feel her softening. “I think it’s sweet,” she said. “I really do. But, Park, it’s not reality. This isn’t some romantic comedy where the clueless dad and a pair of charming, well-trained Labradors endure the hilarious misadventures of spit-up and dirty diapers. It isn’t that easy. Being a parent is really hard, and it’s real work. You have to be realistic about this.”
I nodded. I knew she was absolutely, one hundred percent right.
I would get a pair of Labs, too.
Greer
MAY 22, 2011
I KNOW I DON’T HAVE time to date is sort of the refrain of my journal. But it isn’t an excuse, like my mother says it is. It honestly isn’t. It’s just that my life is so full right now.
But today was different. Today changed everything. I’m in Manhattan for the week to help Daddy, and I was rushing from a meeting in SoHo all the way back to Michael’s for lunch with a publisher who was interested in my writing a memoir. Me! I mean, I’m twenty-seven years old. What do I know?
I figured they wanted a McCann family exposé, which is laughable. If I’m not going to grant an interview—which I never have—I’m obviously not going to write a book about all my deep, dark family secrets. But that’s not the point.
The point is that I was running late, my driver was stuck in traffic, and I grabbed a cab. I paid the driver, dashed out, and a full half hour later I realized I’d left my phone in the back seat. My stomach sank. With thousands of cabs all around this city, how would I even attempt to find it? I was trying to focus on what the young, fresh-faced, and slightly nervous editor was saying about spreading my message of female empowerment and greater good to the world—I liked that a lot, by the way; I might have been wrong about the family exposé thing—and all I could think about was my missing phone. I was going to have to spend my afternoon going to the Verizon store, waiting in line forever, shutting my old phone off, getting a new one.